Dude. Dude. You’re still a kid ;)

Age jokes from an old fart aside, it’s about your willingness to go looking.

It does mean you’ll end up using some otherwise shitty services unless you are active in a local music related scene (like clubbing). But YouTube, Pandora, spotify, and most of the other music streaming services have some degree of recommendations. They aren’t all that great usually, but in the absence of being immersed with real life music explorers, it’s the best option.

You can check out the Billboard top 200 and go the route of hoping your preferred music genres chart in the first place, but also being fairly reliable that other fans have vetted tracks for it to get there.

And radio still exists. You can pick a station that’s genre specific or a top 40 station and find stuff that’s already a little popular that way. It isn’t as reliable as it used to be, but you can find newer raising acts that way.

There’s forums. I haunt the typical lemmy based music C/s, plus the ones for my favorite genres, which keeps me fairly up to date on new releases as well as some new acts.

And, always participate in your local scene when possible. It’s harder with hip-hop since finding local acts outside of cities is damn near impossible, but if you’re into other stuff too, it can be a great way to catch acts before they get going, if your local scene is active enough. I’m fairly lucky in that bluegrass is one of the genres I’m into, and I’m not too far away from one of the better known cities for country and bluegrass music. So it’s easy to find new bands and solo acts performing at a bar or local festival that end up getting popular eventually. That’s an example of what i mean, making use of what’s already there locally.