I loved this article. I have about 4k songs saved in my "liked" playlist on Spotify, majority of them were from when I was 20 to 24, then it tapered off a lot. I turned 30 this year and I still like to discover new music but not as much as I did in my early 20s.
This is why folks in their 40s+ end up still listening to the same stuff. lol. The article was right about that.
Acts like Greta Fleet help bridge those gaps between old school sounds and new music. Electronica has never been easier to get into as well and there’s a nostalgia for those old school synthwave vibes.
Like all things, there’s an ebb and flow to music and musical taste over time. You’ll find as you understand music more, you’ll be listening to classical on a Thursday morning just as much as you’ll listen to pop, rock, or jazz.
By the time you reach 60, your musical tastes should be broad enough to appreciate all music, hopefully. Obviously some will reach that point faster than others. Musicians tend to be the fastest since they are students of music.
I still have a rock playlist I created in my late 20s on Spotify that I listen to this day. Mostly started as a digital version of my in-car CD collection.
I like to go through my Liked songs list that's probably 10+ years old on Spotify and it's basically like a journal of my life.
I'll see months where I clearly started dating a new person, incorporated their new-to-me music into my playlists, then when I start to see Lord Huron etc I'm probably going through another breakup. Then glowing up which for me is usually a metal/hardcore/rap 3-6 months in the gym until I meet someone and cycle again. lol.
My Spotify Remix in 2020 was pretty much all depression music.
From the artist side, apparently during Fleetwood Mac's heyday they were getting up on stage and basically singing about how horrible their relationships with each other were. Whether that's "money for nothing" or "suffering for your art" I'll leave to the band members to say, but Wikipedia notes:
> In 1976, the band was suffering from severe stress. With success came the end of John and Christine McVie's marriage, as well as Buckingham and Nicks's long-term romantic relationship. Fleetwood, meanwhile, was in the midst of divorce proceedings from his wife, Jenny, and had also begun an affair with Nicks. The pressure on Fleetwood Mac to release a successful follow-up album, combined with their new-found wealth, led to creative and personal tensions which were allegedly fuelled by high consumption of drugs and alcohol.
Nothing like a musical star to provide a good corn king/wicker man sacrifice on behalf of society...
I can't imagine being a grown adult and dealing with that amount of drama. I don't ever date inside of my friend groups because it always winds up causing some rift. Imagine having to put out a world class album through all of that. Oof.
Agreed. I'm 27 and still save a lot of new music. But I've looked back at my older playlists from college and was probably saving 10x more songs back then. Full-time job definitely affected that
As a middle aged guy, I've used TikTok to find new music.
Spotify recommendations are kind of crap after a bit. It's a fundamental problem with similarity based recommendations and people getting stagnant. I don't want to listen to the greatest bands of the 90s and 00s. I want to listen to new bands that were influenced by those bands.
I have a similar issue with Spotify too. Everywhere on my page is stuff I am completely bored of listening to, but since its the only thing I can easily access, I end up listening to the same things and Spotify thinks I want more of it.
Instagram has the same issue. I watch a few horse videos and all of a sudden my feed is horses for months.
I haven't read the article, but I know the answer pretty definitively for me: the second I stopped listening to the radio, which happened in 2008 (when I was 17), because my favorite radio station in Orlando that used to carry a lot of punk rock music got rebranded to music for the 50+ demographic. I'm not even going to pretend that I know the reasons why they did that, but it was the only station I was listening to regularly, and pretty much my only source for new music as a result.
Gradually I stopped seeking out new music, instead just focusing on buying CDs for bands I already knew until I got Spotify in 2012, and that just kind of became an echo chamber.
I have a SiriusXM account now, and I do try and seek out new music that way occasionally via their phone app, but it's been a bit difficult since I don't drive since I moved to NYC. My car was probably 80+% of my music-listening time and now I don't really have that anymore. I can't really listen to music with lyrics while working (way too distracting for me), so the only music I listen to during most of the day is video game music from the 90's: stuff that's meant to be pleasant to listen to, but also easy to tune out by design.
I also have that problem with lyrics in music while I'm working. That pushed me toward more electronic music during the workday. Got into various forms of house that way.
Finding "new" music is a concept that the music industry has marketed to you like being skinny or that cola is a lifestyle. In times past people were happy with one genre or slight variations of that genre for millennia. Now we are spoiled for choice but are yet still made to feel ashamed if we are not consuming the newest and discarding the oldest. As if there is sickness to be found in enjoying something old and well worn.
I think it's easy to sit and judge someone as being "uncultured" because they listen to music that was popular when they were a teenager, but fundamentally it's not like they're hurting anyone. I listen to mostly late-90's-early-2000's punk rock even still, and I don't think it's a moral failing that I don't listen to the latest stuff all the time, just like I don't think it's a moral failing for my mom to mostly listen to The Beegees.
Music is, first and foremost, a means of entertainment, and it's not like it really buys you anything to be up to date in music for most careers. If your job is, I don't know, marketing director of a company, then sure, maybe you should keep up to date with the latest trends all the time, but most of us have pretty utilitarian jobs where it doesn't really matter what we like.
I think where it gets harmful is acting like "the stuff I listened to as a teenager is objectively better than what the kids listen to now", which I will admit is a mentality that I sometimes have to actively fight against. I think it can sometimes be a proxy for shitting on the next generation of humans, and I am very actively against needlessly divisive and reductive stuff like that.
> and I don't think it's a moral failing that I don't listen to the latest stuff all the time
I’ve personally enjoyed going the other way and exploring earlier and earlier singers and genres.
Quite fun.
For those interested, there’s also "Excavated Shellac"[0]. I can’t say I’ve liked or even enjoyed most of it, but it’s been an intriguing and interesting discovery nonetheless.
Yeah, I've done something like the theme of Excavated Shellac with old CDs a couple times. I will buy a bundle of 100 random CDs on eBay and go through and rip anything that seems remotely interesting. Occasionally I've found stuff from obscure artists that I end up liking, and even stuff that never made it to Spotify.
It's time consuming and I probably won't do it again but it was fun to do a few times.
>I think it's easy to sit and judge someone as being "uncultured" because they listen to music that was popular when they were a teenager
Pretty funny, especially since I just attended a sold-out performance of Mozart's Requiem last month. Back when I was younger, I think the dominant perception was that classical music was "cultured" and popular / current music was lacking in refinement
Maybe the word "uncultured" isn't right, but I feel like when I say "I don't really listen to much that was written in the last fifteen years", people kind of act like I'm some kind of luddite. I also think a lot of people feel like the smartest people go way back and listen to the classical stuff. Personally, I've never really been able to get into classical music outside of movie soundtracks, and for awhile I was kind of embarrassed by that fact, but I'm not really anymore. As I said, music is about entertainment, and you like what you like.
Kind of related, when I was a teenager, I liked to read a lot, but I didn't have any money. I discovered Project Gutenberg and started reading a lot of public domain stuff (a lot of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Dickens, etc), purely out of cheapness. Teachers would think I'm smarter than I actually was because I knew obscure literary references from old books in my essays and when I would answer questions in class, despite the fact that it doesn't really require a 10,000 IQ to download a PDF file from the internet and read it.
> I also think a lot of people feel like the smartest people go way back and listen to the classical stuff. […] and for awhile I was kind of embarrassed by that fact
That says a lot more about those who think that it does about than those who do or do not listen to "classical" music.
> Personally, I've never really been able to get into classical music outside of movie soundtracks,
Not implying it will or should be the same for you, or even that you should try it, but in my limited experience headphones and speakers have hardly ever done any justice to "classical" music.
