How to Discover New Music From Friends (Not Another Algorithm)

What "good" discovery actually means

Before grading methods, be clear what you're grading them on. In our experience three tests cover it:

• Novelty. You genuinely hadn't heard it. A "discovery" already in your library is a repeat with extra steps.
• Trust. There is a reason to expect you'll like it before you press play — a person, a label, a shared artist — so you give it more than eight seconds.
• Listen-through. You actually play it, more than once, rather than saving it to a playlist you never open. Saved-and-forgotten is the quiet failure mode of nearly every method below.

Any source can be judged on those three. Most are strong on one and weak on the other two.

Five ways people actually find music

Not a ranking — these are the categories in wide use, graded honestly. Which one you reach for depends on what you want from the next hour.

One note on the last row, since it's ours: a Dex is built on the fourth method, not instead of it. If you have no Last.fm friends, nothing on this page — Whohears included — will help until you do. The next section is partly about getting them.

The Last.fm friends method, done by hand

Last.fm is unusual: it records what people play, not what they say they like. A playlist is a performance; a scrobble log is what actually happened at 2am. That makes the people you follow there the best discovery source most listeners have never used. Here is how to work it manually.

1. 1

   Find people whose listening overlaps yours. The r/lastfm compatibility threads are the usual way: people post a profile and Last.fm's own widget rates each pair. Our compatibility checker does the same for any two public usernames, weighting shared artists by rarity so The Beatles in common counts less than a band with twenty thousand listeners. Follow anyone who lands High or above.

2. 2

   Read their Recent Tracks. Not their Top Artists — you already share those. Recent Tracks is where the drift is: the record they got into last month that you haven't heard of yet.

3. 3

   Scan their Library for artists you don't recognise. Sort by play count. Anything they've played fifty times that you've never played once is a lead with the trust already built in.

4. 4

   Try the Neighbours page. Last.fm still lists listeners with similar taste at last.fm/user/<name>/neighbours. Strangers, so lower trust — but useful while your friend list is short. (If you miss the old Friends who listen panel, this is what replaced it.)

Where it breaks down

Do this for a week and the problem shows itself. It's a feed. Nothing marks which tracks you already know. Nothing remembers what you checked yesterday. You end up with a mental list, a few browser tabs and no loop that says "listened — next." The information is all there; the workflow isn't. That is the gap the next section fills.

How Whohears turns that into a habit

Whohears takes the manual method above, does the diff for you, and makes working through it feel like filling in a collection.

1. 1

   Type a public Last.fm username

   No account, no password, nothing to install. Whohears reads the people you follow and what they play.

2. 2

   You get a Dex

   A numbered wall of cards — one per track your friends play that you never have. Every card is greyed out until you catch it, its number is permanent, and it names the friend it came from, so the trust is on the card itself.

3. 3

   Catch by listening

   Press Play and the tracks come one at a time, full screen, already playing — a 30-second preview, or the YouTube video where there's none. Five seconds in, the card turns to colour. Swipe up for the next. Three new cards drop every day, with a bonus for catching them the day they land.

Rarity is a property of the artist, not of you: each card is banded on the artist's global Last.fm listener count. Common is 2.4 million listeners and up; Legendary is under 31 thousand. Rarer catches pay more XP, and XP moves you through the collector ranks from Rookie to Legend. It is a small game, but it solves exactly the failure the manual method has — every track is either caught or it isn't, and the list is always waiting where you left it.

Build your Dex on the web with nothing but a username, or get the same Dex in the iPhone app — one collection per Last.fm username, synced between the two.

When to use what

Nothing above replaces anything else — and Whohears doesn't replace Spotify or YouTube Music either; it decides what you play next on them. A rough split:

• Algorithms for background, and for your first week in a genre you know nothing about. The convergence that makes them dull for discovery makes them reliable for not-skipping.
• Editorial when you want to understand a record, not just hear it.
• Friends, and a Dex, when you want to be surprised by something that still fits. That is the discovery most people mean when they say they want to discover new music — and it is the one that needs another person in the loop.

If you're curious how far from the mainstream your own listening sits — a fair proxy for how much an algorithm still has to offer you — the mainstream score puts a number on it.

Questions people ask