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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1973 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 8, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I have the impression many people here are weird old people who like strange media, so I would like to humbly plug my strange radio station.

tspigot radio

It's been my personal project the past 6+ years; I collect obscure, old, weird, and beautiful music from everywhere and have software mixing it together 24/7. It's up to almost 16,000 tracks now, all hand selected by me. It's not for profit and probably illegal. I hope you check it out and enjoy it.

I dig it.

I've been listening today. Pretty cool. The first 2 times I tried yesterday it was playing something I would associate with being dragged to a terrible club, but I hit a good streak today starting with a Skip Spence song. I'd say it's about 1/4 songs I think are particularly good or interesting, 2/4 that are okay and have something about them I like, and 1/4 I find almost unlistenable. For a free station with no commercials, I can live with that.

Have you already raided the AOR Disco archives? The site is defunct, but it's still possible to download some playlists or find them through soundcloud or bandcamp. Some super rare 70s stuff there only released on 45s, for example, and fun yacht rock mixes, weird remixes and edits, and more.

11:49:31 I Think In a Minute or So I'll Explode by Flashbulb

It's by The Flashbulb. Downvoted and reported to the RIAA tip line.

What's your process for discovering and acquiring music?

cleaning and correcting metadata is a neverending labour :(

The digging and curation is a lifelong obsession, so I have a lot of angles. I have a script to trawl the youtube API for long playlists with certain criteria that indicate curation of obscure music; when I find those I rabbit-hole down them hunting for gold. I am sometimes active on Soundcloud/Bandcamp and make connections with artists there. When I find a great obscure single, I rabbithole the artist and their label/connections to find more.

cleaning and correcting metadata is a neverending labour :(

I've had a lot of success fetching data from musicbrainz with something like https://beets.io/.

I have a script to trawl the youtube API for long playlists with certain criteria that indicate curation of obscure music; when I find those I rabbit-hole down them hunting for gold. I am sometimes active on Soundcloud/Bandcamp and make connections with artists there. When I find a great obscure single, I rabbithole the artist and their label/connections to find more.

I guess you are mostly ripping from YouTube/downloading from Bandcamp and SoundCloud then? What kind of criteria do you use to find playlists?

I've found that as I've gotten older I've had less time to explore new music. When do you find time to listen to new tracks?

Mostly yeah, although I do old fashioned crate digging and rip vinyl myself sometimes. I search for long (>100 tracks) playlists, the component videos of which have <20k views; this gets me enough candidate playlists to find good music collections. I also sometimes look at similar-artist tools to find new bands from obscure gems I find.

Curation has become a constant background activity for me; if I'm coding for work, reading a forum, or browsing web stuff, I'm probably also auditioning some playlist or artist in the background.

I also sometimes look at similar-artist tools to find new bands from obscure gems I find.

I've had a bit of luck using the Spotify API for this. Any other good sources for connections like this?

oh thank you that is interesting, I just assumed the Spotify API would be locked down and useless, I'll check it out! I generally use music-map.com for finding similar artists (by hand).

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