It also seems some of it needs the listeners to have lived a little, so it can resonate with them. As an example, I couldn’t care less for operas as a teenager. Fifteen years later, two live operas are among the few pieces that have so far managed to make me cry.
I did however try seeing some Beethoven performance a few years ago and I didn’t really enjoy it. I can respect and appreciate the talent of the musicians, and I didn’t hate it or anything, but I still didn’t really have that much fun.
> I think it's easy to sit and judge someone as being "uncultured" because they listen to music that was popular when they were a teenager, but fundamentally it's not like they're hurting anyone.
I think the antagonism usually goes in the other way. Most people get crystallized music tastes pretty soon into their life and the second the new generation comes up with something different, it's all "music is crap these days, silly kids, back in my day the 90s had the best music." There are several examples in this thread without a hint of the irony of this article.
Old foreign language books had translations for phrases along the lines of "the lobster makes a good salad" and "my husband is unwell, can you call a doctor?"
If I were to use YouTube for a corpus, I could probably write contemporary translation books for many languages, as long as the phrases were along the lines of "still listening in ${YEAR}" and "new ${GENRE} isn't this good"
I don't even blame them, clearly the article shows there's a biological or cultural phenomenon to it. It's just unfortunate when you're the 2% outlier that thinks music is progressing, as you can't share with others the appreciation that sounds are actually getting better.
i feel like a majority of people don't seek out "new" music, so i see how you apply that to the music industry as a marketing concept. with whatever app, if you get people listening to more new stuff, you can get them engaged longer etc.
however, i've sought new music since i was young. its something i share with my father who would purposely grab new records or cassette based on trivial things (title, art, price..) and then listen to the album several times. i love exploring different cultures and music is a great reflection of that. at the same time, i often go back to the old and well worn music i grew up with, and even that my parents or their parents grew up with. i think there's a lot of beauty out there and it's a shame to shun something new because you feel it falls within an industries agenda.
> Now we are spoiled for choice but are yet still made to feel ashamed if we are not consuming the newest and discarding the oldest. As
Actually I've found Gen-z's to have surprisingly wide listening patterns. As a few datapoints I was surprised that my friend's teenager could actually name several Nirvana songs, knew who the Smashing pumpkins were, and also the Talking Heads. (all rose and fell from fame before her birth)
My friend (who's the same age as me) has a 14 year old son who's learning guitar and he asked me for a lesson. The first thing he wanted me to show him was some riffs from AC/DC songs that came out before I was born.
Very difficult with streaming. Rdio used to have a slider to recommend more unusual music. No other service has this that I’ve found. They keep playing the same songs and artist forever.
So true. I remember those days very fondly. There was a real community of listeners back then. Within that circle you shared albums and playlists, commented on and discussed them.
Plus, it had a persistant queue that could handle single songs as well as albums and playlists as individual items which could be moved freely. Everything I was interested in was added to the queue and I could be certain it'd still be there tomorrow. Sort of like a musical backlog.
Pandora has introduced different tunings that help a bit with this. Not a continuous slider but provides some presets to indicate how wide a net to cast in different dimensions. Normal, Crowd Favorites, Deep Cuts, Discovery, Newly Release.
I never understand why streaming services that work on subscription push some content over others. I would think if they have a monthly subscriber they wouldn't care what that subscriber is streaming as long as they are streaming.
I find this especially bad with video streaming where a service has a great library but only promotes about 30 titles all categorized under different genres.
I suppose they save on bandwidth if they can get everyone to just stream the same titles.
YouTubeMusic actually has this. With its "You Music Tuner" there are a lot of configurable parameters that control artist variety and music discovery. It doesn't quite nail tuning by curation, but it's a step in the right direction.
The author seems to be describing what happens when one's primary relationship with music is one of consumption. It is easy (for me at least) to find new music when you are looking for inspiration in your own practice of making music. Most people don't make music though so I'd imagine it's easy to get stuck in that rut.
I see what you're saying in terms of additional motivation to find new music.
But, is your average person's relationship with music "one of consumption" in such a way that causes stagnation? This comes off as gatekeepy. People may not make their own music, but I imagine many people listen to music as a form of inspiration.
Ya, I'm positive that familiarity with creating music skews listening preferences towards new music. Which is funny because then people that shit on modern, new music are statistically the ones not being able to create and not as deeply familiar with music.
I remember reading a headline that Despacito had been displaced from the #1 position on Billboard after a 16 week run, while I had never heard the song. At that point I became a bit more intentional about trying to find new music.
You stop when you want to stop. I picked up an affinity for K-pop in my 30s. Currently exploring a few other genres and also enjoying music that my kids are finding.
> This study identifies 33 as the tipping point for sonic stagnation, an age where artistic taste calcifies, increasingly deviating from contemporary works
In the time since I turned 33 I've experienced an almost-complete switchover in genre preference, from pop/rock/light metal to country. Almost all of it has been found through Spotify's Daily Mix N, where n >= 2.
As best I can figure #1 is your 'guaranteed hits' - songs that you have listened to the most. As you go higher it may be your most-loved music of a different genre or the 1st genre again but with more new-to-you music.
Interesting article. I expect today's streaming tech will drive some change in these patterns, between easy access to a massive library and recommendation features.
Much of my music discovery is aided by Spotify - some automated (radio, "Made For You"), some more manual ("Fans also like" related artists). However, as I continue to use Spotify, some of these features seem less effective. It's like I'm filling in interconnected regions of Spotify's graph of music and there are less edges to unvisited nodes.
Spotify has financial incentive to obfuscate their UI to tilt people toward mindlessly consuming playlists. This is because labels pay Spotify to put certain songs on large playlists, and Spotify knows playlists are a good habit to push onto their users.
Radio was used to discover new music decades ago, but paying a radio station (directly) to play a song is illegal (payola), so DJs had to break new songs, styles, and have a wide array of music offered (within the theme of the station).
Spotify now has the ability to engage in a legal version of "digital" payola, so their handcrafted group of artists by major labels are peppered into their hundreds of in-house playlists, disguising this business practice as a wide array of music selection.
This is detrimental to music discovery, because discovering a song is a lot less meaningful than discovering a new album and consuming the project as a whole and appreciating its composition.
So you're discovering new music, but none of it is memorable, because listening to music in 2024 (for a lot of people) is often a wall of slightly groovy background noise, with the occasional standout track that you probably toss into your own personal playlist.
How I fixed this:
1. Disable the 'autoplay' feature
2. Don't use playlists and listen to albums (except for when I'm in a pinch or hosting a party)
3. Intentionally discover a new genre every few months and go down a rabbit hole. My current new genre is South African Amapiano. Excellent stuff.
4. Discover music across different genres and time periods using RateYourMusic.
> So you're discovering new music, but none of it is memorable, because listening to music in 2024 (for a lot of people) is often a wall of slightly groovy background noise, with the occasional standout track that you probably toss into your own personal playlist.
Yea, I tried streaming for a while, and found exactly that. When I play some genre-specific stream with a goal of discovering new music, I find it's basically full of unremarkable, generic musak, punctuated by maybe 0.1% memorable, great tracks that I'm motivated to bookmark for later. Are these few needles worth slogging through hours of haystack? After a few years I have sadly concluded "no."
Not sure why this is. Has it always been this way (0.1% great stuff in a sea of mediocre?) or are "content creators" of today just more focused on churning out quantity than artists of the past?
So now I was on the German and the English Wikipedia entry of the Principle and noticed a noteworthy difference:
English: While it is common to refer to pareto as "80/20" rule, under the assumption that, in all situations, 20% of causes determine 80% of problems, this ratio is merely a convenient rule of thumb and is not, nor should it be considered, an immutable law of nature.
