Agreed! I discover many songs through friends who are big on Spotify and it's great. Though my personal approach to discovering new music now is going through t

Agreed! I discover many songs through friends who are big on Spotify and it's great. Though my personal approach to discovering new music now is going through the full discographies of artists I love (so neat "seeing" their evolution), and then Shazaming any great song I hear while out and about (and then YouTubing the heck out of that artist to quickly mine for any other potential treasures). So far this has been a wonderful approach, especially since I inevitably end up researching the artists and songs I go through, learning so much more about the background stories like song meanings and the issues of those times. As an aside, and speaking of the nonmusical elements that make a song popular, three other things that do it for me are when I heard that particular song (huge fan of Garth Brooks' "Callin' Baton Rouge" because it was what my host parents played on a fantastic summer I spent on exchange), and the CD cover or other imagery that's associated with the artist (it actually makes me sad to delete humdrum songs from my library if they have fantastic album covers) are two. The third is the subsection of songs that I grew up with, which is different than those from the summer exchange situation above because these are emotionally tied to a time in my life when everything was fresh and exciting; they were the theme not just songs but entire albums running through the background of my youth. Objectively speaking, there's nothing too special about Oasis or Weezer or ATB or Robert Miles or Darude or Aqua but that they found me in a particularly impressionable time in my life. Simon and Garfunkel are in this gathering as well, but it's just sheer luck that my friends were turning hipster and so I was exposed. They were actually what caused me to spring off from the popular tunes of the day into more timeless classics : )