How do you consume music?

[senntenial]

There's tons of software solutions for listening to music, like Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, Play, etc. Which one do you guys like?

I tend to lean towards Spotify and Google Play - Spotify because it's just amazing and great to find new artists with. I also prefer Play over iTunes partly because of all the free shit and also because it's easier to cloud sync and I don't have to update it since it's just in chrome.

[itroitnyah]

I just use the explore feature on soundcloud. It's a damn shame that they changed that so that all the song groups are just shoved together. Now when I click on the Electronic group, I get every single top electronic song of the however-long. I miss when they grouped top songs of the however-long by genre so that I didn't have to sort through all the genres of electronic music that I dislike. Such as trap or something.

[Mr. Bigglesworth]

Same boat as Itroit. I mostly go through soundcloud. I follow a few of the .net soundclouds (dubstep.net, Drumandbass.net etc), and that usually sends me onto some pretty decent stuff (every third or fourth upload is pretty crap though). Also I'm subscribed to Soundglee on Youtube. I actually got onto them because they used to use Rainbow Dash's cutiemark as part of the logo, but it turned out they actually uploaded some pretty good stuff.

I'm thinking of subscribing to some more promo channels on youtube like the Most Addictive Network or Mr Suicide Sheep.

[Conduit]

YouTube channels and iTunes for me. I find that promo channels are a great source of new music, and although I'm not a fan of the changes Google's making to comments and whatnot, YouTube is still one of my favorite sites. Once I find an artist I tend to grab their entire discography, and if I like it then I buy it. I wish I could afford to buy more of my music, but I just don't have enough income for the amount of music I move through.

[azerty]

Record label mailing lists for DnB, soundcloud/youtube browsing for everything else

[Gray Ham]

In my mouth

and iTunes, Rhapsody, Band Camp, YouTube, Soundcloud, and Pony.fm
I also torrent old stuff that I can't find anywhere else

[Facade]

youtube vlc and bandcamp

[Alycs]

I normally go to youtube promo channels when I want new music.

[ExoBassTix]

I scroll labels that I know and love, stalk people that I deeply admire, download lots of random compilation albums of specific genres that look appealing, and for the rest everything I find is either coincidental or told to me by my Soundcloud stream/friends/media.

I save music and when I wanna listen, either use VLC or my iPod (160GB buck yeah (only got 5GB left whaddup)).

[Nine Volt]

Youtube promotion channels like Wobblecraft and Proximity for EDM.

Bands and such I usually find out from friends. I found or started listening to Panic! At the Disco, Mumford & Sons, Macklemore (although I only really like Thrift Shop), and Passion Pit through the recommendation of friends. I'll usually just grab an album and start listening and then delete it if I don't like it.

[Injustrial]

I love using the radio function on spotify, as it gives me a ton of new music to listen to, almost always relevant to the thing I based the radio on. The related part is also pretty good, at least for what I generally listen to, and it only gets better the more I use it.
New Album Releases do a fantastic job of letting me know when new and relevant stuff is out, but as with all services as these, requires a bit of setup first.
So yeah, spotify daily, mixed with a few mp3 downloads for stuff not on spotify. (Gimme Motorhead's Basterds, you bastards!)

[HMage]

For dancerloor music I listen to Above & Beyond Group Therapy podcast.

For a specific artist I follow their twitter. Most musicians tend to use twitter themselves instead of delegating them to PR guy.

iTunes Radio for browsing "similar like this". It's surprisingly good.

Sky.fm for everything else.

[SticktheFigure]

I prefer fork and knife.

On a serious note, I'm really bad at listening to any type of EDM. It's all classic punk and what not. So it's usually just pandora or spotify.
Though, I think I'm finally gonna get in the habit of listening to the kind of music I'd like to produce. You know, that'd kinda help. So I'm gonna start living on soundcloud.

There, that's my New Year's resolution. Listen to a shitton of edm on soundcloud.

[FLAOFEI]

To keep up with what real humans listen to I sometimes listen to regular radio, in the mornings I listen to Australian channel Gold FM (cause that's what you do when you miss your other home), in cars I listen to random hit music channels, and in the shower I listen to rock. And once a year I sit through the euro vision song contest.

I also listen to random old vinyls from 2nd hand stores, that's how I fel in love with polka :O I bought an old vinyl labled polka time cause the cover looked funny, and I loved it. Haven't listened much since the player broke though :I

Otherwhise I listen mostly through Bandcamp and youtube, and depending on how much I like the music I make up my mind if I want to download it, and depending on how rich the artist is I chose my method. I generally want to pay for music, but if it's a big artist I am slightly less inclined to do so.
I prefer having the files on my own devices, since I don't want to rely on wi-fi to be fast enough everywhere.

[Viricide Filly]

I usually go on youtube or soundcloud
On youtube, I listen to many promotional channels, like Most Addictive (MAdrumandbass, MAelectro, MAdubstep and MAdance), Monstercat, GlitchHopCommunity, SpeedcoreNetwork, Spinnin', Duploc, Inspector, Vital and the living tombstone
On soundcloud, I just put in tags of what I want, or I look up well known mixes of the songs, as well as The Living Tombstone.

