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When do we stop finding new music?

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Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#491

Post by swozey »

082349872349872 wrote: post #236
swozey wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to go through my Liked songs list that's probably 10+ years old on Spotify and it's basically like a journal of my life. I'll see months where I clearly started dating a new person, incorporated their new-to-me music into my playlists, then when I start to see Lord Huron etc I'm probably going through another breakup. Then glowing up which for me is usually a metal/hardcore/rap 3-6 months in the gym until I me…

> it's basically like a journal of my life. From the artist side, apparently during Fleetwood Mac's heyday they were getting up on stage and basically singing about how horrible their relationships with each other were. Whether that's "money for nothing" or "suffering for your art" I'll leave to the band members to say, but Wikipedia notes: > In 1976, the band was suffering from severe stress. With success came the e…

I can't imagine being a grown adult and dealing with that amount of drama. I don't ever date inside of my friend groups because it always winds up causing some rift. Imagine having to put out a world class album through all of that. Oof.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#492

Post by pxc »

brnt wrote: post #374
pxc wrote: post #303

I expect it'll never happen to me. My dad was still actively seeking out new music when I was a kid, streaming college radio via the Internet before Pandora, Last.fm, or Spotify were things. He's in his 60s today and he still listens to new music (in a range of genres) all the time. If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you.

> If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you. Novelty in music of novelty of music? I never considered one could care about the former (it certainly seems orthogonal to popular music, which is all about being new but never novel). So you are actively seeking out to you new genres and artists? I'm not a completionist, so I'm OK with missing out. I do keep track of artists or (sub)genres…

That's an interesting distinction that I didn't have in mind in my comment. For me, personally, I suppose I'm interested in both (sounds and styles I've never heard, and music whose makings may be familiar to me but which I've not heard yet).

> So you are actively seeking out to you new genres and artists?

Yeah! I generally find that the more music I know and enjoy, the more music I can connect with or appreciate. At the moment I'm developing greater appreciation and taste for house music and extreme metal, while my go-to genres for a long time have tended to be folk and indie rock of various kinds.

> I'm not a completionist, so I'm OK with missing out. I do keep track of artists or (sub)genres to check out, but I very rarely have time to actually check some of it out. I have so much music that the past years I've been deleting more than adding, and I still haven't heard much of it well. Also by now I realize tastes change but also experiences, a song sounds different in different phases of your life it seems.

I'd say I agree with all of this. I used to listen to new artists and genres extremely systematically and dedicate a lot of time to it (many hours every week). Now it's more irregular than that but it certainly hasn't stopped.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#493

Post by wodenokoto »

yobbo wrote: post #436
wodenokoto wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is the reverse. 20-30 years ago, you'd listen to radio or MTV a lot more. They would introduce you to music outside "your tribe" of virtue of having to play a little bit of every genre that's popular. Back then, I'd say investing in a album was always safe, not because you went to the record store and asked for a new rock album, because you had heard 1 or 2 singles (unwillingly) and read a review (willingl…

> 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 think putting Britney Spears, Rage Against the Machine, Moby, Ol'Dirty Bastard and Santana (all had top hits in 1999 with rotation on MTV) into the same "tribe" is painting strokes as broad as the ocean.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#494

Post by JackMorgan »

I think I've got possibly the opposite problem of most people. I quickly tire of music. I'm always building brand new playlists, adding 1000 amazing beautiful songs to it, and then getting so tired of it all I just slam skip through 70% of it. Eventually the playlist gets so bogged down I have to make a new one and start over again with all fresh music.

Each time I start over I say to myself "only the best ones get in this playlist" and sure enough I'll only add the very best, my favorite music. Songs that'll be stuck in my head for days. But alas, I fall back to earth and loathe the whole set of them and the cycle repeats.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#495

Post by lawgimenez »

wittierusername wrote: post #446
atoav wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure about the whole thing. When I was a teenager (so roughly the decade from 2000 to 2009) I hated my guts of any contemporary music, most of what I liked was from the 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s etc. Nowadays I have quite some things in my record collection from my teenage decade, some of which I discovered only a few years ago, some of which I knew and liked back then, but it wasn't popular music back then. I alwa…

As someone constantly seeking out new music (recently for example, I've been working backwards through the 1001 albums you must listen to book), I inherited some of my family's old vinyl collections including stuff that was like 60 years old. So so much of it is awful. It's interesting granted, but people ignore that the charts were filled with bland covers of other popular songs even in the 60's. Hip Hop is a great…

When Kendrick released Section 80, I tweeted that Kdot will be one of the, if not the best rapper of his generation. Can’t believe it became true.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#496

Post by pxc »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #442
pxc wrote: post #303

I expect it'll never happen to me. My dad was still actively seeking out new music when I was a kid, streaming college radio via the Internet before Pandora, Last.fm, or Spotify were things. He's in his 60s today and he still listens to new music (in a range of genres) all the time. If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you.

