When do we stop finding new music? • Hacker News Board

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#161

Post by tmountain » Wed, Apr 24, 2024, 9:27 PM UTC

cchi_co wrote: post #144

tmountain wrote: post #47

Age has affected my taste in music, but I continue to discover new music as I reach my mid 40s. As a teenager, I wanted to listen to grunge, punk, and metal. In my 20s, I had a strong preference for indie music. In my 30s, I got into blues and American folk music. Now, I’m in a jazz phase and appreciating classic guitarists from the 1950s and 1960s. I have always loved classical music, and I still appreciate a lot of…

> Age has affected my taste in music, but I continue to discover new music Same here... And I became really into the ganre World Music

I also like World Music a lot, and West African blues. Check out Bombino if you haven’t already heard him.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#162

Post by bee_rider » Wed, Apr 24, 2024, 9:29 PM UTC

jrussino wrote: post #146

bee_rider wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently switched off Amazon Music and went back to Pandora (must have started using it in like 2010 and then gone on a 13 or so year long diversion into the on-demand streaming services). I guess it isn’t surprising because it is their core value proposition, but the Pandora discovery algorithm seems so much better than the competition, at least to my ears. I miss the ability to hyper-focus and play an album over…

Pandora was my go-to circa 2007-2009 and I haven't thought about it in years. Looking back, I discovered a disproportionate amount of the music I like in that timeframe... I'm honestly kind of surprised they're still around (and, if I'm reading your comment correctly, haven't morphed into something entirely unrecognizable in the meantime?)

I don’t know much about their business model under the hood, but from my point of view they seem pretty similar to back then.

It was funny to log in and see all my old stations from a decade plus ago, still working.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#163

Post by m463 » Wed, Apr 24, 2024, 9:33 PM UTC

llsf wrote: post #159

Funny, when I was maybe 10yo, I got scared when I realized that given the number of notes is finite, the number of different melodies would be too, and so we would have one day to put new lyrics on old melodies.

I wonder... that was about the age when I found out:

"twinkle twinkle little star" = "abc song"

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#164

Post by masklinn » Wed, Apr 24, 2024, 9:34 PM UTC

divbzero wrote: post #158

qzx_pierri wrote: post #22

Spotify 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, an…

The old school way still works too: 5. Listen to the radio.

Nah, most people only have consolidated radio stations, they play national playlists of soup.

If you still have independent stations which pay actual radio DJs empowered to craft their sets, cherish them.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#165

Post by javajosh » Wed, Apr 24, 2024, 9:35 PM UTC

For those interested in finding new music, let me strongly recommend some good radio station youtube channels. KEXP and KCRW both come time mind. In that vein, sometimes you can find good new music through labels. For example, 4AD. I'm not sure why, but YouTube often suggests good stuff seemingly at random, especially in the electronica genre. Radio stations have music only streams on their websites, too. I've often found artists I like going to local shows and paying attention to who they like. YMMV

It also helps to pay attention to the bands you like and where they end up. For example, the band Marriages split up and Emma Ruth Rundle went solo and the guitarist started Drab Majesty.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#166

Post by tzs » Wed, Apr 24, 2024, 9:39 PM UTC

For people in their mid-30s and beyond I think a big factor in them commonly perceiving that today's popular music sucks compared to the popular music of their teens and twenties is that when they listen to music from their younger days now it is a small subset of what they were actually listening to back then.

For example my teens and twenties were in the '70s and '80s. If I decide I want to listen to music from those times now I would probably mostly listen to Cat Stevens, Neil Young, The Who, The Ramones, The Dickies, The B-52s, Devo, Queen, The Urban Verbs, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, The Moody Blues, Kansas, The Clash, The Dead Kennedys, Kate Bush, Synergy, Jean-Michel Jarre, Talking Heads, and a few I'm forgetting.

If I decide I want to listen to some current popular music I might listen to something the the Billboard Hot 100 playlist on Spotify.

Of course I'm going to find that nearly everything on there is not nearly as good as the music from artists listed above.

But I'd find the same thing if instead of today's Billboard Hot 100 I listened to a playlist of a Billboard Hot 100 list from the '70s or '80s, or listened to a recording of a random day's broadcast of a '70s or '80s popular music radio station.

