I’ve been working on making it so I can self host my own music library over the last few months. This has entailed buying some music from Bandcamp and pulling in some tracks from a seafaring friend. Do I feel guilty for sailing the seven seas? A little, but most of the stuff I’ve downloaded that way is stuff that I’ve bought before. Sometimes twice. I’m mostly re-downloading this stuff so I can guarantee everything is the same quality. A lot of my older purchased stuff is from the late 90s and early 2000s when ripping was new, meaning it was all of dubious quality.

Anyway, one of the things I’ve been trying to do is browse through music forums and Bandcamp’s rec section to find some new-to-me artists. I like all sorts of music. Really the only type of music I’m meh on is R&B (and even some of that is good). Everything else, as long as it’s not too far out there, I can listen to at least once.

My LastFM stats, which I’ve been keeping track of since mid-year, say I’ve listened to 589 different artists. Which I think is pretty great since I’m the type of listener who gets obsessed with one track and will listen to it over and over again for weeks on end. My goal is to get that to 2000 different artists by the end of next year. I’m going to have a problem with music discovery, but I might go ahead and get a free account with Pandora or something like that, so I’ll have a good way to be exposed to other music.

I’m a non-typical 40 year old. I feel like all of my peers do what most people do: they keep listening to the same stuff they grew up with. I do that too, but I’ve found that I like some of the newer artists as well. I like Taylor Swift (probably lost my man card by admitting that, but oh well), I like Shaboozy, I like Ariana Grande. Maybe not everything they sing, but I enjoy listening to newer artists just as much as I enjoy listening to the stuff I listened to back in the 90s.

So, I’m going to keep working on finding new music. For those of you who self host your own library, how do you find new music? (I think I’ve asked that before, but it doesn’t hurt to ask again).