> If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you. One of the most traditional - and important - uses of music was to preserve the oral record, which existed in musical form to make it easier to remember accurately. I wouldn't expect novelty in music to be important to many people.

For me, at least, the desire for new-to-me music isn't paired with a disdain for repetition or tradition. It's more like that I want to discover more traditions and connect with them, and to develop a better intuition for how the constituents of my musical universe are interconnected.

The traditional use of music you highlight really resonates with the way that I listen to music, incidentally. I joked recently with my roommate that for me, music is poetry with embellishments, while for him, it's drums with embellishments. Lyrical memorization has been a central part of how I've related to most of the music most important to me, too.

I suppose you're right, though. Most people engage relatively casually with music, and that's okay.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#497

Post by hmm37 »

dudefeliciano wrote: post #414
r1b wrote: post #175

Outlier 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…

> there is a freeform radio station near me do you have any suggestions for similar online radio stations or playlists?

You can try some college radio e.g. some smaller colleges in WA, or U. Mich radio station. But for freeform, I think in the US at least WFMU is considered the best. https://wfmu.org/

Davide of MIMIC Radio is good for classical music, as it's pretty much the only one I know that usually plays a whole classical music piece, and not a single movement, etc. and it's high bitrate as well.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#498

Post by goosejuice »

erikbye wrote: post #431
goosejuice wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music is absolutely not getting worse unless you're only considering top charting music which is such a small fraction of what's out there. Even then it's highly subjective and behind almost every one of those songs or albums is a handful of brilliant writers, producers and session musicians you probably never heard of. I'd say it's never been better. Music is more accessible which means more folks get exposed to it…

Of course, it's extremely subjective, but how about naming a few artists who have appeared in the last few years that you think make better music and are more talented musicians than those who came before?

There's a tremendous amount of talent in contemporary music. Comparing musician against musician is silly.

Some of these have been around longer than others.

Jacob Collier, Vulfpeck, Cool Sounds, Sylvie, Bobbing, Abigail Lapell, Big Theif, Tank and the Bangas, Richard Houghten, Kurt Vile, Thundercat, Little Simz, Nora Brown, Barrie, Dominique Dumont, Lusine, Cory Wong, Billy Strings, DoomCannon, Cory Henry, Mark Lettieri, Nate Smith, Yussef Dayes, Yumi Zouma, limperatrice, Slow Pulp, Vetiver, Bibio, Altin Gun, King Gizzard, Julian Lage.

I could go on.. give me an artist you like or a genre and I could likely find you new music.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#499

Post by lawgimenez »

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.

Before the internet, there has always been a gathering place already for each culture. In my teens, it was the weekend punk hardcore matinees. Before internet, kids passed out fliers to their upcoming shows. Kids invite fellow kids because there isn’t much going on during weekends.

Re: When do we stop finding new music?

#500

Post by goosejuice »

lapcat wrote: post #454
goosejuice wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music is absolutely not getting worse unless you're only considering top charting music which is such a small fraction of what's out there. Even then it's highly subjective and behind almost every one of those songs or albums is a handful of brilliant writers, producers and session musicians you probably never heard of. I'd say it's never been better. Music is more accessible which means more folks get exposed to it…

> Music is absolutely not getting worse unless you're only considering top charting music which is such a small fraction of what's out there. But there's a crucial difference between what's out there and what people are listening to. There's a lot of obscure stuff that not many people are listening to. Whereas the top charting music is what millions of people are listening to. It matters a lot what's getting marketed…

Define obscure.

Musicians are more discoverable than ever. Unlike in the past it doesn't matter nearly as much what's getting marketing/ gets air play at the top of the charts, because if you have a desire to find music that you like you just have to try and it's all there for free with an Internet connection.

If one can't find new music to ones taste it's not because of what's being produced.

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