You don't have to rely on software recommendations. You can still get your music recommendations the same way you did in 2005. Follow the artists, follow reviewers you agree with, follow indie music blogs.

Music is either a casual experience or a hobby and people who complain that good music is hard to find are in the former category. Which is totally fine but boy am I sick of casual listeners complaining about music nowadays. There's more good music than ever.

Like are you gonna trawl through 5 billion songs to find 1000 ones that blow your mind?

I think 5 billion might be a bit of an exaggeration :P

But yeah I do listen to a lot of new music, one of the big ones for finding new music is live performances like Defqon1

They have lots of colour stages, for example Gold stage is old school hardstyle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tww7lK7OHpw

Yellow (uptempo):

https://youtu.be/RolG5P3YN1o

Red which is the main stage and this set in particular is the legends set which goes through all the top hardstyle producers in their eras playing their stuff

00:00 - Epoch 1: 2000 - 2005

00:23:34 - Epoch 2: 2005 - 2010

01:33:18 - Epoch 3: 2010 - 2015

02:55:32 - Epoch 4: 2015 - 2020

04:08:42 - Epoch 5: 2020 - 2025

04:41:46 - The Closing Ritual

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvVrXLErxcg

Then maybe I go oh this song from late 90's sounds good, wonder what else was going on before then, then I can hop on Spotify and search for early 90's rave:

Early 90s rave classics

Classic rave tracks from (mostly) 1990-1995. Everything from chart hits to underground hardcore.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4kWUW71rphZnv4hPE7OsVQ

or maybe I'll hear something new like https://youtu.be/QeD-amb0vA0?t=580 and want to hear more so then I lookup the artist on Spotify and just start playing through all their songs seeing if anything else stands out

and that's just for one genre (hardstyle) not taking into account trance music, metal, ambient/chillout, vaporwave, techno etc

It's just a never ending quest to hear new music and keep pushing my boundaries

There's also a BIG catch, you're predisposed to liking the music you heard during your youth the most:

“Between the ages of 12 and 22, our brains undergo rapid neurological development—and the music we love during that decade seems to get wired into our lobes for good. When we make neural connections to a song, we also create a strong memory trace that becomes laden with heightened emotion, thanks partly to a surfeit of pubertal growth hormones. These hormones tell our brains that everything is incredibly important—especially the songs that form the soundtrack to our teenage dreams (and embarrassments)…

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-career-within-you/201411/why-does-music-we-heard-as-teens-stick

This might explain why I still love a cheeky listen to Korn or Limpbizkit every now and then 🤣