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Spotify killed the thrill of the hunt

erildrun.bearblog.dev

21–30 of 60 posts

Re: Spotify killed the thrill of the hunt

#21
Instant access to all media has many benefits and is probably better than the how it was in the past, but there is definitely less magic in the world. Less surprise. Less excitement. The thrill of the hunt is a universal human feeling that occurs in all sorts of scenarios.

I remember in college there was a sandwich shop that was always playing amazing music, there was a tip jar and if you wanted to know what was playing you had to tip $1. Good times.

Re: Spotify killed the thrill of the hunt

#22

I have qualms with Spotify as well, but not sure I entirely agree with the premise of the article. It still takes effort to find good music. There's a LOT of music being produced nowadays, and wading through all of that and finding niche stuff you like can still be a "hunt" - it's just a different kind.

Yeah I agree, the hunt is still there, just got redefined.

Re: Spotify killed the thrill of the hunt

#23

I think this translates to a few different mediums. I'm thinking about modern matchmaking in video games today. I used to play a game called SOCOM II back on the PS2 and it was all lobby based. You had to jump around to find the right lobby with the game mode you liked, find people to play with and build community. There was time between games for banter. Now everything is automatic and instantaneous. It has its adva…

I've noticed that most people nowadays, myself included, don't use mics when they play. There's not a lot of banter or trash talk in lobbies anymore.

Re: Spotify killed the thrill of the hunt

#24
It did not work that way for me. My music interest has been rekindled since Spotify.

You can also hunt via Spotify. Songs and artists can help you find curated playlists (by other artists or fans) where you discover new artists.

Everynoise.com is also a great start, but these playlists are no longer maintained.

There is also a huge audience of people who want to hear “elevator music” tuned to their activity at hand and do not care about who or what made it. Spotify obviously wants those customers. I don’t mind these people subsidising my hobby, but I hope Spotify will continue to cater to my interest too.

Re: Spotify killed the thrill of the hunt

#25
> Now, it’s completely different. The moment some obscure demo drops, it’s everywhere, Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram, whatever. Everyone knows about it instantly. That sense of discovery, of finding a truly underground gem, just isn’t the same anymore. It’s too easy now.

I don't agree. I want to be clear that I think youtube is terrible in many, many ways, but one thing I _do_ love about youtube is music discovery. Finding label channels and tracing through their artists, seeing what else pops up in my feed as a result and following those threads...finding random weird stuff with four listens posted two days ago, which then leads you to more weirdness...etc. is all very fun to me and I've discovered a ton of great music that way. There's also tons of random channels that have DJs or mixes they put out that is also a great and relatively organic way to discover new stuff (I'm always thrilled when a new Kieran Hebden set drops on The Lot Radio for one).

Maybe spotify is different, I've actually never used it, but I don't think the "Thrill of the Hunt" is dead in a general sense. And I'm kinda old, I was a music major in the 90s and at that time I was all about finding weird bootlegs and going to shows with <10 people showing up, subscribed to The Wire for a long time, and etc. There is still a ton of great new music out there and fun avenues for discovery! If anything there is more than I ever could have imagined when I was younger. People keep making great stuff.

Re: Spotify killed the thrill of the hunt

#27

I just had the best time migrating to Navidrome / Synfonium. I didn't think it would be as easy or as enjoyable, but it's changed the way I listen to music back to how it was -- listening to albums, not random singles. I'm happy to be free of Spotify. The fact it even works with carplay/ Android auto is remarkable.

Navidrome is so sick! I've been a full album listener for years, but switching to it was a great excuse to make sure my music library was FLAC only and tagged with good MusicBrainz metadata. If you're a self-hosting / NAS person already and you have a music library of digital files it's a no brainer.

Re: Spotify killed the thrill of the hunt

#28
post #19
post #5

Spotify is one of the apps I've noticed continually getting worse and more buggy over time. The Android app is very annoyingly buggy and the WebOS (LG tv) Spotify app is completely unusable at this point. Also, a bunch of (non-English) music/lyrics I listen to have recently become strongly censored.. which makes them unlistenable to me... I wonder if there is (or should be) a censorship-free, decentralized, open alte…

I love these posts from randos on hackernews. > XXXX is completely buggy and unusable Which is amusing because experience shows that XXXX is not buggy and very much usable.

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Re: Spotify killed the thrill of the hunt

#29

This is one of the reasons I’ve gone with Apple Music. The way the app is setup, I can treat the catalog like an online store and my library like my personal CD collection. I made a self-imposed rule to respect this paradigm. When I hear about a new band or album, I go the “store”, add it to my library, and the next time I’m looking to listen to some music, I can see some the recently added list has a couple albums I…

That's how I use Spotify. I make playlists of music I listen to frequently, separated by genre. If I want to play a whole album, I click through for one of those favorites or search for it. Mostly I find music via YouTube and then search for what I specifically want to add, or I look for user-curated playlists.

I've been doing that since Spotify launched in the US, and I'm mystified by people somehow using it differently and letting algorithmic picks determine what they listen to.

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