It’s much easier to find organic art in a community, outside the art industries.

Sure, unless you set up a lot of subscriptions it won’t just come on a consumption conveyor belt, and some people might want or expect that, but it’s much better to be in a place where you’re actually interacting with artists.

i stopped using spotify altogether and limit myself to yt music with adblock and sometimes look at the “discover” playlist or just let the platform autoplay songs

so far I haven’t been recommended AI slop that way

I discover new music by listening to music themes radioshows. NPR New music Friday is pretty awesome, and there’s at least a dozen more in various public radio channels abound the world.

Bandcamp, but also get to know the artist behind the music. Maybe follow their socials and see if they have other friends that publish music.

Bandcamp

By not caring who made it and just listening to it if I like it

I get recommendations from real people, not algorithms.

I go to live shows and music festivsls and buy music at the merch table.

I use Youtube. It has more stuff and most of the time, if you check the channel you can get a good feel of whether the stuff is AI - like several hour long “albums” uploaded only a few days from one another. Only applies to stuff uploaded after 2023

Oh wow, that’s something that’s been bothering me lately a lot. Not just avoiding Ai generated music but developing my own musical tastes and not having the algorythm-served taste that I mistook for my own.

Here’s what I have learned so far:

• I have switched from listening music on youtube to listening music on my Digital Audio Player aka good old mp3. It forces you to put your own music there instead of just letting it play.

• I have installed the RSS reader and follow many German and English music magazine/websites and look there for what I could like

• I have also started asking other people like friends and colleauges for recommendations. I have received many good recommendations, but I don’t have to like everything.

I’m fully aware that it’s not a great solution, because it’s a technological step back instead of evolution, but the way music on youtube with ads worked lately has really started to annoy me.

There will never be a way to know if it was written by AI but performed by a human, so I will just keep buying used CDs.

Sites like Gnoosic and Music Map. Browsing Soulseek/Nicotine shares. Wikipedia to see who artists have collaborated with or any side projects they’re on.

I literally look for live performances on YouTube and then look for similar recommendations or, if the artist did it, their list of recommended channels on their own channel.

I work listening to ambient, which is a terrible minefield for AI, but having discovered Martin Stûrtzer led me to discover a bunch of new no AI instrumental and electronic (mostly modular analog synth) music artists.

I personally am a big fan of Rate Your Music. By cataloging and rating my music opinions there I’m able to get interesting recommendations, but moreso I’m able to actively navigate and explore music by genre, year, year-range, influence, even descriptor tag (breakup or migration, for example).

Better is engaging with it as a pseudo-community; finding others with similar tastes and seeing what else they like, or finding review authors whose writing resonates with you and following them.

As for how this pertains to AI, well you have sort of some protection in the crowd effect; obvious AI is likely to get either called out as such or buried in low review scoring. Users of RYM aren’t infallible of course, but in much the same way that the average lemmy user is already a comparative poweruser when compared to the average reddit user just due to the narrowing of field and additional barrier to entry serving as a filter for those less invested in decentralized internet spaces, the average RYM user is more music savvy and discerning as a listener than the average Spotify listener*️⃣, most of whom just want something on in the background while they do their errands. It’s not going to be a foolproof solution, but at least RYM feels more to me like navigating music through the lens of listeners rather than marketers and algorithms.

(*️⃣This is not a value assessment, I’m not saying RYM users are better listeners or inherently have better taste than anyone, just that they’re on average more invested in active music listening as a hobby.)

I just skip the AI stuff same as I’d skip any bad song. If a good song was AI generated I don’t mind it honestly, but I’ve yet to hear one.

In my experience though I’ve not seen a single AI generated song yet. I discover music primarily from Spotify, at the bottom of my playlists where it shows recommended songs to add, or below songs in the player view where it shows “similar to” or something like that.

You discover by searching things you already Iike and finding similar artists. LastFM is good for this.