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.
A story especially for you:
When do we stop finding new music?
171–180 of 585 posts
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am 100% onboard with the phone bans. There's nothing worse than hundreds of phone screens glowing in your face while you're trying to enjoy a live act. I can't imagine how weird it must feel for the performer(s) too. To go from people looking at you, making eye contact, engaging with the performance, to suddenly seeing a sea of phones pointed at you, with everyone watching you indirectly via their phone screen.
Yea, the whole "I want to watch the concert through my phone" thing I don't get at all. If you just want to watch it on your phone, why not just stay home and watch a professionally-produced concert video? Are they actually recording it for later (and are actually going to watch their low-quality recording later), or do they simply need to frame everything they experience inside a phone bezel?
> Are they actually recording it for later (and are actually going to watch their low-quality recording later)
What's wild is how much the "low-quality recording" on a modern smartphone looks and sounds way better than bootlegs I listened to (or, god forbid, watched) in the 90s.
I don't film entire concerts but I will usually try to get a nice clip from one of my favorite songs. It's fun to revisit. I'd love it if I had short clips from shows I saw when I was 20, especially ones of bands who blew up later or fell off the face of the earth.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#173Spotify 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…
I don't know about the Spotify analysis here, but certainly cosign RateYourMusic, which I just learned about this last weekend and am now a little bit obsessed with. It's like IMDB crossed with Pinboard, and the list of new stuff I have to listen to now is long and intricately connected to what I already listen to. It's a pretty amazing resource, even if everyone there is wrong about Uncle Tupelo's "Anodyne".
I pay for it because it's dirt cheap and you get track ratings. If I discover an artist I use RYM to get the best 3 songs of their best 3 albums on YouTube. if I still like the band after that I'll buy the highest rated album.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Infantilized lyrics, melodies, and harmonies, for starters.
i think defining what "new" means would help clarity this. perhaps what you said is true with new mainstream music from large labels, but none of that applies to "new" music that i listen to, at least that i'm aware of.
New popular music.
The mainstream went from quite decent to crap within the last 20 years or so.
One could always find stuff to listen to their personal echo bubble, but not as much in the wider shared pop culture space.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#175Outlier here (musician, spend hours per week trying to find new music) - some thoughts:
- The search space for music is really large and noisy. Most of the stuff out there isn’t very good, and the stuff that is good isn’t always discoverable with a single strategy - The best strategies almost always exploit human connections
Some strategies I use:
- Spatial locality, who is performing with or near artists that I like? - Publishing locality, who is on the same label as an artist that I like? - Artist locality, what other projects has an artist I like contributed to? - Fan locality, what other artists does a fan of an artist that I like enjoy?
——
Note that none of these strategies are as effective as “relinquish control”. For example, there is a freeform radio station near me that I listen to all day at work. I have a rule that I won’t turn the radio off in the middle of a DJs set, even if I don’t like a song. This has helped me “break through” to interesting artists I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
To the article’s question, I think the main factor here doesn’t have much to do with music. Cultural production has exploded, and it’s really hard to navigate any cultural space in a non-obsessive way.
I thought it was interesting that the effect of “generational preference for music released when teenaged” seemed to wane around Gen Z. I wonder if this is just exhaustion, perhaps with tendencies towards pastiche as a consequence.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. This is a very silly statement. As someone who prefers to listen the full albums and does so 95% of the time and basically never seek to play a specific single; I’m definitely not going to listen to an entire albums of new art…
>If I like a song, I’ll listen to the album. If it I like the album, I’ll listen to the discography. Not everyone wants to put forth that much effort. Design decisions are often, if not always, centered around the path of least resistance. [1] 1: https://www.usertesting.com/blog/why-users-wont-go-where-you...
> Not everyone wants to put forth that much effort.
How is that more effort than listening whole albums?
I personally do my Spotify discovery exactly that way - I listen to "discover weekly", and when a song stands out, I just click on the artist and listen more. I can't imagine any way of putting less effort than that into discovering new music.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#177For 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 tho…
The more time passes, the fewer relics from earlier eras survive and stay relevant, like a funnel.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#178I'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 t…
Ah this is very cool.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Pink Floyd etc albums for the 100th time If you can risk a 101st time, have you tried "Dark Side of the Moonshine" (2009) yet?
Dub side of the moon (2003) is an absolute masterpiece of alternative covers. Sometimes I forget their version of Breathe isn't the original.
I also listened to so much of this in my late teens that hearing the original sounds strange.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#180A good reminder for parents to push beyond their comfort zones when playing music with their children, otherwise they will take the path of least resistance: popular music.