Radio is an age-old way of finding music. Two of my favourite platforms are NTS (https://www.nts.live/) and, closer to home, Dublin Digital Radio (https://listen.dublindigitalradio.com/home). Another very cool station is Radio Alhara, an online radio station based in Palestine that was founded in March 2020 by Yousef and Elias Anastas along with several of their friends internationally.

What’s great about these stations is that they feature shows produced by people from all walks of life, musicians and music enthusiasts alike, with a desire to share the sounds they care about and to build community. I feel like some of the coolest music can be found in these places, and the sense of excitement you feel when you find it can’t be matched by using Spotify. You don’t find music on Spotify. Spotify finds you, uses the algorithms devised by Echo Nest to create a profile of you and pump the music to you. It becomes a symbiotic sort of relationship; you become what you listen to and, the more you listen to what an algorithm insists you listen to, the more homogenised your taste can become.

Diversifying what you listen to requires setting intentions: to be patient, to be curious, to be open-minded. As algorithms have made our world simultaneously more easy to navigate but also more closed, these intentions can be met across both online and offline interfaces with tension. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. I think these points of tension, these subtle glitches, can offer moments for reflection.

Were you always this impatient? 

This thing that you are feeling right now, what does that sound like to you?

Do you appreciate the artists who soundtrack your life? How do you show that appreciation?

Who would you be if the way you listened to music wasn't so easy?

Engage more with direct artist platforms. These are services where the musicians publishing their music don’t require music distributors to publish their music on the service. Two main examples of this are Soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/) and Bandcamp.

Soundcloud was founded in 2008 and is a great place to discover new artists, check out demos and mixtapes and see what musicians themselves are listening to through curated shows and mixtapes. It is also the world's largest audio and music platform so you're bound to find something that will catch your ear!

Bandcamp was founded in 2007 and a core part of its ethos is to put the artist first. When you purchase a musician's music on Bandcamp, the musician themselves will receive on average about 82% of that money, with the remainder covering Bandcamp's revenue share and payment processor fees.

During the pandemic, Bandcamp began an initiative known as Bandcamp Friday where, on the first Friday of each month, they waived their artist fees meaning that musicians would receive 100% of the money their music was purchased for. This initiative has carried on and is a great opportunity to support artists you care about.

One feature of Bandcamp I enjoy is Bandcamp Daily. Bandcamp Daily acts simultaneously as a directory for the music that's available on the site and also a great place to find well-written articles about musicians and their oeuvres. Right now there are some great features looking at some of the music that's been released during 2022 and recounting the highlights.

Another great feature that Bandcamp has is an extension called Black Bandcamp. Here, you can search for musicians based on genre, location and format of release and the site will offer suggestions of Black musicians, producers and labels you can listen to and support.

Moving away from listening to music that is prescribed to you by an algorithm can be really frustrating initially. You might listen to forty minutes of an hour-long radio show before you hear a track that really stands out to you. You might look through Bandcamp Daily and read through dozens of articles before finding one about an artist that you're really curious to learn more about. But it's that process, that *hunt* for something that truly resonates with you that makes it worthwhile. Because when you do find that piece of music that stops you in your tracks, that musician whose work seems to make physical that emotion or thought you've never quite been able to articulate, it's something close to magic.

DIVERSIFY HOW YOU LISTEN TO MUSIC. STOP USING SPOTIFY. STOP SHARING YOUR SPOTIFY WRAPPED. GO TO GIGS. PAY ARTISTS AS DIRECTLY AS YOU CAN BY BUYING THEIR MERCHANDISE AND BUYING THEIR RELEASES. TRY TO LISTEN TO AN ALBUM IN ITS ENTIRETY. BREATHE. PRACTICE EMBODIED LISTENING. RECOGNIZE THAT THERE IS A COLLECTIVE DUTY TO MOVE AWAY FROM ENDORSING AND PERPETUATING THE 'BROKE MUSICIAN' STEREOTYPE.

I'm also going to take this opportunity to show some love to minm (https://minm.co/)- an Irish streaming platform!

Minm was founded in 2022 by Luke Lau and Daniel Cosgrove. Unlike Spotify's market-centric payment system, minm operates using a user-centric payment system. That means its the listening choices of the user, not the saturation of the market, that decide what an artist gets per stream. So if you pay a €5/month subscription and you stream a song 10 times, the artist will receive 50 cent per stream. For independent artists, this means they don't have to compete against major labels or 'Legacy' artists like they would on Spotify.

Minm also has a blog feature similar to that of Bandcamp's, where different contributors can write articles and conduct interviews with artists. It's another great way of discovering independent musicians and giving them support!

HOW TO LISTEN TO MUSIC BETTER