/!\This article is an archive from my previous blog, the original release date is : 2017-09-23. Most of the original links I put on this article to search musics are dead, some websites are almost inactive now like Free Music Archive... And my english wasn't really really correct (it's not better now, haha)
If you want to look at the french video with english subtitles, here it is :
It’s been months now that the « groups » function on Soundcloud has been deleted by the Staff team of the audio streaming website. This choice has been heavily criticize by users and musicians, even if some groups stream were flooded by tracks, users and musicians used them to discover and share musics.
I was pissed of when I learnt that this functionality was deleted because it permited me to discover a lot of awesome artists I couldn’t find in an other way. Except finding them with by chance by hitting the perfect tag in the research function and by digging deeply during hours the stream of songs, I would not find such incredible artists like Aquatics Bumble Bee B Guns, Spaceshake, The Jagged, Bodies under the waterfall, Moonlit Align, Maison de Confiance, Berzmow, Surprise you’re dead, Surrender to Sound… I loved to explore the list of the Soundcloud groups’s members with the term « experimental » or « weird » to understand what in there music was so different of the « normal » music. I found some beautiful music, with flaws, sometimes not really weird or experimental, but mostly surprising. I really loved the group functionality. By registering to this kind of federation, those artists defined themselves with their own vision of the experimentation. And the thing that appealed me, is that most of the time those artists had really low listening stats, and sometimes zero listening.
It was my research tool, exploring member list. And the disparition of the Groups functionality block me a lot in my searchs of amateur music in Soundcloud because I will never have the same range of research, and that for every other music plateforms.
You can say to me to do the search by tag by the Bandcamp searching engine. Except the result of the music will be totally different for at least two reasons.
First : Tags. By searching tags like « weird » or « experimental » I could find some interesting stuff. But there is a problem to that. Artists I’ve found on soundcloud are lame for communication and their music wasn’t holding the tag « weird » or « experimental » but was tagged with the music genre that was the closer to their music, or random tag like « tghdppp ». It makes the search by tag really difficult to access easily to a musical diversity, easy acces I found in the Soundcloud groupes functionality.
Second : Bandcamp and Soundcloud are two different platforms where you don’t find the same type of music and artists. If Bandcamp proposes to put singles and albums online, Soundcloud is more access to singles, or music under construction. Also, Bandcamp is more complex than Soundcloud to upload music. Where you just have to drag and drop on Soundcloud to upload and edit datas, on Bandcamp, you have to complete a bigger page. With this we have to take in count the fact that we can see statistics of listening on Soundcloud, impossible on Bandcamp (but you can see if people have supported the artist by paying for the album). Also, you can comment on Soundcloud but not on Bandcamp.
So, I’ve the impression that I can have acces to more amateur musicians on Soundcloud than Bandcamp, like people trying to create music and sharing it for the first time, with only 3 titles uploaded years ago. Like on Youtube, Soundcloud is easy to use.
And here we find our problem : Search engine on stream and download music website.
There is a thing I don’t understand in those website, it’s why there is few choices and functionalities to allow accessing all the music stocked on their database servers. If logically the search functionality tries, with its default settings, to find popular musics to make the user pay for « quality musics », I don’t understand why those platform doesn’t give the possibility to find artists with less interactions. Plateforms like Soundcloud and Bandcamp offer to upload for free a lot of music, what is the marketing logic that doesn’t push the user to consumate all the music that occupies the space of the servers ? It costs money to take care of this music with low listenings, and it’s more a problem for bandcamp that does only upload lossless music format. So why is that so difficult to find artists with low interactions ? What do they have to lose to give access to this function ?
It’s not so difficult to estimate an artist has low interaction on this kind of platforms. Take in count the number of views of the artist page, the number of listenings, downloads as a data and allow a search link to those data doesn’t seem to be impossible ( you can totally tell me I’m wrong on this point, I don’t know how hard it is to create a search engine), it seems that it’s already the case to define how popular is an artist. So why won’t they create a backward search engine ?
It’s a functionality that I love in the FAWM website even if it is limited. To have the possibility to search a ZONG (a song with zero comment) allows to connect and interact with the forgottens of the music timeline. Cross the first comment threshold and the song leaves the ZONG list to go in the general timeline. The ZONG concept reach rapidly its limit but has the value to give a brief enlightment to music without interaction.
