If there’s one thing that gets me as giddy as gadgets, it’s music.
Tech and music have always been my two biggest passions. And lately, as I’ve been reconnecting with some of my old (heavy emphasis on the word old) college friends, many of whom are professional musicians, I’ve been thinking more and more about the way I discover new music now compared to (cough, cough) 20-some-odd years ago.
In short: Nowadays, I don’t really discover new music. I mostly just listen to either specific albums or mixes that a streaming service churns out from stuff it already knows I like. And, when it occasionally does attempt to insert something I don’t know into that mix, I almost always just skip it immediately because it’s so frickin’ far off the mark.
In my, ahem, no-longer-exactly-young age, in other words, I’ve gotten in a bit of a rut—and our algorithmic overlords aren’t helping.
That’s why I was so excited to find a pair of genuinely cool power tools that are introducing me to oodles of electrifying new music—stuff I don’t already know but that’s impressively in line with the sorts of sounds I like.
Best of all? They’re completely free—and they even have sibling tools for discovering new books and movies, too.
This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures!
Your personalized maps to new music
Grab the nearest pair of headphones and allow me to introduce you to an awesome little site called Music Map.
1️⃣ Music Map is the first of our one-two-punch music discovery pairing, and it does one thing and one thing only:
➜ You tell it the name of a band or musician you like, and it generates an instant map of other artists you’re also likely to find interesting, based on that preference.
⌚ It takes all of 10 seconds to get started. You just type the name of any artist into the box on the site, and . . . boom: You get your map.
You may well see other artists you already know and like within the results. That’s a good sign that the site is on the right track.
When you see something that intrigues you, whether it’s familiar or foreign, you can click it—and Music Map will remake your map with that artist at the center. Notably, in any map, the closer two names are to each other, the greater the probability that you’ll like both artists.
2️⃣ The companion to Music Map and one that’s maybe even more fun to explore is something by the same developer called, amusingly, Gnoosic. (Try saying it out loud—ideally, 10 times fast.)
➜ Gnoosic takes the same concept as Music Map and puts it into a more interactive form. There, you start by telling the site the names of three bands or musicians that you already like.
It then takes you through a journey of suggestions, one by one, often with embedded videos you can click to sample the suggestion right then and there.
Not bad, eh?
💡 And, as promised:
- For books, Literature Map does the same thing as Music Map, while Gnooks is the interactive equivalent.
- And for movies, there’s Movie Map and—oh, yes—Gnovies.
- (Don’t forget, too, about the excellent human-curated movie recommendation site my pal Jared Newman recently suggested in these same quarters.)
All that’s left is to poke around and see what unexpected treasures await you— and then prepare to have all sorts of saucy new ingredients spicing up your aural diet.
- Music Map and Gnoosic (and their book and movie equivalents) are regular ol’ websites that’ll work in any browser, on any device—no downloads or installations involved.
- They’re completely free, with a smattering of ads throughout.
- They don’t require sign-ins or ask for any manner of personal info.
Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletter—starting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app that’ll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
