Using Wikipedia to Find New Music

In the internet age, how does one find new music?

Some old ways still work. You can ask your friends. You might go to a music festival, or see a concert with an opener. With these, however, you're at the mercy of your friends, and of your budget.

There are new ways too. Spotify or youtube can recommend new music to you. You might watch concert footage on social media, or might see an ad. These methods work, but they're mediated through algorithms that are designed to show you things you will like. That's good, but risks pigeonholing you into certain genres.

If your goal is to listen to new music, music that you have little chance of encountering otherwise, there's another method: Wikipedia. Let me explain.

Wikipedia has a random page button. It's no longer easily visible, but one can press the keyboard shortcut alt+shift+x to navigate to a random page. To find a new artist, go to random pages until you find an article about a musician or a piece of music. Once you've hit such a page, listen to some of that musician's music.

There you go, using Wikipedia to expand your taste in music!

Notes:

• Even if you don't like the artist you hit, you may enjoy another, related artist. For instance, I once listened to an album by TZU that I found using this method. I didn't particularly like it, but I found another Australian hip hop group, Urthboy, through them.
• Of course, Wikipedia is not a random sample. Prolific musicians and musicians in the language you are using are much more likely to have a Wikipedia page. (I'd also assume that certain genres are over-represented). However, there is enough breadth on Wikipedia that you are likely to run into artists you've never heard of before, which is sort of the point here.
• In my experience, it doesn't take too long to find a page, (maybe 30 or 40 pages tops, which takes a minute or two).¹ However, I don't have a lot of data. I plan to write a small script to automate this procedure, and I'll report the average time it takes to find a random artist, among other things.