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When do we stop finding new music?

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11–20 of 585 posts

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#11
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.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#15
post #6

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 we…

Yeah, I agree.

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.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#16
post #6

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 we…

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.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#17
post #3

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.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#18
> 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.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#19
post #5

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…

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.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#20
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.

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