From Morgan Wallen to Hyperpop: I Fed 5 Seed Artists to Every 'Sounds Like' Engine and Ranked the Rabbit Holes
Every music nerd has that one friend who 'knows everything.' The problem is you can't text them at 1 a.m. when you're three songs deep into a new genre and need more, immediately.
That's the job these five tools want: type in an artist, get back artists that sound like them. Simple pitch. Wildly different executions. So I ran a little experiment — five seed artists spanning the spectrum from stadium country to stuff that sounds like a dial-up modem having feelings, then followed each engine's recommendations as far as they'd go.
The seeds: Morgan Wallen (mainstream country), Fleetwood Mac (classic rock canon), Kaytranada (dance/electronic), Soccer Mommy (indie), and 100 gecs adjacent hyperpop deep cut territory — I used a small artist with barely 12,000 monthly listeners to see how the tools handle obscurity.
The Contenders
- MusicMap — the interactive web of artist connections
- Last.fm similar artists — the old guard, powered by scrobble data
- Every Noise at Once — Spotify's genre-scape, basically a map of all music
- Chosic — a recommendation aggregator with a discovery playlist angle
- Gnoosic (Gnod) — the bare-bones veteran that's been doing this since the early 2000s
MusicMap: The Pretty Rabbit Hole
MusicMap drops you into a constellation of dots. Click an artist, the map re-centers around them, and suddenly you're six clicks deep from Morgan Wallen into some alt-country outfit you've never heard of.
Accuracy: Solid for mid-tier artists. The recommendations near Fleetwood Mac made immediate sense — Stevie Nicks solo work, Heart, the expected classics.
The weirdness factor: Moderate. It drifts, but politely. After four or five hops from Soccer Mommy, I landed on some excellent bedroom-pop projects I'd genuinely never heard of.
The catch: Obscure seeds are a problem. My hyperpop deep cut? Not on the map. If your taste is niche, MusicMap shrugs at you.
Last.fm: The Wisdom of Crowds, For Better and Worse
Last.fm's similar-artist lists are built from what users actually listen to together, and that cuts both ways.
Accuracy: The best of the bunch for mainstream seeds. Morgan Wallen's page surfaced Luke Combs, Hardy, and Zach Bryan — basically the current Nashville chart. If you want 'more like this' in the radio-station sense, this is your tool.
The weirdness factor: Low. Almost suspiciously low. Starting from Kaytranada, the recommendations stayed in a comfortable lane. Last.fm knows what people listen to, and people are predictable.
Discovery value: It's a mirror, not a door. Great for filling out a genre, bad for leaving one.
Every Noise at Once: The Genre Nerd's Playground
This one's technically a genre map, but click any genre and you get a scrollable list of artists plotted by 'organic vs. mechanical' and 'dense vs. sparse.' It's gloriously unhinged in the best way.
Accuracy: Weirdly good once you learn the layout. Looking for 'more like Soccer Mommy'? Punch up indie rock adjacent genres and scroll until something clicks.
The weirdness factor: High, and deliberately so. This is the tool that took me from Morgan Wallen to red-dirt Texas country to a Norwegian folk revival act in three moves. Whether that's a feature or a bug depends on your tolerance for whiplash.
The catch: No search-by-artist in the traditional sense, and the interface looks like it hasn't been redesigned since 2014. You work for your recommendations here.
Chosic: The Middle Ground
Chosic aggregates recommendations and adds a 'similar songs' angle, which is handy when you like a track more than an artist.
Accuracy: Decent. Fleetwood Mac seeds produced the expected canon plus some soft-rock deep cuts.
The weirdness factor: Mild. It occasionally served up genuinely oddball picks — one hyperpop-adjacent recommendation appeared under a pop-punk seed, which felt like an algorithm having a moment.
Discovery value: The song-level matching is the real hook. Artist similarity is table stakes; matching a vibe is harder, and Chosic does a respectable job.
Gnoosic: The Ancient One Still Kicks
Gnoosic asks for three bands you like and spits out recommendations based on decades of user input. That's it. No maps, no playlists, no accounts.
Accuracy: Shockingly good for the classics. Give it Fleetwood Mac plus two others and it'll name things you'll want to hear.
The weirdness factor: Surprisingly high for such a simple tool. The crowd data is old, so it occasionally recommends an artist's 1998-era contemporaries rather than anything current — which is either charming or exactly what you wanted.
The catch: Newer artists are invisible. Morgan Wallen? Crickets.
The Verdict
| Tool | Best For | Rabbit Hole Depth |
|---|---|---|
| MusicMap | Visual explorers | Medium |
| Last.fm | Mainstream fill-in | Shallow |
| Every Noise | Genre nerds | Very deep |
| Chosic | Song-level matching | Medium |
| Gnoosic | Classic rock archaeology | Medium-deep, backwards in time |
If you want your next favorite act to sound exactly like what you already love, Last.fm won't steer you wrong. But if you want to find the weird stuff — the stuff your algorithm would never serve — Every Noise at Once is the tool that actually leaves the neighborhood.
My advice: use two. One mainstream engine to map the territory, one weird one to wander off it. That's how I found my favorite album of the month, and it came from a Norwegian folk act recommended four clicks away from a country star.