German: The 80-20 distribution in the Pareto principle often leads to the false assumption that a sum of 100 is mandatory. In fact, however, any other distribution is possible, in which, for example, 50 % of the efforts lead to 90 % of the effect, and again 50 % of the efforts lead to the remaining 10 % of the effect. This is easy to see in the trivial case that 100% of the efforts are the cause of 100% of the success. [0]
It's interesting how this explanatory information is lacking in the English version. Should be a cool project for an LLM to transfer information between the different language versions of a Wikipedia entry.
It's "true", yes, for almost everything, but there is a lot to gain from recognizing the difference between 80/20 and 90/10 or even 99/1, etc. Just like 99%, 99.9% and 99.99% uptime are VERY different promises to meet, while looking virtually identical to a layman.
>> labels pay Spotify to put certain songs on large playlists
What are you talking about. IM going to need you to back this one up with some proof.
1. The labels have a giant back catalog that remains popular. It does not need promotion. Huge long tail profits there.
2. The labels dont have a lot to sell any more. The big artists tend to get out of the system (and make money on tours) and small artists get nothing. And lots of artists have bought back their catalogs, again long tail.
The album, as a vehicle is mostly dead. Hell songs are mostly dead, if you cant hook someone in the time of a ticktock video your going to have a lot of trouble getting them. And there you need to be "background music" with a groove.
Anecdotal, but I was close friends with someone who managed a niche (but popular) artist’s social media and streaming service presence. We discussed this fact and this person mentioned it could be $10k+ to be on some playlists 1st song spot for just a few days. I doubt it’s only Spotify official playlists.
I’ve wondered for a while if Spotify skews playlists in favor of cheaper songs. I have no evidence of this, but it’d make business sense to use the equivalent of store brand music (even if that just means outsourced to a cheap agency) for generic study music playlists and such.
I noticed Google Play do this with Soundcloud Rap.
Their amorality has caused me to enjoy SoundCloud Rap at a formidable age, now I cannot shake it. My kids listen to it, swear amorally, and the cycle continues.
All because Google Play didn't want to shell out an extra 60 cents per year for paid Rappers.
> so DJs had to break new songs, styles, and have a wide array of music offered (within the theme of the station).
I'm an older Zoomer and this was never the case for radio in my lifetime [1]. I heard "college radio stations" being a bastion of this but I've never listened to one myself.
One of the earliest internet services I remember loving was Pandora because it recommended me artists I never heard on the radio and was the start of my love of music.
[1] I'm guessing it was related to all radio stations being owned by the same companies.
Late Gen-X/Early Millennial here; there was a time before the consolidation of radio stations and invasion of iHeartMedia (at the time named Clear Channel) where DJs had the final word in what got played and most were quite good at introducing new music. Here's my experience form the outside of the industry: once consolidation started there was a push to use canned (pre-recorded) intros, outros, and interstitial announcements to reduce costs. Stations often kept some talk shows, but few kept real DJs. This let stations use a small number of voice actors for a large number of stations. Combined with centrally controlled playlists they were able to push the costs down and increase profits to the point that older style stations with bespoke DJs couldn't compete financially and either adopted the same model or they sold out.
EDIT: I may be misremembering, but there used to be a limit on how many stations a company could own in a given market.
I recently switched off Amazon Music and went back to Pandora (must have started using it in like 2010 and then gone on a 13 or so year long diversion into the on-demand streaming services).
I guess it isn’t surprising because it is their core value proposition, but the Pandora discovery algorithm seems so much better than the competition, at least to my ears.
I miss the ability to hyper-focus and play an album over and over, but on the other hand, it is probably better not to burn out on an album, and anyway, if I really want to, I can buy the album I guess.
Pandora + Bandcamp reminds me of what the internet looked like it could be. Sad that Amazon and their ilk have to silo everything.
Last.fm was pretty good too. I wonder how they are holding up…
Pandora was my go-to circa 2007-2009 and I haven't thought about it in years. Looking back, I discovered a disproportionate amount of the music I like in that timeframe... I'm honestly kind of surprised they're still around (and, if I'm reading your comment correctly, haven't morphed into something entirely unrecognizable in the meantime?)
I use Pandora and subscribe to Premium which allows me to listen to albums on demand. When I started out as a free user after I gave up on Youtube in the background apps, I didn't like Spotify because it kept forcing me to listen to awful songs that it pushes on everybody instead of what I actually wanted to listen to. Pandora was a much better experience as a free user because their "radio" plays music similar to what you've already told it you like.
How does Spotify "force" you to listen to stuff? I have a very different experience. Pandora (many years ago when I tried it) did not let you choose what you wanted to play (e.g. am album) and Spotify did (and still does). I have hundreds of my own playlists on Spotify, and my listening time is split between those, Spotify's "daily mix" playlists (generated from your personal music tastes) and occasionally "discover weekly" (one way I discover new music). I like choosing what music I listen to.
Dude... THANK YOU. I just logged back into Pandora and the recommendations are just as excellent as I remember. I also remember discovering some of my absolute favorite songs/albums via Pandora.
One thing that Pandora has is GENRE based stations. I don't know of any other service that can do that. This will be a game changer for when I dive into new genres.
This is the same defense used in radio. Note the wording ... "no one can pay". Favors and indirect payment are used excessively in the music industry. Note that I also said that payola was the act of "direct payment".
An example of indirect payment in radio would be the record label gifting a set of expensive tickets to the station.
Remember those contests in the 2000s where the radio station would play a collection of songs over the course of a few hours, and if you could call in and be caller number 15 and name all the songs, you could win free concert tickets?
The record label didn't pay the radio station with money - The tickets were gifted to the station for free. But as a result, the radio station played [insert band name]'s songs for 2 hours straight (and possibly other artists on the same label).
This is a win-win, because a ton of people talk about this contest with their family and friends, so the station gets free promo, and the artist gets exposure.
I don't know how Spotify is doing this in the digital era, but ask anyone connected to the music industry. This 100% happens.
For a lot of casual listeners, Spotify editorial playlists are the new radio station.
Read my comment again. If you're listening to a playlist, you're not mindfully choosing each song. There's nothing wrong with playlists, but my point was to describe how listening to music from Spotify's playlists often isn't a mindful experience (excluding when your attention is grabbed the occasional standout track).
A GOOD playlist can keep your attention, and those are often handcrafted by other users. Just look at some of the other responses in this thread. Plenty of people have the same experience.
I also said that music from playlists is often (not always) groovy background noise - This isn't a mindful experience - And that's okay.
My previous genres were dozens of Techno subgenres. Check out the 2023 Coachella lineup. That year had a strong focus on 'World Music'. I went last year and that's how I discovered Amapiano.
If you like Amapiano, check out a song titled 'Ungowami' by Sha Sha
Check out 'Big Flexa' by Costa Titch. Awesome music video too. Huge dance culture in South Africa.
Also check out 'Abo Mvelo' by Daliwonga (this song gets me hype during workouts)
And check out Uncle Waffles' Boiler Room mix. Truly awesome performance.
> This is detrimental to music discovery, because discovering a song is a lot less meaningful than discovering a new album and consuming the project as a whole and appreciating its composition.
This is a very silly statement. As someone who prefers to listen the full albums and does so 95% of the time and basically never seek to play a specific single; I’m definitely not going to listen to an entire albums of new artists at a time.
I look at the discover weekly / release radar. If I like a song, I’ll listen to the album. If it I like the album, I’ll listen to the discography.
Most music is not great, but it’s easy to sample and dive deeper.
> Not everyone wants to put forth that much effort.
How is that more effort than listening whole albums?
