If I'm being honest, I'd say pretty much right after the music industry sucked the last drop of blood from the actual musicians which has brought to where we are today: session musicians on shoestring budgets performing tunes written by repurposed advertising jingle composers.
When do we stop finding new music?
251–260 of 585 posts
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#252I'm old enough that I've seen Miles Davis and Fats Domino live. I am listening to more new artists than I ever have.
Gnoosic is still a good source for me.
I search torrent sites for users who upload obscure artists I like - and then mine their history for artist recommendations.
I have a lot of regular listens I first heard on LastFM channels. It's the only streaming service I've ever used.
I've 5 sons who turn me on to artists I wouldn't hear otherwise.
The most utterly useless source for new artists (or music, or anything) is commercial FM radio. It has no redeeming value.
In contrast, local indy stations are amazing.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#253Two sailant points to me:
- With work from home, time spent with no one else around increases and it's never been easier to listen to ambient music.
We see this in the lofi youtube channels uprising, or the whole "work music" genre, but I think most people will listen to whatever they like that doesn't need to be fighting against the open space noise anymore.
I'd expect music discovery to be strongly impacting by that.
- The impact of technology and rhe new platforms is understated.
What my generation could listen to at 14 is a ridiculous fraction of what we have access to now. The author poses it as "need to sit down for two hours to find new stuff" problem, but if you watch tv shows, listen to podcasts it will happen organically, and even browsing random channels or checking ranking charts (spotify's top 50 for instance) will gradually inject new things without that much active research.
All in all, I think the current state of tastes getting frozen at some point is an artifact of the older generations, and might not affect people growing up now.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#254I'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…
Thank you for sharing this! Looking forward to try it, seems like an interesting idea. My strategy on bandcamp is conceptually similar, albeit manually.
Bandcamp is my primary place for learning about new music. I find following small labels that specialize in a genre to be ideal. Unfortunately, bandcamp doesn't do a great job in helping me keep track of everything, so this is what I do:
1. Bandcamp doesn't have RSS, but I take all the incoming emails and convert them to RSS[1]. I separate out new messages vs new releases. I host my own RSS with FreshRSS.
2. I wrote an app (Camp Counselor [2]) to help manage your Bandcamp wishlist. You can organize, rate, and comment (privately) on your wishlist, along with play directly in the app. I find that my wishlist (which has a few thousand albums on it) is more of a "to do" list. If I get a recommendation, I just add it to my wishlist and will check it out later. Even stuff I don't like stays in my wishlist (with a low rating), to help me remember. I then sort by rating or added at dates, and as I purchase things, they move off my wishlist into my purchase list.
This generally works really well for me, and I continue to explore lots of new and great music every day!
[1] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email...
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#255My personal observation is that listening is different today than it used to be. I grew up in the 70s and 80s when bands focused on making an album that you sit a listen to. Today, kids listen to songs, not albums so to me, the artists aren't as interesting as they used to be.
Also, recording has changed a lot and has impacted the feel of most music. Listen to Led Zeppelin and you hear a very practiced band that is good enough that their performance is what you hear on the album (for the most part). Today, bands play to click tracks individually and the DAW scrubs a and polishes the performances until they are perfect. This give a different feel to the music that doesn't sound quite right to someone used to listening to more lifelike performances.
I do listen to a lot of newer music and have some favorites like Lana Del Rey and St. Vincent, but I have to admit, I don't give some music the attention it deserves because it often sounds like a copies of music I already know.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#256One problem I've run into with the music services is with older styles. For example, I'm specifically into black musicians from the 1930s-1950s who played swing style music. I have yet to find a service that actually will play more than 2-3 songs in that style before deciding that what I really want to hear is rat pack or swing by white musicians. No matter how much I thumbs down it, I get Glenn Miller/Frank Sinatra/…
You're probably wishing for a community playlist with people pitching in songs as they discover them ?
Would be great to have options to add stuff but keep it private while keeping in sync etc. Could be done with a meta layer on top of the Spotify player for instance ?
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#257One problem I've run into with the music services is with older styles. For example, I'm specifically into black musicians from the 1930s-1950s who played swing style music. I have yet to find a service that actually will play more than 2-3 songs in that style before deciding that what I really want to hear is rat pack or swing by white musicians. No matter how much I thumbs down it, I get Glenn Miller/Frank Sinatra/…
I'm a little puzzled as you're describing a music stylist on skin colour, black vs white. I presume you don't really mean that, so what distinguishes the two musical styles, black swing vs white swing? Serious question.
Not OP but I would assume that because they where still somewhat isolated groups in terms of directly lived culture, this would have influenced their works differently.
Like how the Blues didn't come out of a comfortable lifestyle.
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#258One problem I've run into with the music services is with older styles. For example, I'm specifically into black musicians from the 1930s-1950s who played swing style music. I have yet to find a service that actually will play more than 2-3 songs in that style before deciding that what I really want to hear is rat pack or swing by white musicians. No matter how much I thumbs down it, I get Glenn Miller/Frank Sinatra/…
I'm a little puzzled as you're describing a music stylist on skin colour, black vs white. I presume you don't really mean that, so what distinguishes the two musical styles, black swing vs white swing? Serious question.
I admit I'm uncomfortable explaining it by skin color, but I've never found anybody who has been able to explain to me what the difference is, and I will admit lacking the musical knowledge to explain it. I fell into that style from dancing Lindy Hop; I was loving the music I was hearing when I was out dancing, so I went and bought an album from the only name I knew at the time - Glenn Miller. It was some of the most boring and trite music I'd ever heard in my life, and did not inspire me to dance.
For me (and I don't judge people for thinking differently) there's a certain joie de vivre in the music that is just lacking from what white musicians released commercially. I know they were capable of it (I once found a recording of Glenn Miller swinging it just as hard as anything Basie put out) but they were playing to their audience at the time. As I've learned more about the history of Swing and Lindy Hop, this was a specific choice made to "civilize" (as the white people of the time would have said) Jazz's savage rhythms. There's actually posters from the Arthur Murray school in the 1940s saying this exact thing.
(Aside, I had a friend who played a radio show in the 2000s playing old Jazz music. She told me once that if she put anything from a black musician on the show, she'd get hate mail from the listeners. Go figure.)
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#259From the article: “But 'American Idiot' wasn't a true act of revolution. In fact, the album was produced and promoted by a multinational conglomerate with the intent of packaging seemingly transgressive pop-punk acts for my exact demographic.” This is sort of beside the point of the article, but I was just reading an interview[1] with Billie Joe Armstrong about this album and it doesn’t sound like their process was a…
Green Day got a lot of air time in the 90's but the playola effect (the not payola wink-wink that still went on) died out in the early-mid 00's as rock and alt rock stations folded with demographic changes and mp3 trading took off. Also overplayed on the radio: Sublime, Rush, Van Halen, RHCP, and Metallica.
As far as cultural impact over a larger timespan: Iron Butterfly, The Dead, Frank Zappa, Quiet Riot, Ozzy, MJ, Nirvana, Cake, AiC, NIN, Marilyn Manson, Soundgarden, TOOL, Beastie Boys, RATM, Kool Keith (and other aliases), Jay-Z (and Danger Mouse mixes), RZA (and family relations).
Re: When do we stop finding new music?
#260I 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…
that boston ota channel? v66 from framingham.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2yGuGdeB7Y
if you were into mtv in the 80s, early 90s the v66 doc is a great watch