How to discover new music online away from the Spotify algorithm, in the April 8 edition of the Good Tech newsletter

Spotify, YouTube Music or Apple Music automatically suggest songs, but how often do they really lead you to something unexpected that surprises you or opens up a new universe? In tomorrow's edition of the Good Tech newsletter we learn how to get out of the paradigm of passive content consumption and how we can regain our “autonomy” over personal taste.

• Journalist Vlad Dumitrescu sends the Good Tech newsletter every Wednesday morning. If you want to receive practical tools and key information to help you make your life easier with technology, you can subscribe here:

If you miss discovering new music through other methods than the algorithms on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, etc., you should know that you can still do it, even if it requires a little more effort on your part.

Because that's essentially what's changed: not access to music (which is greater than ever), but how we get to it. The algorithms are built to keep you in a familiar, comfortable zone, where the chances of skipping are as low as possible. It works well, maybe too well. After a while, you start to feel that all the songs sound pretty much the same, or that nothing really surprises you anymore.

At the same time, I don't think we should be talking about efficiency when it comes to music discovery. That's not what it was ever about. It was about serendipity, about good and bad recommendations, about moments when you come across something completely different from what you were listening to before. The chances of that happening in today's algorithm-dominated digital universe are slimmer, but that doesn't mean you can't do anything about it.

Tomorrow's edition of Good Tech is about simple ways to find new music without leaving it all to algorithms.