I personally do my Spotify discovery exactly that way - I listen to "discover weekly", and when a song stands out, I just click on the artist and listen more. I can't imagine any way of putting less effort than that into discovering new music.
I don't know about the Spotify analysis here, but certainly cosign RateYourMusic, which I just learned about this last weekend and am now a little bit obsessed with. It's like IMDB crossed with Pinboard, and the list of new stuff I have to listen to now is long and intricately connected to what I already listen to. It's a pretty amazing resource, even if everyone there is wrong about Uncle Tupelo's "Anodyne".
I pay for it because it's dirt cheap and you get track ratings. If I discover an artist I use RYM to get the best 3 songs of their best 3 albums on YouTube. if I still like the band after that I'll buy the highest rated album.
I used it for like 5 minutes before paying for it, it's obviously great, and the "pro" upgrade has the funniest best feature ever (exclude ratings by the age of the rater).
How did you discover Amapiano? I ask because Tyla has become massively popular in the last year and I'm wondering if the discovery was truly coincidental or undercover marketing?
Also - just don't use Spotify. It has a UX that is just consistently opposed to album-centric listening. Or any sort of focused listening, really.
There are alternatives. Apple music is fine. Tidal + Roon is also pretty good.
For discovering music, Roon provides a much more album-centric way to browse and learn about different albums and genres. I use that combined with subreddits for particular genres and good old fashioned album reviews and artist interviews.
Since I'm not seeing anybody mention it yet but it's one of my favorite ways to find new genres, I'd highly recommend everyone check out everynoise.com because they seem to have scraped Spotify's genres (you'll need Spotify to listen to more than 30 second samples, but probably still useful even if you don't use Spotify). The number of genres they have listed in the THOUSANDS, and I guarantee they will have something you've never heard of, but it's a great rabbit hole to go down when looking for new music. If you like a genre, they'll already have multiple playlists for it, and if you like a particular artist, they'll have those too. I am not affiliated with the website, but try to turn everyone I know onto it because there's just so much out there to discover that I wouldn't have otherwise.
(everynoise.com developer, if you're reading this, I love you <3)
> 2024-01-05 status update: With my layoff from Spotify on 2023-12-04, I lost the internal data-access required for ongoing updates to many parts of this site. Most of this, as a result, is now a static snapshot of what, for now, will be the final state from the site's 10-year history and evolution, hosted on my own server. Some pieces may get disabled and reenabled over time, and some that only made sense with current data may never return. But we'll see.
Strongly disagree with your take on albums. I'm a music lover, spotify wrapped always puts me in the top 5% for most artists. I never search by album, always song, and if it's great I'll click in to check to see if the album is to my taste.
I have discovered so much music on spotify. I'm not going to listen to a whole album to see if I like a new artist, lol.
I’m not convinced that we stop finding new music, we just become less zealous or outward about it as we get older. When I was young, I was all about talking music, having the right DJ list for roadtrips, etc, etc and now? I just hit play and don’t think too much about it. Probably because it’s harder to attend shows, less relevant to my social life, etc. I’ve also found as I’ve gotten older that I just care less about the specifics of what the song or artist is. I’ll anchor to a song I really like and then let Apple’s infinite play loop take it from there.
The artists have made it harder. They've pushed for aggressive one sided fan behavior policies (phone less), they've increased aggressively with the prices, the quality has gone down with many established bands, pushed large shows without building a performance with the space, and they've done a ton of things that don't help their product.
It feels more like greed in the business than an experience.
That being said I'm still sitting on the idea of paying 123$ for cage the elephant show on an album I haven't heard yet.
I am 100% onboard with the phone bans. There's nothing worse than hundreds of phone screens glowing in your face while you're trying to enjoy a live act. I can't imagine how weird it must feel for the performer(s) too. To go from people looking at you, making eye contact, engaging with the performance, to suddenly seeing a sea of phones pointed at you, with everyone watching you indirectly via their phone screen.
There are far better ways to address people holding up their phones to record than to outright ban them from everyone. There are strong reasons (Bataclan) to need and have those there.
What's with the sympathy for the performer? It's hard for them to even see the audience. Most of the light is focused on them and the audience is in the dark.
What's the better way? I'm not saying phones need to be physically removed from people, just kept in pockets/bags/whatever.
As for my comment about the performer, I'm just picturing it from their perspective and to me it would feel odd to go from looking at people to looking at phones. I'm sure there are lots of people who film with their phone lights on, so that's got to be noticeable through the stage lights.
Yea, the whole "I want to watch the concert through my phone" thing I don't get at all. If you just want to watch it on your phone, why not just stay home and watch a professionally-produced concert video? Are they actually recording it for later (and are actually going to watch their low-quality recording later), or do they simply need to frame everything they experience inside a phone bezel?
I'd bet that most of such recordings are not even shared or perhaps even looked at by the author (personally, I'm guilty of this). It's just some sort of compulsion to record it.
They just want to brag about it, I guess. Like with photos of their meals and... well, lots of things. To each their own, but I stopped attending most shows mainly because of the annoying seas of phones in front of me.
> Are they actually recording it for later (and are actually going to watch their low-quality recording later)
What's wild is how much the "low-quality recording" on a modern smartphone looks and sounds way better than bootlegs I listened to (or, god forbid, watched) in the 90s.
I don't film entire concerts but I will usually try to get a nice clip from one of my favorite songs. It's fun to revisit. I'd love it if I had short clips from shows I saw when I was 20, especially ones of bands who blew up later or fell off the face of the earth.
Thank you for pointing this out. Everytime I bring up the "phone free" thing, everyone keeps jumping on and saying "well i don't like people filming". The situation that you mentioned is exactly how I do that and what I've seen.
The exception to this is extremely mainstream performances that attract people, where it may be the one big thing they do in the year or the next.
> There's nothing worse than hundreds of phone screens glowing in your face while you're trying to enjoy a live act.
Plenty of worse things. People throwing up on you. Harassment. Tarps. Passing out. Being sold water even though it's supposed to be free. Taking bottle caps away from you. People talking during the show. People yelling about politics.
I don't enjoy all the phones either, but it is what it is.
>I’m not convinced that we stop finding new music, we just become less zealous or outward about it as we get older. When I was young, I was all about talking music, having the right DJ list for roadtrips, etc, etc and now? I just hit play and don’t think too much about it. Probably because it’s harder to attend shows, less relevant to my social life, etc.
Well, older people (40, 50, even 60+) more passionate about music, they still do all of those (going to concerts, discussing music, crafting the right playlist for roadtrips), not unlike like they did in their 20s.
So, yes: most people do care less about music and stop finding new music.
This is maybe true if we talk about superstar kind of show. But I think it's now easier than ever to find out about little gigs, which were hard to find before social networks.
I live in medium size capital city (Belgrade), there are options to listen to live music every single day. Sometimes it's just classic music, sometimes there are cover bands, but quite often there's a chance to listen to original music. And these small gigs are quite cheap or even free. I very often listen a song or two (Spotify or youtube really help with this!), then if it looks promising I listen to some more while walking to the show.
Sure, sometimes it's not good. But very often I like it a lot and you can bet I listen to it much more focused then if that same music came on autoplay at home.
If you're in big enough city or have something bigger nearby - find a way to discover new gigs, follow venues, event organizers, local cultural institutions, festivals, etc. That's my main use of Facebook.
I can't buy an argument about there being too many options. If there were a lot of options, and you liked a lot of them, you could just randomly sample new albums, or listen to whatever Spotify told you to listen to, and there would be no problem finding new music. I suspect the issue is there's a lot of music out there and none of it sounds like what you want.
