Music discovery in the algorithm era has forced me to develop completely different skills than the ones I used to rely on.

The old model was: read music press, get recommendations from trusted sources, go to shows, buy records by bands you saw live. That model still works but it's insufficient if you want to find things that haven't been legitimized by any of those institutions yet.

The skill I've had to develop is what I think of as tag ethnography — learning to read Bandcamp tags not as genre labels but as community signals. The way an artist tags their own music tells you about what community they think they belong to, which tells you about their musical reference points in a more useful way than a genre label. "lush," "textured," "melancholy" as tags on a record means something specific about what the artist was going for that "dream pop" alone doesn't capture.

What's your current primary discovery method and what's it getting right that you didn't expect?