How to discover new classical and jazz music via streaming services?

[beanbag]

Hello folks,

 

I have a subscription to the Naxos Music Library and also a trial subscription to Sony's streaming service as well. Within these two areas, how can I find new music that I like?

 

Lemme give some examples of what I mean:

 

For classical, I already know of a few composers but would like to find out more, or more of their works, or more about other genres that don't have clearly defined composers, like ancient music. Recently I discovered composers like Arne and Sylvius Weiss, but only because I was listening to albums that had "Bach, plus some other people", or because I was following some particular performer and ran across one of their "recital" albums, where they play a bunch of songs from different composers.

 

In terms of Jazz, I don't care so much about particular composers, but only that the music sound like "normal", "fun" jazz, (e.g. dixieland, pre-1940's, gypsie, etc) and not this modern, atonal, random tooting. So far I have only tried to search by "genre", but that doesn't seem to go very well. The other is just to find a record label, like Linn (which doesn't have all that many listings on Naxos), and just step thru all their albums. This also doesn't work all that well, since I run into a lot of types of music I don't care about.

 

In the spirit of "teach a man to fish...", can you give any advice about how to find new music WITHOUT referring to any specific albums or composers? I think the internet has enough threads that are clogged with replies about how you should check out this guy or that other guy, or "these are my favourite albums". I'm more interested in your techniques or methods. But maybe getting specific recommendations is the best way after all?

 

Thanks

 

PS: I am very pleased with the lowly 128kbit Naxos compressed files. They sound VERY close to actual CDs I have.