Essential Mix opened my early 2000s teenage world to so much more electronic music. Good memories of downloading sets via Napster and manually recording on to cassettes to listen to in my '95 Saturn. What a weird statement.
I would say it heavily depends on what converts and festivals you’re going to. I just went to Making Time in Philadelphia where Fourtet was the headliner and by far the biggest name. Everyone else would be what you would consider “underground” or niche. My favorite DJ, Donato Dozzy, played an incredible set.
for old electronic music - Youtube, honestly. the algorithm is pretty good for finding old electronic music. like if youtube recommends me some random old 7 minute song with nothing but a picture of a record, there's a good chance I'm gonna like it at this point.
I'm on some of the oink/what successors and honestly, it's so hard to build ratio that it makes me not really like them at all.
> I'm on some of the oink/what successors and honestly, it's so hard to build ratio that it makes me not really like them at all.
You might have some success remaking rips others have made using the same settings for the rips and encodes, and then letting your torrent client recheck the existing torrent against your version of the files. I’ve also had success contacting filesharing-friendly artists and getting new and unreleased albums and tracks and building ratio more directly that way.
Another option is to source the same files from a private torrent from a public one by the same uploaded/release group, and then recheck and upload the same blocks to the private tracker as a completed or nearly completed download, without it affecting your quota much if at all, with all uploads benefitting your own ratio.
Many private trackers also have a higher ratio multiplier for dead or nearly dead torrents to promote seeding of those torrents specifically. I’ve also seen quota-free days and torrents that can be downloaded without a quota impact, uploads of which will help your quota get back in the black.
Bandcamp is your friend here. It’s got an almost infinite selection of the tiniest of micro-genres. Vaportrap? Yes. Blackgaze? Absolutely. Barber beats? Why not.
My process is to find or invent a ludicrous sounding genre name, search for it, click on any promising-looking covers and then if I like the music I’ll look through their label, any hashtags and the profiles of people who purchased it to see what else I can find. Discovered a vast amount of excellent or at least interesting music this way.
Soulseek is still around (somehow) and thriving. Of course on there, discovery is more or less "check out the library of this person who had something you were looking for".
Came here to mention this. I'm shocked when people use YouTube to rip stuff. Soulseek is a remnant of the web 1.0 era and Napster times. It feels my heart with joy that it still exists. Also people that use it are mostly djs and have great collections that is a joy to explore, it's like being invited into someone's house, not being fed by a heartless algorithm. Plus the 1on1 model works great these days for music since internet is so fast, and it's a security against the lawyer mafia letters that you can get in Germany for using torrents.
I also spend like 300 to 500 EUR a year on Bandcamp so I don't feel bad about this. Plus a lot of stuff there is just hard to find elsewhere. In times where we keep losing agency through cloud-enshitification, AI-inscrutability and technofeudalism, Soulseek and its community brings me hope.