Sometimes, I go on mp3crank to download music such as the living tombstone.

If I'm ever on grooveshark, it's usually to listen or find rare songs of bands I'm a big fan of, like dave matthews band, the who or the living tombstone.

To download or buy my music, I either use torrents, I purchase them from amazon cloud, or in some cases purchase physical copies of music I really enjoy, such as the living tombstone.

My favourite method of finding out if I'd enjoy a genre or not is to listen to multiple different mixes of it. If i like what I hear, then I search up promotional channels to do with the genre(s), and carry on from there. If I find an artist I find myself enjoying a lot on the promotional channel, I find everything he's ever done and I pilfer it via my high quality youtube to mp3 desktop application. It can download in 1080p so shut the fuck up.

[PropellerEscape]

I usually discover new music through Soundcloud through promotion labels and the like (FKOF, D4, Monstercat, Most of the .NETs), but I'll sometimes use youtube to find other stuff.
I get some music through torrents, but the majority of the time I just opt for free stuff. Also, if there's no download link for something, Audacity is your best friend.

[Mijka]

I am an avid user of Youtube, back in the beginning of the fandom i used to check new releases AND favs/likes of the people i followed, and now i am following... (checking) 999 different channels (mostly music ones), it is not anymore doable to follow the favs/likes but it still massive enough to provide loads of fresh releases (maybe a bit too much) in the "/feed/subscriptions" panel of YT.

So it's mainly YT, and to compensate the lack of newcomers and discover new tracks, i started to use Twitter a bit (Everfree Network and MLP Tunes accounts are handy), Soundcloud (but i am bit afraid that i should pass through the same "following gather" i did for YT to make Soundcloud effective, at least the "embedded share" option (similar to "retweet") is interesting...), and more recently a bit of EQD musical news.

On top of this, i am starting to use some archive / listing websites for pony music, like pony.fm, Eqbeats and EQD Music... and i recently found Brony tunes too, dunno about the last one but 3 first ones can be handy to expand some researches (btw all of them have incomplete databases in terms of quantity (they lack a lot of songs, due to the amount of work needed) and quality (a lot of songs are terribly tagged)).

Edit : and i forgot bandcamp, where i bought many albums... but it was linked by artists through their YT/twitter.

[Ed Viper]

I often use Spotify's radio function. It comes up with a lot of cool, new stuff, and it's pretty good at staying relevant to what I started it with.

[Pulse Wave]

Sometimes plain old Internet radio, most of the times my collection of FLACs hand-ripped from CD. In rare occasions, I play some vinyl.

I pretty much only ever listen to music that's older than broadband Internet, at least voluntarily. In fact, most of it is older than the Super NES (pre-pre-predecessor of the Wii).

[Mr. Bigglesworth]

Thank you, Pulse Wave. I had no idea what a 'Super NES' was because I live under a rock.

Back on topic. I'm getting into some new promoting channels like Mr. Suicide Sheep and some of the other .NET soundclouds. Also Moombahton.NET turned into MidTempo.NET.

[XXDarkShadow79XX]

It's all Soundcloud for me. I'm currently following over 270+ channels, including each of the .Net channels. I check Soundcloud at least 2-3+ times a day, and listen to more or less everything in my stream. I have more than enough music to keep me occupied. (About 10+ new songs a day)

[ExoBassTix]

Recently I added something new to my searching arsenal:
Archive.org

I find too much quality music on there without much effort. Search a genre (as tag), and listen to the results. And please, don't ignore the ones with low amounts of times downloaded. I often find them to be glorious.

[FLAOFEI]

I realized lately I am a bit "old fashioned" in that I hate relying on streaming. I want to have my music downloaded.
I think it's cause I know that whenever I do theres gonna be a power out, or lagy interwebz or something that ruins my day.
Also, I don't go out of my way to find new music any more. I mostly just take what ever I feel like and sit in front of the drums. I really should record it sometime.

[Stuntddude]

I really can't stand having a computer pick out what I listen to for some weird reason, so I've never been a fan of services like pandora or spotify. Most of the music I listen to I actually find based on peer recommendations, although recently I've spent some time bouncing around plug.dj (I love that site, it streamlines the peer recommendation process in a really fun way).

Another thing I'm weird about is that I don't like to listen to new music in the background. When I'm listening to something I like for the first time, I'll almost always just sit and focus all my attention on listening and appreciating the music, rather than delegating my attention to other things. Once I'm familiar with a track, I'll happily put it on in the background, but the first time through I can't stand to.

[SticktheFigure]

...although recently I've spent some time bouncing around plug.dj (I love that site, it streamlines the peer recommendation process in a really fun way).

Jesus. I joined the site to check it out and four minutes in on a room I was banned because some random person was spamming and they just banned everyone who had been there for a short time.