Usually: Apple Music, despite a lot of annoyances [my profile]
I like its Flipped playlists (rap songs from a single artist with the songs they sample), and "Radio" for individual artists.
Rarely: Bandcamp
Even more rarely: Spotify (I keep an account despite everything I hate about the service)
Occasionally for music videos: YouTube. It does pretty well for film scores.
Drastic action: Finding an MP3, though I can't think of the last time I did that. My brother is even pickier than me about music. He'll find MP3s of songs with skits in them and delete the skits, and upload them to his online music player. He will "ban" artists he finds are morally reprehensible. He has even more honour than I do.
iPhone
Mac
Volume Control smartly (whenever I'm playing music) adjusts the volume from my keyboard on the speakers the music is playing on
Keyhole promises to use the media keys on my keyboard only for my media player, i.e. Apple Music.
AirPods Sound Quality Fixer And Battery Life Enhancer (for when I used my AirPods)
Headphones:
At home:
Sony WH-1000XM4. Surely there are better headphones, but these ones are pretty good, and they're the reason I started listening to so much more music starting in 2021. I don't typically take them out while walking in the concrete jungle.
Sonos speakers:
Two Sonos One units at my desk,
A Sonos Playbase below my TV (but I don't use that for music much)
Out and about:
I typically use Apple's wired EarPods while out and about. I had tried AirPods but I had a bad first (and second) impression with them. Wired EarPods, circa 2025, sound pretty good, and they're not expensive.
I use Shazam a lot, but I hardly ever look back at it.
That said while at an place of work where music is playing, I use ShazamScrobbler to scrobble what I'm hearing. See my "scrobbling stack" link above.
I track artists that I know about using Songkick and, to a lesser extent, Bandsintown.
I track the concerts I've been to with Setlist.fm and Concert Archives.
I rely pretty heavily on Pitchfork (as of January 2026, I pay for a subscription) and, to a lesser extent, The Quietus (I take their yearly top 100 albums list, shuffle it, and try to listen to them over the course of the next year). I'm trying to branch out to Hearing Things and other sites.
Pitchfork's news has been good in alerting me that a band will go on tour or will have a new album out soon. I usually find out about a band touring on Pitchfork way before Songkick. Songkick lets me track individual artists a bit easier. I don't really care about recommendation algorithms, so I try to ignore them.
I listen to Pitchfork's Selects Playlist. It's updated every Monday.
On these two days of the week I don't know what to do with myself. I try to remember to listen to a release from my Record Club queue.
I listen to the Friends playlist in Apple Music, updated every Thursday. This is probably my favourite "algorithmic" playlist. My "friends" (people I follow on Apple Music) all have different tastes, all of which are interesting.
I listen to the New Music playlist in Apple Music, updated every Friday. This one is algorithmically targetted to me, though I'd rather it surface new music generally, not new music that it thinks I would like. Often, though, the songs are great, so I'll frequently listen to the whole release if I like the song.
Pitchfork has been doing Saturday Reviews, reviews of tracks that aren't in their reviews archive. Those reviews have served as deep dives of great tracks from the history of music.
I listen to Pitchfork's Sunday Review, a review of a historical album they have yet to review. I think they can do 2 or 3 albums per Sunday, not just the one they ever do. These tend to be reviews of an artist's entire career.