We will see some websites dedicated to musical discovery. I will not review website like Spotify/Deezer/Musicme for the simple reason that I don’t use them and that they are websites oriented mostly for professionals. Their is a search engine and also an idea to discover new artists in those websites but it’s not the same artists. To upload on those website, you will have to contact labels and distributors.
We will see websites where we can upload by ourself, mostly websites where the amount of amateur musics is important. Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Jamendo, Free Music Archive, Youtube, Archive and also everynoiseatonce because some people recommanded it to me to find new genres.
Let’s start with the one that introduced my article : Soundcloud.
Soundcloud : The search engine of Soundcloud limits itself to a word we can write in the searchbar which search in function of music titles or artists names. The function allows to filter if we are looking for an artist page, single, an album or a playlist. But there is no way to filter by tag. To search a tag, you can copy this url https://soundcloud.com/tags/ and you can write after the word you are looking as a tag (you can write a space between words if your tags have more than one word in it). It’s already hard to find a tag. It should be a basic filter function. The only way to search tags is to click on the tag of a song to access to the feed of this tag. But it limits the tag research to the tags of the songs that you have on your feed, not the tags you could search by curiosity. If you are curious, use the url technic. And, in this tag research, this is the most popular songs that will appears, and there is no way to filter more the research. It’s clearly becoming impossible now to find non popular musics except by using searching technics that was not developp for. My first technics to use groups federation was not the most appropriate technic. But now, the only way to find non popular music on Soundcloud is to search into playlist or friends of musicians and find some stuff with luck. It has a certain lack of precision, it’s way too complicate for curious listeners who are not hardcore researchers. Obviously, no research function according to the licence used (Copyrright or Creative Commons) even thou the website propose to upload with those licences.
Soundcloud his a heavy website, hard to load, and now it doesn’t put in light non popular artists, prefering sponsorised tracks. Soundcloud, you got nothing for you except your artists. You hide them and it’s sad.
Jamendo : When I’ve done my article about the free music playlist in CC-By and CC-0 on Free Music Archive, I wanted to do the same for Jamendo. EXCEPT THAT Jamendo doesn’t allowed to filter tracks by licences, THING COMPLETELY ABSURD FOR A WEBSITE DEDICATED TO FREE MUSIC. It’s in my opinion a marketing strategy to make people look for remixable music to go to the section « music for video », leading the user to the catalog licencing, a catalog of music allowing people to pay the use of a track under some restrictions. I think this is lame for a free music website to not propose a search by licence function. The most frustrating thing is to see that research engine of the catalog licencing is more developped that the free side of the website, allowing the user to filter by speed, mood, instrumental or not, with specific instruments…
Classic Jamendo has the decency to propose a « tag » filter when you hit a keyword in the search engine but doesn’t propose it everytime. It shows me the #weird tag but no #atagatrap tag (it is not an obscur genre, don’t look for that), or no #grunge tag. I don’t understand this search engine, it shows by priority singles, Jamendo has changed their priority policy few years ago, albums to singles. Sometimes it shows albums, sometimes singles. I don’t understand. And it loads with difficulty.
Jamendo, you’re lame. The period where you rebeled against HADOPI is far far away.
Bandcamp : Bandcamp has several search engines. One in the front page which allow to search with keywords. When you’re not satisfied (there is no filter), it proposes to use the tag research function and proposes also some related tags to look deeper.
Bandcamp has also an other research system called Bandcamp Discover. This function propose several filters : By genre (which show subgenres), by popularity (best sells, new music, recommanded artists), by localisation, by format (digital, vinyl, CD, cassette) and by age of release (to today at two months). It has the value to filter. Here again, no licences filter even if you can upload your music under Creative Commons. But you can do the search by using the tag Creative Commons, but you will only find artists which have put Creative Commons for their tags.
Bandcamp has for the moment one of the best music filter system with Free Music Archive but the filter, and mostly for the localisation, is not perfect. It only proposes big american and european cities. And you can’t modify the url to find some specific cities, those are written with numbers.
Youcandobetter/20
Free Music Archive : (2021-02-17 update : the whole FMA section is irrelevant now :( ) The search engine of Free Music Archive allows to search by keyword an artist, an album, a song or to choose the genre, if you are looking for an instrumental song, the lenght and the licence (YES !!!!!). You can sort the result by novelty or by most interesting. Sadly, there is no less interesting choice but you can reach the last page of the research to find them. There is no possibility to search by tag with the search engine. But it’s possible to click on the tags on an artist or album page like soundcloud or you can use the url http://freemusicarchive.org/tag/ and put some keywords after ( you will need to put an underscore « _ » between words to search tag with several words).
