I don't agree. I want to be clear that I think youtube is terrible in many, many ways, but one thing I _do_ love about youtube is music discovery. Finding label channels and tracing through their artists, seeing what else pops up in my feed as a result and following those threads...finding random weird stuff with four listens posted two days ago, which then leads you to more weirdness...etc. is all very fun to me and I've discovered a ton of great music that way. There's also tons of random channels that have DJs or mixes they put out that is also a great and relatively organic way to discover new stuff (I'm always thrilled when a new Kieran Hebden set drops on The Lot Radio for one).

Maybe spotify is different, I've actually never used it, but I don't think the "Thrill of the Hunt" is dead in a general sense. And I'm kinda old, I was a music major in the 90s and at that time I was all about finding weird bootlegs and going to shows with <10 people showing up, subscribed to The Wire for a long time, and etc. There is still a ton of great new music out there and fun avenues for discovery! If anything there is more than I ever could have imagined when I was younger. People keep making great stuff.

> You had to dig. You had to seek out small, specialized record stores or spend time on shady forums. You’d track down obscure distros just to order releases you couldn’t get any other way... Now, it’s completely different... That sense of discovery, of finding a truly underground gem, just isn’t the same anymore. It’s too easy now.

To the contrary, I can now spend months digging into obscure African 70's music that there was just no realistic way for me to access before.

There are 10,000x more obscure gems to find, across the world and across the decades.

You can define your taste in far more granular ways than you ever were able to before, follow the paths of so many more artists, and even put out your own music with infinitely less friction than before.

The author is missing the forest for just this one tree.

There's a philosophical point of view that equates art to "making special", as in, art offers something different from the dull routine of survival. In my memory, seeing Reideen for the first time in that way was special. Now that it's part of the infinite buffet, it's just flattened out with everything else into mundane fungibility.

I feel the opposite. Finding gems in all the trash and bland music streaming services have on offer does give the trill of the hunt. How is it better to send a money order and spend your time "just waiting" when you could be spending that time digging past whatever streaming services push at you and diving deeper.

Search for a genre on youtube and you get a bunch of artists. Search for those artists, find their channels, and check out the songs youtube's algorithm doesn't surface. You can still use recommendation services and websites outside of youtube and streaming services to get leads on good stuff to try. It's a whole lot more exciting than throwing cash into the void and hoping something good comes back at you.

I also don't understand the "you can't find anything that everyone else doesn't already know about" stuff. I love comparing playlists with friends and family because the massive amount of available music means that they always have music from artists that I've never even heard of before. If everyone knows about every song you're finding you aren't looking very hard. I don't really care much about being the first person to learn about a cool song or artist, but even on youtube I find good songs with very low view counts all the time. It doesn't make me feel special though. I kind of think it's frustrating and just think "Why don't more people know about this! This deserves more attention!"

Also, a bunch of (non-English) music/lyrics I listen to have recently become strongly censored.. which makes them unlistenable to me... I wonder if there is (or should be) a censorship-free, decentralized, open alternative..

This has helped me a lot to avoid the infinite choice and overwhelm of having a 100 million song library, which is the case when engaging with a streaming service library directly.

You can also hunt via Spotify. Songs and artists can help you find curated playlists (by other artists or fans) where you discover new artists.

Everynoise.com is also a great start, but these playlists are no longer maintained.

There is also a huge audience of people who want to hear “elevator music” tuned to their activity at hand and do not care about who or what made it. Spotify obviously wants those customers. I don’t mind these people subsidising my hobby, but I hope Spotify will continue to cater to my interest too.

I don't subscribe to _any_ streaming services. All listening is done via a Navidrome server.

Use YouTube for this. You can find experts, fans, all kinds there who will guide you through genres and act as non-algorithmic, human-sense-making curators. Use Spotify only to find the specific tracks and albums you already know the name of, to listen.

He has identified a real problem, and the good news is there is a solution.

I've discovered a share of my favorite artists through friends and relationships, I don't think that will ever change.

A surprising number of bands aren’t on Spotify or any streaming sites. Or they will be on YouTube with under 100 views

Spotify is not for you move on.

I get excellent suggestions from Youtube on old tracks after spending 20+ years liking music tracks on there. I go on there and get suggestions for a youtube video with 4 likes posted five hours ago for a track released 15-25 years ago and they're almost always good if not great music. I still go on bandcamp and soundcloud and other places and buy tracks, eps, full albums in mp3s and flac and wavs and download them for djing purposes. As far as I'm concerned I'm still crate digging whether it's in an actual crate of records and cds or sans-Spotify. New music is not hard to find and if you like something you can easily search other releases by the artist or label or even partial producers. People have it better than they know in 2026 but it takes some involvement too.

I used to play a game called SOCOM II back on the PS2 and it was all lobby based. You had to jump around to find the right lobby with the game mode you liked, find people to play with and build community. There was time between games for banter.

Now everything is automatic and instantaneous. It has its advantages, just like with music, but something was definitely lost.

This romanticizes logistical issues for nostalgia purposes.

I did not live through that era, but his description makes me thankful i didn't have to go through all that to find my favorite music

I think there is certainly also something to the hyper-availability problem, where a great preponderance of music is simultaneously available everywhere. But I think the degradation of the streaming product itself is what makes it inferior to radio.

I remember in college there was a sandwich shop that was always playing amazing music, there was a tip jar and if you wanted to know what was playing you had to tip $1. Good times.