Note that this isn't saying music today is bad, it's got nothing to do with that.
At a certain point, changing trends in music cause it to drift too far from your internal model (developed in youth) for what a song should be, and it becomes hard to take, decreasing returns with increasing effort, and you say "fuck it, I'll just listen to what I already like for the rest of my life".
I would guess there's a strong correlation with trait openness to someones ability to integrate new music into their collection. IDK if its a lot, but I listened to 90 genres in 2023. I do find myself frequently liking music that is about 10 years old, but I think that's a function of discovering it, not of a willingness to try new sounds on for taste.
Other than the opportunity for a misplaced pun on the term “spiral”, why would you take an otherwise linear-in-time graph and make it radial? Why would age 0 to 50 be somehow cyclical?
I've been building systems to find new music for 18 years or so. This latest one I've been using since early 2020.
It's really for just me so sorry if the documentation is a little scattered. I'm certainly doing some minor ToS violations all over the place with this thing so I don't want it to get too popular but I'll be happy to clean up the documentation if there's interest
Thank you for sharing this! Looking forward to try it, seems like an interesting idea. My strategy on bandcamp is conceptually similar, albeit manually.
Bandcamp is my primary place for learning about new music. I find following small labels that specialize in a genre to be ideal. Unfortunately, bandcamp doesn't do a great job in helping me keep track of everything, so this is what I do:
1. Bandcamp doesn't have RSS, but I take all the incoming emails and convert them to RSS[1]. I separate out new messages vs new releases. I host my own RSS with FreshRSS.
2. I wrote an app (Camp Counselor [2]) to help manage your Bandcamp wishlist. You can organize, rate, and comment (privately) on your wishlist, along with play directly in the app. I find that my wishlist (which has a few thousand albums on it) is more of a "to do" list. If I get a recommendation, I just add it to my wishlist and will check it out later. Even stuff I don't like stays in my wishlist (with a low rating), to help me remember. I then sort by rating or added at dates, and as I purchase things, they move off my wishlist into my purchase list.
This generally works really well for me, and I continue to explore lots of new and great music every day!
This looks great - how do you then keep the subset that you want to continue listening to in the longer term? Is there an "extract to my music collection" feature - or is this your music repository?
It doesn't seem like the article makes much of a distinction between newly released music and music that you haven't listened to yet. Personally, as I get older I've lost the ability to listen to the same Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd etc albums for the 100th time. I cringe every time I hear the opening of Don't Stop Believing. So I've kept trying to get deeper into prog and other genres lately as I'm just burnt out on the old (good) stuff.
I still like Nirvana, and think they defined a moment, but let’s be honest here. Dave Grohl has had a longer career with Foo Fighters, and Cobain hasn’t put out new stuff since 1994.
Even on crappy old junk headphones, still an awesome song that I don't think I'll ever get tired of.
Granted, I don't generally let services make a playlist for me, and I don't beat the old songs to death. I like more variety than that.
I have however, rolled my eyes when listening to services that have an "80's rock" or "top 90's songs" only to have them play the exact same dozen-or-so songs that they did the last time I visited that channel. No thanks!
That's also probably one of the reasons I rarely listen using a service-generated playlist/channel. I think they are maximized for the service's profit, not for the listener's enjoyment.
To me it depends a lot on the music... if it's more complex, or has more emotional depth I can usually continue to enjoy it almost indefinitely and get something new out of it each time.
I'm sad to admit Led Zeppelin has lost some of it's charm after many listening, which makes me sad because I enjoyed it so much in the past. I've found a lot of Pink Floyd stuff is complex enough that I'm still enjoying it and noticing new things after many decades of listening to it. Watching videos of Floyd playing live also opened up a whole new appreciation for the music.
Lots of the music I enjoyed as a kid/teenager had themes I can only now understand in my late 30s, and didn't really appreciate or fully grasp back then.
Overall, a lot of prog really seems to have enough complexity to remain interesting for a long time. Most of Tools albums, I seem to not enjoy much at first, but enjoy more, and notice more things each time I listen, even after hundreds of listens.
The same music that is complex enough to remain interesting over time, usually doesn't compress well and is really damaged as a low bitrate MP3. I've found those same albums I listen to most year after year are the ones I sought out lossless versions of.
Prog is making a bit of a comeback. Black Midi brought it back to the limelight for critics I think and the london scene is kind of all in on the sound.
I have to wonder how much of this is societal expectations as you age? or "Being an adult".
The idea that once you reach a certain age, you settle down, get into a routine, doing less new things, etc.
While yeah, a music streaming service could introduce you to new music. Maybe you will just find yourself in less situations where you will experience new music?
Listening to a new song on your phone is a drastically different experience to overhearing it while traveling, with friends, whatever.
I know I have a number of songs that bring up an emotional response due to certain events tied to them. And some of them are genres I would not have normally found myself listening too.
"Ah…there it was again: an example of how someone’s musical tastes evolve with age… it’s just something that happens with most people… most of take that as a given…not me, though…this is something that’s always fascinated me…there has to be some science behind why we listen to different types and styles of music as we go through life… So I tracked down this science and I have some answers…we’ll call this episode “what a drag it is getting old—musically”…"
Well I'm in my 50s, and I mostly stopped finding new music when record labels, streaming, and social media destroyed the prospects for people who would otherwise make that new music for me to find.
New stuff still arrives (you're not going to predict that me-at-15-loving-Megadeth will much later also love Billie Eilish or Gin Wigmore or Mirel Wagner or ...) but most "new music" is garbage by the standards set by about 50 years of music (much of that before I was alive and thus well before my "peak influence").
I suspect the "findings" of the article suffer from environmental effects that weren't considered/controlled.
I'm closing in on 50s, and what I miss the most out of the music I grew up with are actual cohesive albums that work as a single artistic unit. I think the 70s were the golden age of albums, and then slowly we moved towards the world of albums being just random collections of tracks, with one or two good ones and the rest "filler." Now, do many modern musicians even bother to release albums anymore? Seems like it's just track after track now.
You might really like the new Cindy Lee double album[1]. The artist decided to only release it as one long video on Youtube instead of separating the songs so it can be played by streaming companies.
For people who want to purchase the album, they can purchase the entire album, or none of it.
i think defining what "new" means would help clarity this. perhaps what you said is true with new mainstream music from large labels, but none of that applies to "new" music that i listen to, at least that i'm aware of.
A peek at billboard 100 from 2004 might surprise you. Same themes, new style and production. That said the rise of trap, particulary the repetitve autotuned bars, certainly hasn't helped in the lyricism dept.
You'll of course find great talent in every generation. While I don't like the majority of the current top billboard there's some talent behind those tracks.
Have you tried adapting to newer discovery methods like http://rateyourmusic.com/ or http://last.fm/ or subreddits like reddit.com/r/LetsTalkMusic , reddit.com/r/IndieHeads , reddit.com/r/HipHopHeads ?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadSometimes there are nice surprises: for instance, "My Way" (1969) and "Comme D'Habitude" (1967) share a tune but are very different songs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FEwW0W9AvA (did Sid influence this interpretation?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeTn56-lahg
Acts like Greta Fleet help bridge those gaps between old school sounds and new music. Electronica has never been easier to get into as well and there’s a nostalgia for those old school synthwave vibes.
Like all things, there’s an ebb and flow to music and musical taste over time. You’ll find as you understand music more, you’ll be listening to classical on a Thursday morning just as much as you’ll listen to pop, rock, or jazz.
By the time you reach 60, your musical tastes should be broad enough to appreciate all music, hopefully. Obviously some will reach that point faster than others. Musicians tend to be the fastest since they are students of music.