Best research engine with Bandcamp.
Youtube : Youtube is an excellent website to find music. Even if musics are drown in non musical video content, the website has a big impact for the diffusion of live music and music video. If it’s difficult to begin with something, it is easy to find something to listen to. Even if the function looks less accurate than years before, it is really nice to travel into suggestions by clicking on the funniest name band. Also, if it’s not possible to search by tag, hit in the search engine « Malaysian Math Rock » or « Japanese Shoegaze » is mostly accurate. Tags and descriptions text answer at the research, but it finds also playlist, and that’s really really great. There is a lot of people doing playlist on youtube with a precise localisation or genre.
It is possible to filter the search, by content (video, channel, playlist, movie, show), by date, by lenght, by accuracy, number of views… If the tool is cool, like on Fma, it doesn’t allow to sort in ascending order. You’ll have to reach the last page to find videos with less interactions.
Everynoiseatonce : If the map of the website can be chaotic by is size, it’s possible to go on list mode and filter by genres.
Everynoiseatonce is maybe one of the best website to discover new musical genres with Wikipedia. I say maybe because I don’t use it personnaly even thou I’m a bit addict to this kind of research ( I really prefer Wikipedia for this, french wiki is really full of good musical genre articles and musical niches). I don’t use this website for one simple reason, it’s because it’s linked to Spotify database which imply several stuff. Musical genres will be linked to Spotify database only and you will need to have a Spotify account to listen to more than 30 seconds of music. So, if you don’t have an account (and there is a lot of reason to not want a Spotify account), you will lose a lot of the interest of the website. But you can use it with an other streaming website like youtube to look for subgenres.
Archive.org : This website has with no doubt the search engine the most complete and complicated of this list. The regular research allows to put a lot of filters to dig content, by type of media, by subject, by authors, by collections and by language. And this research can be sort by accuracy, titles, dates, authors, views and this increasing or descending ! It’s awesome and really practical but it has a lack, a big lack for this kind of website : There is no filter by licences ! This function would make this website so great for people looking for stuff they can use and remix !!
But you can do the search by licence in the advanced search. And here it’s way more complicated, it’s like the most difficult search engine I’ve ever seen. I can’t explain, there is so much zone you can edit and type things, it’s full english (and I’m not so good at english), it’s complicated, really. There is a manual on the page but it’s still hard to use.
Here we finish the look on search engine. Non of them really satisfies my use of this type of tool, and I can’t find easily musicans with low popularity. We can say it’s not so important but yes, it’s important. All artists doesn’t know referencing technics and it’s difficult when you don’t see any trafic on your artist page. To give you an idea of the thing, for their 5 years, Spotify said that 80% of their music catalog of 20 millions of tracks was listened at least one time. It says that 4 millions of tracks have not been listened. It’s a big amount of music and there are ways to encourage the listening of those 20% never found in users search.
There is a lot of artists, proposing original content, new concepts, new unknow genres untagged, which navigate in silence. And it makes me sad that you can find them only by hitting the perfect tag and by digging many hours, and maybe by luck find some unlucky tracks.
If websites allow to make popular independant bands, those who have put their music many years ago have no possibility to be found. While by the democratisation of Internet and tools to create musics we can see a new wave of creators or people which think about the music and our way to consume it, I think it’s sad that all that creation is not reachable.
I dream about a website with a perfect search engine. Which show content without hitting a keyword, and which allow to filter the result like I want and eventually sort the result. A search engine which take a lot of metadata that the creator can edit. A search engine that allow to show music with no tag or metadata. Which gives the chance to find anything without looking for 60 pages to eventually end on unknown tracks. With a random function you can switch on or off to make a mix of popular and unpopular artists. A search engine which can put everyone in the spotlight.
Those choices of streaming website to propose a limited research are political choices. A website like Soundcloud has decided to put in front popularity and sponsorised content, has decided to delete spaces where unpopular artists could federate, discuss, share, discover and have a minimum of listens.
If the study of the consulting firm Kurt Salmon on cultural consommation shows that cultural hyper choice, meaning too many choices, restrains the consommation, we’ll need to have search engine which can reduce the research possibilities. And this can only be done by using a lot various filters and sort possibilities.
It’s all for today, thanks for you attention.