It also feels like these things are making me more musically illiterate.
You see enough Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Imaginal Discs and the twenty yearly Trhä albums as super highly praised and something every music nerd should listen to, and forget what kind of music most people actually like… which if you go by the spotify charts, is a lot of slop! And if you go by the radio, it’s mostly the same stuff since 1995.
Yea i basically have stopped using any specific site/thing for discovery. I just kinda look around when I fancy, hear something somewhere and find it, check out the discography of that band, look into what people also like, etc. I don’t rely on algorithms basically. Maybe the emails I get from bandcamp sometimes based on stuff i’ve already bought or groups/people I already follow.
The downside is that since I don’t even listen to radio or follow specific influencers/recommendations, I feel like a weird hermit, I don’t really know of an artist or their music unless i’ve randomly come across them, even extremely popular stuff everyone’s heard about. But it’s no big deal, I still find plenty of cool things.