I still have a rock playlist I created in my late 20s on Spotify that I listen to this day. Mostly started as a digital version of my in-car CD collection.
I'll see months where I clearly started dating a new person, incorporated their new-to-me music into my playlists, then when I start to see Lord Huron etc I'm probably going through another breakup. Then glowing up which for me is usually a metal/hardcore/rap 3-6 months in the gym until I meet someone and cycle again. lol.
My Spotify Remix in 2020 was pretty much all depression music.
From the artist side, apparently during Fleetwood Mac's heyday they were getting up on stage and basically singing about how horrible their relationships with each other were. Whether that's "money for nothing" or "suffering for your art" I'll leave to the band members to say, but Wikipedia notes:
> In 1976, the band was suffering from severe stress. With success came the end of John and Christine McVie's marriage, as well as Buckingham and Nicks's long-term romantic relationship. Fleetwood, meanwhile, was in the midst of divorce proceedings from his wife, Jenny, and had also begun an affair with Nicks. The pressure on Fleetwood Mac to release a successful follow-up album, combined with their new-found wealth, led to creative and personal tensions which were allegedly fuelled by high consumption of drugs and alcohol.
Nothing like a musical star to provide a good corn king/wicker man sacrifice on behalf of society...
Spotify recommendations are kind of crap after a bit. It's a fundamental problem with similarity based recommendations and people getting stagnant. I don't want to listen to the greatest bands of the 90s and 00s. I want to listen to new bands that were influenced by those bands.
Instagram has the same issue. I watch a few horse videos and all of a sudden my feed is horses for months.
Gradually I stopped seeking out new music, instead just focusing on buying CDs for bands I already knew until I got Spotify in 2012, and that just kind of became an echo chamber.
I have a SiriusXM account now, and I do try and seek out new music that way occasionally via their phone app, but it's been a bit difficult since I don't drive since I moved to NYC. My car was probably 80+% of my music-listening time and now I don't really have that anymore. I can't really listen to music with lyrics while working (way too distracting for me), so the only music I listen to during most of the day is video game music from the 90's: stuff that's meant to be pleasant to listen to, but also easy to tune out by design.
(every now and then I get tempted to translate whatever word I think I keep hearing in every song; it often turns out to be either "love" or "heart")
I think it's easy to sit and judge someone as being "uncultured" because they listen to music that was popular when they were a teenager, but fundamentally it's not like they're hurting anyone. I listen to mostly late-90's-early-2000's punk rock even still, and I don't think it's a moral failing that I don't listen to the latest stuff all the time, just like I don't think it's a moral failing for my mom to mostly listen to The Beegees.
Music is, first and foremost, a means of entertainment, and it's not like it really buys you anything to be up to date in music for most careers. If your job is, I don't know, marketing director of a company, then sure, maybe you should keep up to date with the latest trends all the time, but most of us have pretty utilitarian jobs where it doesn't really matter what we like.
I think where it gets harmful is acting like "the stuff I listened to as a teenager is objectively better than what the kids listen to now", which I will admit is a mentality that I sometimes have to actively fight against. I think it can sometimes be a proxy for shitting on the next generation of humans, and I am very actively against needlessly divisive and reductive stuff like that.
I’ve personally enjoyed going the other way and exploring earlier and earlier singers and genres.
Quite fun.
For those interested, there’s also "Excavated Shellac"[0]. I can’t say I’ve liked or even enjoyed most of it, but it’s been an intriguing and interesting discovery nonetheless.
[0]: https://excavatedshellac.com/2020/12/13/excavated-shellac-an...
It's time consuming and I probably won't do it again but it was fun to do a few times.
Pretty funny, especially since I just attended a sold-out performance of Mozart's Requiem last month. Back when I was younger, I think the dominant perception was that classical music was "cultured" and popular / current music was lacking in refinement
Maybe the word "uncultured" isn't right, but I feel like when I say "I don't really listen to much that was written in the last fifteen years", people kind of act like I'm some kind of luddite. I also think a lot of people feel like the smartest people go way back and listen to the classical stuff. Personally, I've never really been able to get into classical music outside of movie soundtracks, and for awhile I was kind of embarrassed by that fact, but I'm not really anymore. As I said, music is about entertainment, and you like what you like.
Kind of related, when I was a teenager, I liked to read a lot, but I didn't have any money. I discovered Project Gutenberg and started reading a lot of public domain stuff (a lot of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Dickens, etc), purely out of cheapness. Teachers would think I'm smarter than I actually was because I knew obscure literary references from old books in my essays and when I would answer questions in class, despite the fact that it doesn't really require a 10,000 IQ to download a PDF file from the internet and read it.
That says a lot more about those who think that it does about than those who do or do not listen to "classical" music.
> Personally, I've never really been able to get into classical music outside of movie soundtracks,
Not implying it will or should be the same for you, or even that you should try it, but in my limited experience headphones and speakers have hardly ever done any justice to "classical" music.
It also seems some of it needs the listeners to have lived a little, so it can resonate with them. As an example, I couldn’t care less for operas as a teenager. Fifteen years later, two live operas are among the few pieces that have so far managed to make me cry.
But in any case, to each their own.
I did however try seeing some Beethoven performance a few years ago and I didn’t really enjoy it. I can respect and appreciate the talent of the musicians, and I didn’t hate it or anything, but I still didn’t really have that much fun.
I think the antagonism usually goes in the other way. Most people get crystallized music tastes pretty soon into their life and the second the new generation comes up with something different, it's all "music is crap these days, silly kids, back in my day the 90s had the best music." There are several examples in this thread without a hint of the irony of this article.
If I were to use YouTube for a corpus, I could probably write contemporary translation books for many languages, as long as the phrases were along the lines of "still listening in ${YEAR}" and "new ${GENRE} isn't this good"
Puberty?
(much folk music has ambiguous lyrics; I wonder if starting to blush at all the traditional village songs used to be a social milestone?)
however, i've sought new music since i was young. its something i share with my father who would purposely grab new records or cassette based on trivial things (title, art, price..) and then listen to the album several times. i love exploring different cultures and music is a great reflection of that. at the same time, i often go back to the old and well worn music i grew up with, and even that my parents or their parents grew up with. i think there's a lot of beauty out there and it's a shame to shun something new because you feel it falls within an industries agenda.
Actually I've found Gen-z's to have surprisingly wide listening patterns. As a few datapoints I was surprised that my friend's teenager could actually name several Nirvana songs, knew who the Smashing pumpkins were, and also the Talking Heads. (all rose and fell from fame before her birth)
Plus, it had a persistant queue that could handle single songs as well as albums and playlists as individual items which could be moved freely. Everything I was interested in was added to the queue and I could be certain it'd still be there tomorrow. Sort of like a musical backlog.
I find this especially bad with video streaming where a service has a great library but only promotes about 30 titles all categorized under different genres.
I suppose they save on bandwidth if they can get everyone to just stream the same titles.
But, is your average person's relationship with music "one of consumption" in such a way that causes stagnation? This comes off as gatekeepy. People may not make their own music, but I imagine many people listen to music as a form of inspiration.
Lagniappe: Ländlercito https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSwQ1icECNg
In the time since I turned 33 I've experienced an almost-complete switchover in genre preference, from pop/rock/light metal to country. Almost all of it has been found through Spotify's Daily Mix N, where n >= 2.
Much of my music discovery is aided by Spotify - some automated (radio, "Made For You"), some more manual ("Fans also like" related artists). However, as I continue to use Spotify, some of these features seem less effective. It's like I'm filling in interconnected regions of Spotify's graph of music and there are less edges to unvisited nodes.
