the biggest reason I pay for Spotify is to enjoy each Monday my "discover weekly" playlist :)
agree with this
When do we stop finding new music?
21–30 of 585 posts
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#22Spotify 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.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#23I’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.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#24I 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".
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#25I 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.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#26Finding "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 mo…
> 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.
[0]: https://excavatedshellac.com/2020/12/13/excavated-shellac-an...
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#27I'm still finding new music (look at my account creation date if you want an indication what my real world age is).
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.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#28Very 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.
I still mourn the loss of Rdio. It was far and away better than any other option. It's such a bummer it lost out to Spotify.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#29Other 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?
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#30I've got a rather wonky way of doing this. https://github.com/kristopolous/music-explorer
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