There’s nothing more heart-breaking than realising you’re grown bored of your new favourite song. We had it back in the day with Cee Lo Green’s ‘Crazy’, we more than had it with Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’ and we’ve had it more recently with Maroon 5’s ‘Payphone’. There may be plenty more fish in the musical sea, but you know what you like and you don’t want to have to go looking too far out of your comfort zone, not to mention it takes time to keep your iTunes library up to date. Here are five ways to find new songs within your tastes, giving you some space from your old music – as well as a richer music library and the opportunity to fall in love with new bands and artists.
1.) Enter an artist you like into Spotibot, and it will create a personalised playlist of new music based on your tastes. You can specify how many tracks you want to generate, and even choose multiple artists to base the playlist on. If you see a song you don’t like or already know, you can swap it for a new one. You can also prioritise popular tracks over more unknown ones, and vice versa.
It’s annoying that unless you have Spotify, you need to source the tracks yourself. The best thing about it is that if you do, you can click and drag the playlist straight into your Spotify library.
2.) Tuneglue’s audiomap creates a customisable spider diagram of artists, all linked to an artist or band of your choosing. You can expand it as far as you like to find hundreds of new artists.
The best thing about it is its interactive nature, the connecting lines are like elastic and can be pulled and stretched wherever you like. The downside is that, again, you have to source the actual music yourself.
3.) 8tracks is essentially a huge collection of mixtapes from people all over the internet, with a soundtrack for every mood and event you could possibly think of. There is music for a ‘Lazy Sunday’ and for ‘Getting Ready’, as well playlists with more obscure titles – such as ‘Busting Baron von Grumpy’ and ‘Paris When it Sizzles’. A personal favourite has to be The Best of Disney playlist.
The downside is that it limits the number of songs you can skip, but it’s great because the songs are all chosen with love and care by real-life humans, rather than generated by computer databases.
4.) Tastekid is a standard database of music. You type in something you like and it gives you a list of music other people with your preferences tend to like. What makes it an HCX favourite is that it can also recommend films, books and TV shows with the same accuracy. There are also app versions for iPhone and android.
The best thing about it is the suggestions have links to a biography of the band/artist, a YouTube video and direct links to buy their music on amazon and iTunes. The downside is that some of its suggestions are fairly predictable.
5.) Musicovery will give you a stream of continuous music based on your mood. You tell it how energetic, calm, dark or positive you’re feeling, and it plays the relevant songs to that mood from various genres and decades. It’s completely free and you can listen for as long as you want.
It’s annoying that to use features like ‘save to favourites’ and to ban songs you don’t like you need an account, but it’s great that you can edit the stream of music to genres and decades of your choosing.
Happy hunting! And if it all goes horribly wrong…Unhearit exists to help get those annoying, catchy songs out of your head. Admittedly by replacing it with an equally irritating one.