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When do we stop finding new music?

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Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#481

Post by koromak »

I find and listen to plenty of new music, for some reason I find it hard to listen to the teenage stuff. Even though I love it, its too fraught.

But, its not like I love any of the new music I find. I can like it, but I'm never going to blast it on repeat for weeks on end like 15 year old me could. Its hard to make an emotional connection like that as an adult.

As a result, I care less about music discovery. I know I'm not going to find a revolution in my own tastes. I know I'm not going to convince a whole group of friends to do the same, like you might in highschool. Its just a little more colorless now.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#482

Post by detourdog »

fancymcpoopoo wrote: post #7

Very difficult with streaming. Rdio used to have a slider to recommend more unusual music. No other service has this that I’ve found. They keep playing the same songs and artist forever.

I never understand why streaming services that work on subscription push some content over others. I would think if they have a monthly subscriber they wouldn't care what that subscriber is streaming as long as they are streaming.

I find this especially bad with video streaming where a service has a great library but only promotes about 30 titles all categorized under different genres.

I suppose they save on bandwidth if they can get everyone to just stream the same titles.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#483

Post by cyphereal »

fancymcpoopoo wrote: post #7

Very difficult with streaming. Rdio used to have a slider to recommend more unusual music. No other service has this that I’ve found. They keep playing the same songs and artist forever.

YouTubeMusic actually has this. With its "You Music Tuner" there are a lot of configurable parameters that control artist variety and music discovery. It doesn't quite nail tuning by curation, but it's a step in the right direction.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#484

Post by sim7c00 »

eloisius wrote: post #396
cesaref wrote: post #389

The useful metric with these sorts of things is to ask yourself, when was the last time you tried something that you didn't like? For expensive experiences, say, going to the theatre, it's hard to see shows you don't think you are going to like, as the price pressure makes you choose 'safe bets' as the cost/reward is somewhat weighted in one direction. For something like music, the above used to be the case, as typic…

> We really need music search which follows more interesting routes through content rather than just 'people who like this also like' or 'here's another album by someone you already listen to'. I agree with this so much. We've had about a decade of this kind of robo-curation in every single aspect of our media consumption. Read books like the ones you like, listen to bands like the ones you listen to, more videos lik…

you touch an important thing. music is a common thing between people that's shared, and a way to express, which is usually also meant for sharing (you can make music to express to yourself too.). hence i think most people develop their taste in these things mostly through social interactions which algorithms cannot provide. additionally as a result, the memories/experiences attached, influence heavily how it tastes, exactly as you say.

these numbers presented seem a bit from a narrow dataset. all the people likely from one culture or even sub-culture, with one sort of social pattern that impacts this kind of stuff. - i live in a northen country, and find often in the south people are more actively outside and socializing at later ages. sharing more music and food, and likely the peak ages would thus be later too, or less of a peak.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#485

Post by sim7c00 »

082349872349872 wrote: post #402
eloisius wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We really need music search which follows more interesting routes through content rather than just 'people who like this also like' or 'here's another album by someone you already listen to'. I agree with this so much. We've had about a decade of this kind of robo-curation in every single aspect of our media consumption. Read books like the ones you like, listen to bands like the ones you listen to, more videos lik…

I suspect it's the notion of a "feed" that's at fault, but then again I'm an old codger who likes to rummage in the cupboard and actively search for my content instead of being stuck in the high chair and passively waiting for somebody else's algorithm to feed it to me. (in another domain, at some restaurants it's possible to order dishes which don't appear on their menu)

the joy of discovery is lost. its discovered for you and fed to you. where did the journey go? :D

if you have more content, but someone filters it for you to 'your taste', you will end up with less content, and no more exciting discoveries. you'll learn what to expect from the feed quickly and everything becomes boring. hence the required upward spiral in ridiculousness, to counter the natural encroaching boredom.

the last maybe a little grim take, but i dont think invalid.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#486

Post by JohnFen »

I never did stop, even though I'm a graybeard. I wonder if that might be because I didn't really start to enjoy music until after I was done being a teenager. I don't have any music I fell in love with when I was that young.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#487

Post by cyphereal »

The article might describe a common scenario, but there are plenty of outliers. I hardly listen to music I liked in my teens and early twenties. I love discovering new music.

Many comments here are very insightful and discuss phenomena like high music diversity, music proliferation and easy of producing music, and automated recommendations.

