Why we listen to new music

"The Rite" may have been technically groundbreaking, but it sounds TERRIBLE. We've seen plenty of artistic experimentation over the centuries leading to new artistic genres, but early experiments like these are almost always awful. It takes someone with skill in aesthetics to turn the new into the beautiful, and it's rarely the inventor who does this.

I get what you're saying about openness, but I also think there's an immense matter of time involved. Music was an obsession for me from the age of 12, and I had time to be open for all of it. Thanks to a paper route, I bought my first turntable around then and my second a few months later. I was DJing parties within a year. I listened to music _constantly_.

It was ALL new to me. It was the early 90s at the time so that was all new to me, and all of the 80s music was relatively new to me. Everything before that was new to me. I had entire days to listen to all of it all the time: While I was on the train to / from school, while I was on lunch break at school, while I was on my paper route or eventually whatever other mindless teenage job I was doing, while I was failing miserably at understanding BASIC, while I was in my room drawing, writing, doing home work, or literally just sitting and listening to music - as a full-on activity.

And then the internet was just starting to get popular. Sure, it took an hour to download a wav file via modem, but it wasn't unheard of to download a few songs overnight (pre-mp3) from various sources. And then the next day we would talk about the new music, and I'd play it for my friends and they'd play what they found recently, and we'd talk some more, and then we'd head to the record store to find the best of it and more, and talk to people at the record store about it, and then pass it on to others and play the music at parties and so on.

I don't have anywhere near that much time on my hands now. I don't have that many people to talk about music with, nor do I have the time or inclination to talk about it with them.

I'm very fortunate to be working full-time right now, but I sure would love to take a couple months off to catch up on the last 10 years worth of music. It's pretty damn easy to be open to new music when you have the time to listen to everything and build a nuanced opinion.

On a completely related note, if I were a musician, I would do everything I can to release music far and wide right now. A lot of the world suddenly has nothing but time to consume music.

Listening to new music is one of my favourite activities. Don't understand how people are happy to listen to the same old stuff - it must get so dull.

There's so much good stuff out there, and it's so exciting to find an artist, genre or new combinations of sounds I've not heard before.

Bandcamp is great for this – better than Spotify or Apple Music. You can explore by artist, genre tag, label, and by people who have bought/wishlisted an album. Plus there's lots of interesting smaller artists who are not on the bigger platforms.

I agree with this. We're in a golden age of access to small and/or unsigned artists who don't need to be in the top 20s to get their name out there any more.

I really enjoy exploring different genres of music and finding new albums I've not heard before and devoted subreddits have been my main source of that. For me, r/progmetal is a group of devoted fans who enjoy recommending prog metal artists and albums. Nowadays a band doesn't have to be super famous and have to have a CD in a store in order for me to be able to listen to them. I read a recommendation, fire up spotify and start listening asap.

Does anyone else grow "numb" to a track after listening to it for a while? 400-500 plays seems to be the limit for me, and the period between plays doesn't seem to matter, after which it evokes no pleasing feelings, and even causes a little annoyance as if some part in the brain is "sore" from it.