Radio was used to discover new music decades ago, but paying a radio station (directly) to play a song is illegal (payola), so DJs had to break new songs, styles, and have a wide array of music offered (within the theme of the station).
Spotify now has the ability to engage in a legal version of "digital" payola, so their handcrafted group of artists by major labels are peppered into their hundreds of in-house playlists, disguising this business practice as a wide array of music selection.
This is detrimental to music discovery, because discovering a song is a lot less meaningful than discovering a new album and consuming the project as a whole and appreciating its composition.
So you're discovering new music, but none of it is memorable, because listening to music in 2024 (for a lot of people) is often a wall of slightly groovy background noise, with the occasional standout track that you probably toss into your own personal playlist.
How I fixed this:
1. Disable the 'autoplay' feature
2. Don't use playlists and listen to albums (except for when I'm in a pinch or hosting a party)
3. Intentionally discover a new genre every few months and go down a rabbit hole. My current new genre is South African Amapiano. Excellent stuff.
4. Discover music across different genres and time periods using RateYourMusic.
Yea, I tried streaming for a while, and found exactly that. When I play some genre-specific stream with a goal of discovering new music, I find it's basically full of unremarkable, generic musak, punctuated by maybe 0.1% memorable, great tracks that I'm motivated to bookmark for later. Are these few needles worth slogging through hours of haystack? After a few years I have sadly concluded "no."
Not sure why this is. Has it always been this way (0.1% great stuff in a sea of mediocre?) or are "content creators" of today just more focused on churning out quantity than artists of the past?
English: While it is common to refer to pareto as "80/20" rule, under the assumption that, in all situations, 20% of causes determine 80% of problems, this ratio is merely a convenient rule of thumb and is not, nor should it be considered, an immutable law of nature.
German: The 80-20 distribution in the Pareto principle often leads to the false assumption that a sum of 100 is mandatory. In fact, however, any other distribution is possible, in which, for example, 50 % of the efforts lead to 90 % of the effect, and again 50 % of the efforts lead to the remaining 10 % of the effect. This is easy to see in the trivial case that 100% of the efforts are the cause of 100% of the success. [0]
It's interesting how this explanatory information is lacking in the English version. Should be a cool project for an LLM to transfer information between the different language versions of a Wikipedia entry.
[0] Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
5. Once you find a band you like, pull their tour dates. See who they're opening for or who their openers are.
Examples: Dolly Parton covering Joan Jett; Alla Pugacheva and Sofia Rotaru covering t.A.T.u.
What are you talking about. IM going to need you to back this one up with some proof.
1. The labels have a giant back catalog that remains popular. It does not need promotion. Huge long tail profits there.
2. The labels dont have a lot to sell any more. The big artists tend to get out of the system (and make money on tours) and small artists get nothing. And lots of artists have bought back their catalogs, again long tail.
The album, as a vehicle is mostly dead. Hell songs are mostly dead, if you cant hook someone in the time of a ticktock video your going to have a lot of trouble getting them. And there you need to be "background music" with a groove.
The optimal state for Netflix, Spotify, any other bandwidth intensive fixed price service is for you to PAY for it and NOT USE IT.
These services are optimized for maintaining subscription numbers, not your enjoyment.
Their amorality has caused me to enjoy SoundCloud Rap at a formidable age, now I cannot shake it. My kids listen to it, swear amorally, and the cycle continues.
All because Google Play didn't want to shell out an extra 60 cents per year for paid Rappers.
They've been accused of almost exactly this: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-is-creating-i...
Spotify denies doing this but you can google to find a lot of controversy over fake artists on Spotify.
A more recent variation on the theme: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/19/swedish-comp...
I'm an older Zoomer and this was never the case for radio in my lifetime [1]. I heard "college radio stations" being a bastion of this but I've never listened to one myself.
One of the earliest internet services I remember loving was Pandora because it recommended me artists I never heard on the radio and was the start of my love of music.
[1] I'm guessing it was related to all radio stations being owned by the same companies.
EDIT: I may be misremembering, but there used to be a limit on how many stations a company could own in a given market.
I guess it isn’t surprising because it is their core value proposition, but the Pandora discovery algorithm seems so much better than the competition, at least to my ears.
I miss the ability to hyper-focus and play an album over and over, but on the other hand, it is probably better not to burn out on an album, and anyway, if I really want to, I can buy the album I guess.
Pandora + Bandcamp reminds me of what the internet looked like it could be. Sad that Amazon and their ilk have to silo everything.
Last.fm was pretty good too. I wonder how they are holding up…
It was funny to log in and see all my old stations from a decade plus ago, still working.
One thing that Pandora has is GENRE based stations. I don't know of any other service that can do that. This will be a game changer for when I dive into new genres.
Source? This is what Spotify says about it themselves:
"We want to make something crystal clear: no one can pay to be added to one of Spotify’s editorial playlists."
https://community.spotify.com/t5/FAQs/How-to-get-your-music-...
Sure, they could be lying but then all the labels and their employees would need to be in on the lie as well.
An example of indirect payment in radio would be the record label gifting a set of expensive tickets to the station.
Remember those contests in the 2000s where the radio station would play a collection of songs over the course of a few hours, and if you could call in and be caller number 15 and name all the songs, you could win free concert tickets?
The record label didn't pay the radio station with money - The tickets were gifted to the station for free. But as a result, the radio station played [insert band name]'s songs for 2 hours straight (and possibly other artists on the same label).
This is a win-win, because a ton of people talk about this contest with their family and friends, so the station gets free promo, and the artist gets exposure.
I don't know how Spotify is doing this in the digital era, but ask anyone connected to the music industry. This 100% happens.
For a lot of casual listeners, Spotify editorial playlists are the new radio station.
Or mindfully.
You have no idea why people choose what they listen to, and suggesting they're doing it without thinking is just your snobbery showing.
A GOOD playlist can keep your attention, and those are often handcrafted by other users. Just look at some of the other responses in this thread. Plenty of people have the same experience.
I also said that music from playlists is often (not always) groovy background noise - This isn't a mindful experience - And that's okay.
Care to share some of the other genres you've tried before this one?
If you like Amapiano, check out a song titled 'Ungowami' by Sha Sha
Check out 'Big Flexa' by Costa Titch. Awesome music video too. Huge dance culture in South Africa.
Also check out 'Abo Mvelo' by Daliwonga (this song gets me hype during workouts)
And check out Uncle Waffles' Boiler Room mix. Truly awesome performance.
This is a very silly statement. As someone who prefers to listen the full albums and does so 95% of the time and basically never seek to play a specific single; I’m definitely not going to listen to an entire albums of new artists at a time.
I look at the discover weekly / release radar. If I like a song, I’ll listen to the album. If it I like the album, I’ll listen to the discography.
Most music is not great, but it’s easy to sample and dive deeper.
Not everyone wants to put forth that much effort. Design decisions are often, if not always, centered around the path of least resistance. [1]
1: https://www.usertesting.com/blog/why-users-wont-go-where-you...
How is that more effort than listening whole albums?
I personally do my Spotify discovery exactly that way - I listen to "discover weekly", and when a song stands out, I just click on the artist and listen more. I can't imagine any way of putting less effort than that into discovering new music.
> See my comment above.
Please either reply to my comment with new words, or not at all.
5. Listen to the radio.
If you still have independent stations which pay actual radio DJs empowered to craft their sets, cherish them.
They play a lot of styles, and there's a lot I don't like, but there's a very high chance you haven't heard it before - and that counts for something.
https://www.threedradio.com
How did you discover Amapiano? I ask because Tyla has become massively popular in the last year and I'm wondering if the discovery was truly coincidental or undercover marketing?
