The lost joy of music piracy

I dunno.. even here in new zealand, very much not a musical hub, i still know plenty of jazz musicians who make a living off of music, and there is generally at least 1 jazz gig every week.

I also think the industry is pretty tolerant of more experimental/non-pop music, just that this isn't really true for the rock scene amymore. Hardcore punk, hardstyle, dubstep, hyperpop, shoegaze are all huge genres now, large enough to live off of and perform at festivals as big as coachella.

You may be right about Damon Albarn but that would just be a result of which genres have listeners who are willing to listen to smaller, non-mainstream artists. I think the biggest example of this is that mainstream rock music a la guns and roses has pretty much completely died out, while genres with smaller, more dedicated fanbases like post-rock and noise rock are still going strong as ever. I'm sure if you check your local shows (and you live in a place with reasonably large population) you will be able to find plenty of bands who completely live off their music.

  > I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.

I don't think algorithms are to blame (bear with me).

It's that the word "discovery" internet platforms have started using for this kind of experience is very misleading.

What real discovery means:

  - Spending more time and attention when selecting next artist
  - Reflecting on what you like about the song/album, and why
  - Taking time to curate your collection
  - Exchanging thoughts with other people, and reflecting on their opinions

Platforms are selling you efficiency, in reality the've compressed above steps to minutes or even seconds.

This is not unique to music platforms by the way. Instagram spoon feeds you reels so you never actually reflect on anything - you don't have time for reflection, because content is coming. Instagram will say they've solved "content discovery" for you, which is good, right?

LLMs spoon feed you tons of data, leaving no room for reflection.

It is logical if you think about it: these platforms do solve accessibility, but they don't solve discovery, deep reflection or retrospection of the user. Why bother marketing things they _don't_ solve? So they oversell accessibility solution like they've solved everything else, while in reality their product teams spend literal zero time addressing the important things.

Unless you consciously prompt yourself to reflect and think (which takes x10 more time than just browsing content) you are missing out.

I've spent good 20 minutes reflecting while writing this comment. Could have been written by LLM based on a short prompt, right? But I write on HN not because I want for everyone to see my thoughts published out there - I write precisely because I want to _reflect on my own thoughts_.

I need help reflecting, not writing or discovering.

If you’re gonna capitalize the “D” you should also capitalize the “G” (since it’s the first letter of his last name…)

I find college radio to be a good curator of music. MIT radio is a mix of students and long time music lovers who DJ.

They archive shows for a couple weeks (though it’s automatic so the shown typically starts a couple minutes in). Some shows actually list the songs they play at trackblaster.

Radio Ninja I like for electronic music. They put shows up on mixcloud as well.

https://www.wmbr.org/cgi-bin/show?id=6883

Its not lost here, still going strong. Lol