Listen to the top 100 on RYM. When you find an album you like listen to the artists other albums and the albums on the genre chart.
Ask HN: How to Become a Music Buff?
61–70 of 133 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to Become a Music Buff?
#62I took a History of Rock and Roll course at my local community college and learned more in 4 months than 30 years of listening to "deep tracks".
Re: Ask HN: How to Become a Music Buff?
#63There was a time when I was younger (back in the early 90's) when I thought I just didn't like music that much. Turns out I just really didn't like the sort of music that was played on the radio. Once I discovered what was then termed "alternative" music that opened up entire vistas of the kind of music that was out there. It was just really hard to find back then. In 2020 there this is not the case and finding great music in niche genres is easier than ever. Just listen to a bit of everything until something hooks you and then let the recommendation engine of YouTube, Spotify, etc take you down the Rabbit Hole.
Re: Ask HN: How to Become a Music Buff?
#64What worked for me is to blindly listen to bands whos names kept coming up. For example I heard that the Police were supposed to be a big deal so I dug up an album by them and listened through the whole thing. If I liked what I heard I would hunt down more albums (or CD's because this was mostly in the 90's and 00's). I would do the same thing if I heard a song I liked on the radio.
Gradually you will find out what genres you like and you'll be able to discover similar artists.
Re: Ask HN: How to Become a Music Buff?
#65The book Range, by David Epstein has a pretty interesting chapter on music and the history of improvisation.
I knew that Django, the Python web dev framework, had been named after some obscure dutch musician. But after reading the book I had a wholly new appreciation for Django Reinhardt [1], the artist. Man was truly a great jazz improviser, whose legacy now lives on in the framework.
Re: Ask HN: How to Become a Music Buff?
#66There's the beatles, which are worth following chronologically as a sense of how pop music evolved. The "Beatles Anthology" documentary series is great.
Other than that, music is really too diverse and varied to approach systematically IMO, especially from the perspective of individual taste (as opposed to, say, academic ethnomusicology). My suggestion would be tasting assortments of artists within subgenres until you stumble upon something you love, and branching from there. The free NTS internet radio station (https://nts.live) has a lot of searchable shows curated by musicians, so I really recommend that resource for exploration.
Re: Ask HN: How to Become a Music Buff?
#67RateYourMusic and a few decent BitTorrent trackers should get you started. Listen to what you like.
+1 for RYM. It's one of the greatest curated resources with a ton of ratings and metadata. I think a good start for you might just be going to RYM Charts ( https://rateyourmusic.com/customchart ) and selecting a genre. You'll find the top rated albums, and can further filter by the decade. That's my #1 music discovery source.
That's a damn fine looking list. I cannot understand why people like King Crimson no matter how hard I try, let alone well enough for In the Court... to place at #5, but otherwise, looks great to me.
For anyone starting from nearly-scratch with popular music I'd recommend a chronological approach to lists like this. Don't start at #1—cut the list off with however many you're willing to commit to listening to, then order them by release date, and start at the beginning. For the earliest entries consider hunting down the major influences on their genre or a couple major popular acts from the preceding 10-20 years before them to get a sense of where they came from—maybe a few tracks of ragtime, a crooner or two, a couple big-band acts, some early and mid-period jazz, maybe an album of "standards" or something, a small selection of early rock. That's a decent set-up for starting on 60s-and-on popular music, which is mostly what these lists treat (Kind of Blue is almost always the highest-ranking exception to the "60s and later" rule)
[EDIT] incidentally, I don't see a CSV or Excel export option for the list on this site, even in the list of "subscriber" features that I could unlock by paying $15. I am entirely certain I'm not the only person who needs my lists to end up somewhere like that so I can mess around with sorting, checking-off, and so on :-)
Re: Ask HN: How to Become a Music Buff?
#68If you are interested in classical music - here's a couple of good books on the 20th century.
"The Rest Is Noise" by Alex Ross
"Modern Times, Modern Places" by Peter Conrad
"America's Musical Life: A History" by Richard Crawford is also great, focusing on America obviously and covers more than just the 20th century.
Re: Ask HN: How to Become a Music Buff?
#69Of course any answer you'll get is by its very nature opinionated. But /mu/ essentials tends to have a pretty good cross-section of the most important and foundational works across a wide variety of genres.
Re: Ask HN: How to Become a Music Buff?
#70I don't know if I am a music buff -- what are the qualifications? I have a few thousand CDs, some of them fairly rare, and I am the person my friends turn to when they need to track down a song or rare release. By those standards ...
1) Find your passion. I generally despise this as advise for careers and the like but when it comes to matters of personal preference, de gustibus non est disputandum. What do you like?
2) Hit Discogs for your bands. Don't just look at main albums, look at appearances and rarities, songs covered by the band, appearances on soundtracks (which can often be one-offs) and the like. For certain bands, I literally own everything they performed in because I like all of it. This is depth. After that, follow each member of a band to hear if they did anything before or after you enjoy. Even try session musicians. You may find a talented collaborator that way, too. This is breadth.
3) Find a radio program adjacent to your tastes and examine the weekly playlist. What did you like? Here you are riding in the slipstream of a great big truck, as the DJ is doing a lot of the work for you.
4) Ignore most recommendation algorithms but Pandora, which are based on what other people play rather than what is actually related.
5) Don't be afraid to reach out. I have written musicians letters (snail mail, self-addressed stamped envelope enclosed) and said, "I really like X, Y, and Z" or "Your performance on this track moved me" then asked what inspired them, influenced them, or if they have influenced others. I usually hear back.
6) Attend concerts and listen to the opening acts, buy their (typically cheap) CDs. The openers appreciate it and you can find some great somewhat related music that way.
7) Back in the days when record stores existed, I would hit the "M" section or whatever letter, any band that didn't have a tab of their own, and just flip through it, looking for anything to catch my eye, then listen that way. Many duds, but some real wins.
8) Now that you have a sense of what you enjoy, you probably have some names associated with them, various microgenres. List 'em. For example, "grave wave."
9) Look up those microgenres on Bandcamp and the like, listen through that way.
10) Hit "Every Noise at Once" and surf your microgenre that way, too. Bop around between band and microgenre names.
11) Iterate.