There are alternatives. Apple music is fine. Tidal + Roon is also pretty good.
For discovering music, Roon provides a much more album-centric way to browse and learn about different albums and genres. I use that combined with subreddits for particular genres and good old fashioned album reviews and artist interviews.
(everynoise.com developer, if you're reading this, I love you <3)
> 2024-01-05 status update: With my layoff from Spotify on 2023-12-04, I lost the internal data-access required for ongoing updates to many parts of this site. Most of this, as a result, is now a static snapshot of what, for now, will be the final state from the site's 10-year history and evolution, hosted on my own server. Some pieces may get disabled and reenabled over time, and some that only made sense with current data may never return. But we'll see.
I have discovered so much music on spotify. I'm not going to listen to a whole album to see if I like a new artist, lol.
It feels more like greed in the business than an experience.
That being said I'm still sitting on the idea of paying 123$ for cage the elephant show on an album I haven't heard yet.
That's the best thing they could do for fans.
What's with the sympathy for the performer? It's hard for them to even see the audience. Most of the light is focused on them and the audience is in the dark.
As for my comment about the performer, I'm just picturing it from their perspective and to me it would feel odd to go from looking at people to looking at phones. I'm sure there are lots of people who film with their phone lights on, so that's got to be noticeable through the stage lights.
Before this was mostly done through in person communicate, now this is primarily done through smart phones.
What's wild is how much the "low-quality recording" on a modern smartphone looks and sounds way better than bootlegs I listened to (or, god forbid, watched) in the 90s.
I don't film entire concerts but I will usually try to get a nice clip from one of my favorite songs. It's fun to revisit. I'd love it if I had short clips from shows I saw when I was 20, especially ones of bands who blew up later or fell off the face of the earth.
The exception to this is extremely mainstream performances that attract people, where it may be the one big thing they do in the year or the next.
> There's nothing worse than hundreds of phone screens glowing in your face while you're trying to enjoy a live act.
Plenty of worse things. People throwing up on you. Harassment. Tarps. Passing out. Being sold water even though it's supposed to be free. Taking bottle caps away from you. People talking during the show. People yelling about politics.
I don't enjoy all the phones either, but it is what it is.
Well, older people (40, 50, even 60+) more passionate about music, they still do all of those (going to concerts, discussing music, crafting the right playlist for roadtrips), not unlike like they did in their 20s.
So, yes: most people do care less about music and stop finding new music.
This is maybe true if we talk about superstar kind of show. But I think it's now easier than ever to find out about little gigs, which were hard to find before social networks.
I live in medium size capital city (Belgrade), there are options to listen to live music every single day. Sometimes it's just classic music, sometimes there are cover bands, but quite often there's a chance to listen to original music. And these small gigs are quite cheap or even free. I very often listen a song or two (Spotify or youtube really help with this!), then if it looks promising I listen to some more while walking to the show.
Sure, sometimes it's not good. But very often I like it a lot and you can bet I listen to it much more focused then if that same music came on autoplay at home.
If you're in big enough city or have something bigger nearby - find a way to discover new gigs, follow venues, event organizers, local cultural institutions, festivals, etc. That's my main use of Facebook.
Note that this isn't saying music today is bad, it's got nothing to do with that.
At a certain point, changing trends in music cause it to drift too far from your internal model (developed in youth) for what a song should be, and it becomes hard to take, decreasing returns with increasing effort, and you say "fuck it, I'll just listen to what I already like for the rest of my life".
Go crate digging or something, I don't know what the secret formula is.
Spotify's robot dj just plays the same stuff over and over without much of a discovery component to it.
I only listen to hard rock. All the songs are new & recently added with a fairly new artist mix.
I've been building systems to find new music for 18 years or so. This latest one I've been using since early 2020.
It's really for just me so sorry if the documentation is a little scattered. I'm certainly doing some minor ToS violations all over the place with this thing so I don't want it to get too popular but I'll be happy to clean up the documentation if there's interest
1. Bandcamp doesn't have RSS, but I take all the incoming emails and convert them to RSS[1]. I separate out new messages vs new releases. I host my own RSS with FreshRSS.
2. I wrote an app (Camp Counselor [2]) to help manage your Bandcamp wishlist. You can organize, rate, and comment (privately) on your wishlist, along with play directly in the app. I find that my wishlist (which has a few thousand albums on it) is more of a "to do" list. If I get a recommendation, I just add it to my wishlist and will check it out later. Even stuff I don't like stays in my wishlist (with a low rating), to help me remember. I then sort by rating or added at dates, and as I purchase things, they move off my wishlist into my purchase list.
This generally works really well for me, and I continue to explore lots of new and great music every day!
[1] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email...
[2] https://flathub.org/apps/net.line72.campcounselor
There's a bit of Perlis's turing tarpit here but it's intentional
If you can risk a 101st time, have you tried "Dark Side of the Moonshine" (2009) yet?
Sometimes I forget their version of Breathe isn't the original.
I’m not really interested in reliving that time.
Even on crappy old junk headphones, still an awesome song that I don't think I'll ever get tired of.
Granted, I don't generally let services make a playlist for me, and I don't beat the old songs to death. I like more variety than that.
I have however, rolled my eyes when listening to services that have an "80's rock" or "top 90's songs" only to have them play the exact same dozen-or-so songs that they did the last time I visited that channel. No thanks!
That's also probably one of the reasons I rarely listen using a service-generated playlist/channel. I think they are maximized for the service's profit, not for the listener's enjoyment.
I'm sad to admit Led Zeppelin has lost some of it's charm after many listening, which makes me sad because I enjoyed it so much in the past. I've found a lot of Pink Floyd stuff is complex enough that I'm still enjoying it and noticing new things after many decades of listening to it. Watching videos of Floyd playing live also opened up a whole new appreciation for the music.
Lots of the music I enjoyed as a kid/teenager had themes I can only now understand in my late 30s, and didn't really appreciate or fully grasp back then.
Overall, a lot of prog really seems to have enough complexity to remain interesting for a long time. Most of Tools albums, I seem to not enjoy much at first, but enjoy more, and notice more things each time I listen, even after hundreds of listens.
The same music that is complex enough to remain interesting over time, usually doesn't compress well and is really damaged as a low bitrate MP3. I've found those same albums I listen to most year after year are the ones I sought out lossless versions of.
The idea that once you reach a certain age, you settle down, get into a routine, doing less new things, etc.
While yeah, a music streaming service could introduce you to new music. Maybe you will just find yourself in less situations where you will experience new music?
Listening to a new song on your phone is a drastically different experience to overhearing it while traveling, with friends, whatever.
I know I have a number of songs that bring up an emotional response due to certain events tied to them. And some of them are genres I would not have normally found myself listening too.
What A Drag It Is Getting Old (Musically)
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/what-a-drag-it-is-gett...
New stuff still arrives (you're not going to predict that me-at-15-loving-Megadeth will much later also love Billie Eilish or Gin Wigmore or Mirel Wagner or ...) but most "new music" is garbage by the standards set by about 50 years of music (much of that before I was alive and thus well before my "peak influence").
I suspect the "findings" of the article suffer from environmental effects that weren't considered/controlled.
For people who want to purchase the album, they can purchase the entire album, or none of it.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LJi5na897Y
How so? What are these standards?
The mainstream went from quite decent to crap within the last 20 years or so.
One could always find stuff to listen to their personal echo bubble, but not as much in the wider shared pop culture space.
You'll of course find great talent in every generation. While I don't like the majority of the current top billboard there's some talent behind those tracks.
That era is already after it has been going downhill.
Perhaps even "4chan /mu/ charts"?