And I'm sure that in 2040 if I ask someone who is 37 to make me a playlist of music from 2024 (when they were 21) that playlist is going to sound a lot better to me than the 2024 music I hear now when I decide to check out current music.

Just like my list above is the '70-80s artists that I'm still listening to 50 years later, that 37 year old's playlist will be the 2024 music that he's still listening to 16 years later.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#167

Post by PaulHoule » Wed, Apr 24, 2024, 9:39 PM UTC

I listened to the radio and watched music videos (Boston had an OTA channel that was like MTV) as a teen, and was the public relations officer and then engineer at the KTEK college radio station, which exposed me to more music.

In my 20s though I was in grad school and monomaniacally focused on my work and I avoided mass culture almost completely. Around the time I turned 30 I got interested in new music again and it was first east coast hip hop (KRS One, M.F. Doom) then psychedelia and classic rock adjacent music (by that time I was really sick and tired of overplayed classic rock, one time I was tripping on acid at 2 am and called up the local college station to complain about the Doobie Brothers song they played that is on a twice a day during drive time and the program manager picked up, I told him to play what he thought was good music and he put on Miles Davis.)

Since then I have had pulses of being interested in "new" (to me) music but it's usually been a bit old. The last round has been the Super Furry Animals (Mwng for the win!) and similar UK bands like The Charlatans. I just found out that I like some of Cyndi Lauper's later albums. Before that it was early Japanese electronica like Yellow Magic Orchestra and Isao Tomita. Before that Synthesizer by Information Society was a revelation.

Recently my son got into the big hits of Fleetwood Mac but I was amazed that they made a lot of music before they hit it big and some of it I like.

I don't listen to a lot of "new" music in the sense of "released in the last few years" and I'd be inclined to blame the prevalence of auto-tune for that. People I know in the music industry make all sorts of excuses ("Don't you like the vocoders on Daft Punk?", "... look I like the vocoders in Laurie Anderson's work and in Neil Young's *Trans&", "Isn't T-Pain talented?", "... I got no problem with T-Pain, I've got a problem with all the other rappers who sound like T-Pain") but if I hear something on the radio that is auto-tuned I'm pretty quick to change the channel.

My next project is to learn something about traditional and contemporary Chinese music.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#168

Post by lapcat » Wed, Apr 24, 2024, 9:41 PM UTC

I find it interesting that GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

The 1980s are still doing quite well among all but the oldest generation.

Is it possible that music may actually be getting worse? Corporatized, consolidated, computerized.

Look at Hollywood now too: everything is a sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, or adaptation. There’s hardly anything original anymore.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#169

Post by doublerabbit » Wed, Apr 24, 2024, 9:42 PM UTC

Zancarius wrote: post #122

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #106

I must be some sort of freak. I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s listening to classic rock, and a lot of it I can’t even stand any more due to the incredibly small playlists that most classic rock stations use. In my 20’s I started listening to a lot of classical and then jazz. In the 90’s a lot of grunge which’s I still love. After that was trance in the 2000’s, then ambient, techno and IDM after that. I still listen to…

I don't think you're completely alone, but you're probably statistically insignificant (don't worry, I'm right there with you). Like you, I can't stand the music I grew up with all that much (maybe a few songs here and there), but I went through the trance/electronic fixation in the 2000s. Now it's almost anything that I enjoy, which probably doesn't say much, but I'm presently listening to some chillstep and was lis…

Anecdotally for me it's that music is now more complex the simplicity of older music just doesn't please the senses as it did back then.

Kind of the same feeling where you upgrade to two monitors and if you have to use a workstation with one just isn't the same.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#170

Post by listenallyall » Wed, Apr 24, 2024, 9:43 PM UTC

jonathankoren wrote: post #87

ryandrake wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Yea, I tried streaming for a while, and found exactly that. When I play some genre-specific stream with a goal of discovering new music, I find it's basica…

You’ve discovered the Pareto Principle. It’s true about literally everything.

It's "true", yes, for almost everything, but there is a lot to gain from recognizing the difference between 80/20 and 90/10 or even 99/1, etc. Just like 99%, 99.9% and 99.99% uptime are VERY different promises to meet, while looking virtually identical to a layman.