> Now I have to wait, first XYZ might not be on the cassette I have with me,
> There has to be some minimal amount of effort for a `thing`, when you go below it, it just becomes nothing.
I had this conversation with someone at the weekend. It's hard to find new music on Spotify because it's too easy to find stuff you already like.
I'm in my early 50s. I grew up in the 80s, in a fairly rural part of the UK with basically one music shop nearby and the next nearest a good four hours each way on the bus.
In 1988 when I was 15, a load of awesome albums came out that I really wanted and mostly couldn't afford. I bought Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet, Iron Maiden - Seventh Son, 808 State - Newbuild, and probably a couple of others. I'm sure I got into FLA and and The Pixies round about then too.
These tapes were about a tenner each and I had to repair quite a lot of Amstrad satellite receiver power supplies in my weekend job, and if I spent it all on tapes I'd have no money left for beer.
An awful lot of my tapes were pirate copies from friends, which we swapped at school. To this day I'm convinced that Appetite For Destruction was mixed to sound "right" when copied onto a battered old TDK D90 that's been rattling around in your schoolbag for a month by your mate's big brother who bought the CD because he's got a good job earning nearly £5/hr working on a fishing boat and has a really nice stereo.
The upshot of this is that I listened to a lot of things that I simply did not like very much, because it was new and I hadn't listened to it a million times. That being said, I don't think there was much I heard and thought "yeah I don't care for this at all", but there were definitely tapes I listened to that I wouldn't have picked out by myself.
I wouldn't have listened to 10,000 Maniacs if someone my dad worked with hadn't put it on in the car, and gave me his copy of the tape. I might not have listened to Dire Straits so much if another of my dad's friends hadn't given me a handful of bootlegs of their concerts and a copy of Making Movies, and one of the bigger kids in high school (hi Aaron, hope you're doing well) hadn't given me a pirate copy of Brothers in Arms.
I've since bought all of these on at least one other format.
I wouldn't have listened to Suzanne Vega I don't think, if my aunt hadn't given me a copy of her eponymous first album for Christmas when I was about 12 or 13 (it hadn't been out long in the UK), and I absolutely love Suzanne Vega. Loved her stuff from the first note of "Cracking". Have you ever listened to or watched something that you wanted to play at ten times speed just so you could put it into your head faster, then play it again at one tenth speed so you could pick up all the details?
This doesn't even touch on mixtapes, where someone else puts the effort in to curate a collection of things they think you will like, that represents who you are to them. Mixtapes were beautiful.
Now, with any luck, people will get into media they can hold in their hand. Even just things like MP3s on an SD card in some homebrew Arduino blob of a player.
There's more to music than just the noise it makes.