Discovering New Artists and Music: Analyzing the Music You Enjoy

Blog Post #8

Previously in this blog, I covered discovering new artists and music by using broad indicators, such as similar artists and genres. Now I want to discuss the idea of analyzing the music you enjoy in an effort to look for the minute details that may actually be the underlying factors as to why you enjoy certain types of music. What I mean by this is, say you enjoy one particular singer very much. You may really enjoy the instrumentation that this particular singer usually uses, or you might enjoy a specific aspect of their voice, such as the overall raspy, or soulful quality. The first step is to pick a song and begin to pinpoint and isolate certain qualities of the music. Next, you must determine whether or not those qualities are something you find appealing. With these specific qualities in mind there will be an entire new world of music open to you. As you continue to find more qualities you deem attractive, you can keep refining or expanding your musical tastes and knowledge. One great service that uses a technique quite similar to the process I have described above is Pandora Internet Radio. Pandora takes over 450 musical qualities along with your personal input into account when deciding song recommendations to you, the listiner. With a little bit of time and dedication, you can begin to analyze the music you listen to and start to use the information you gather as another means to go about discovering new artists and music.

The artist of the week for this post is Garrett Borns, better known as BØRNS. Originally from Michigan, BØRNS is a singer and musician who released his debut single in late 2014. Relatively new to the game, he has released two EPs and one full-length studio album as of April 2016. I recommend you check out his Candy EP, as well as his 2015 album, Dopamine! BØRNS also has a small collection of acoustic renditions of his own songs that are definitely worth a look. I highly recommend the song, “Seeing Stars,” but all of his acoustic songs are worth a listen!