One thing that has been occupying me is that curation is still harder than I'd like when using streaming tools like Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Tidal. Pandora had good roots with its music genome project, and have built on that. (I can't use it without a VPN since they discontinued supporting the country I mostly live in). It's probably a function of how I consume my music today - no longer desk-bound at work, but on the go, so iPhone (and Apple Watch) are primary tools. Being able to select/skip/preview/tune what I'm listening to is nowhere near as powerful as I'd like. I've written library curation tools in the past, these always expected me to spend significant dedicated time in front of a screen (e.g. a similar tool like the cool looking https://github.com/kristopolous/music-explorer, I think).

This has strong parallels to how older people consumed music - either totally passive curation (radio), or very deliberate, like finding music in record stores, at a friend's place. Also replay involves selecting records/CDs in your own bookshelf. Today's ephemeral digital libraries are much lower effort, are huge and curation/selection tools are not easy enough to use, so I tend to fall back onto old favourites or recommendation engines that usually don't satisfy me.

A solution might be a much more configurable curation assistant that is also super easy to use (and, in my case) very accessible on a mobile device with 0-1 clicks (because I'm busy doing other things). Music discovery tools that don't allow in-situ music playing is thus also a no-go.

It wouldn't be super hard to build an interactive tool, but as always, making a super intuitive and useable UX experience is the hardest part. Most streaming tools are giant swiss-army knives for listening use-cases.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#488

Post by cthalupa »

I'm convinced it's not that we stagnate in our ability to like new things, it's just that we stop exposing ourselves to it, and it's reinforced by the algorithms focusing on stuff we do like when we rely on them for recommendations.

If you purposefully seek out exposure to new things, you'll find stuff you like, regardless of age. I have a friend that brings me along to all sorts of concerts that are well out of the wheelhouse of what I listened to as a kid, or even 5-10 years ago. I frequently get home and purchase their full discography the next day. There are subgenres of the broader genres I like that are quite different from what I am used to, and I keep an eye out for new ones - I've long been into various types of metal, but it was the Judas Priests, Iron Maidens, Megadeths, Slayers that dominated my teenage years. In my 20s it was power metal and then death metal and black metal. In my early 30s, it was prog metal. Now I'm listening to a ton of math-y stuff and djent. I have had many detours into jazz and blues, electronic music, and every now and then very mainstream pop artists make their way into my collection.

I don't think I'm wired in some special way that lets me keep liking new things, it's just that I seek them out when I know a lot of people my age just don't.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#489

Post by cthalupa »

suoduandao3 wrote: post #464
yobbo wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you'd listen to radio or MTV a lot more The selection in these channels was the tribe back then. They were the "bottleneck" of pop culture. From around 2000 with broadband etc, "payola" (broadcasters being coerced by record companies to play their flagship songs "in heavy rotation") is less and less effective. As a consequence, I think the "current fashion" of music seems less defined.

I believe this is the origin of the '90s kids' meme. Not too long ago there was one culture . Then the internet came along and there was a gathering place for fans of every obscure anime and political system. I don't miss the restrictiveness of a single culture and the expectation to fit into it, but with the benefit of hindsight I can't say it was a terrible culture, given all it had to do.

There have always been multiple cultures. This is such a weird statement I don't even really know how to argue against it since to me it seems so self evident, but I suppose I'll try. Since the subject is music, I suppose we can start there.

The sort of people you found at, say, a metal show in the 80s and the sort of people you found at a dance club playing the early era of house music were wildly different. Even if you keep it within rock, the overlap of the audience seeing The Cure would be wildly different from those seeing Judas Priest.

Anime? Even before the internet became what it is today, you could go to a comic book store and hang out. There was significant overlap between the comic book/dungeons & dragons/anime crowds.

There have been social spaces and places to meet people within specific cultures for forever.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#490

Post by mindcrime »

OK, I didn't read TFA yet, but here's some anecdata for you:

I'm 50, and literally 15 minutes ago I'm on a conference call with some colleagues in Brasil, and while we were waiting for a pipeline to run, I started asking those guys about other Brazilian heavy metal bands (other than Sepultura) that I should listen to. They mentioned Sarcófago, and in the process of reading about Sarcófago on Wikipedia I discovered Ratos de Porão. So now I have two new bands to listen to as soon as I get a break where I'm not on a call.

I love discovering new music, both "new" in the sense of "just released" and in the "new to me" sense. For example, there are still plenty of old NWOBHM bands I have never listened to, and occasionally one will pop up and I'll discover them and just be thrilled to death.

Beyond that, I keep branching out into new genres. I grew up as mostly a metal-head (if you couldn't tell) but around 2000 or so I started listening to a lot of rap and hip-hop. Then I started getting into a lot of synthwave/retrowave/darkwave/horrosynth/etc. around 8-10 years ago. And I've picked up a little bit of interest in blues and jazz over the last year or two.

I dearly hope that for me, the answer to "when do I stop finding new music" is "when I am dead."

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