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.
Music as an art form is simply not that important to a lot of people. It's more a mood drug. And you're right about the algorithms. In general, the algorithms are judged by the amount of listening that occurs because of them. It's a poor metric for user happiness, but it's what gets used. And in an A/B test, the one that plays familiar tunes is going to win over one that plays challenging tunes.
The more novel the thing is, the more likely it is that you won't like it. I can tell if I'm truly exposing myself to new music by how often I hear a song and say "Yeah, that's just not for me." It makes sense that by the time one is in their 30s they say "I have 1000 songs I know I like, why do I need to look for more songs, many of which I won't like"
Which is basically a long winded way of responding to:
> 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.
With:
There's a non-zero cost to seeking out new things, so the "special way you are wired" involves considering that cost to be worth it.
> There's a non-zero cost to seeking out new things, so the "special way you are wired" involves considering that cost to be worth it.
Sure, but my (perhaps incorrect?) assumption is that most people are doing that with something. For me, music is one of those somethings. For others, it isn't.
I have no data to support it beyond my personal anecdotes, but I believe that the majority of people are still seeking out exposure to new experiences in at least some hobbies or interests past the early 30s number given in the article. I would hazard a guess that that time might be when people become particularly more selective in the sort of new things they want to experience.
Music has become more stratified. The 90s through the present have been an ongoing escalation of music being democratized more and more, from the rise of the DAW in the late 90s to iTunes and P2P sharing to YouTube and music streaming. So there is vastly more music now, and people have more opportunity to find things that suit their tastes.
People listen to a wider variety of music and the same Billboard notion of popularity doesn't really paint a useful picture anymore. What plays on the radio or in TV ads is the lowest common denominator corporate waffle, and is played heavily, but it doesn't represent what people listen to overall.
I have personal playlists of everything from House music and 90s Eurodance to all kinds of J-Pop to 19th century folk music to early 2000s rock to 80s synth pop to orchestral music. I couldn't name a single Taylor Swift song offhand, but apparently she's pretty big.
This seems like a really good take on the situation. I usually disagree that discoverability as a problem. Discoverability could be why my tastes have stagnated.
I enjoy music but its not a hobby or anything for me.
There's tons of music out there and I find the plethora of niche subgenres now fairly overwhelming and don't even know how to classify the stuff I enjoy listening to.
Recommendation engine feedback loops do not aid in discovery, just repetition.
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 earlier and in more variety and in turn we get more musicians.
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.
Let me preface by saying I listen to a lot of genres, but that jazz & funk is not my "main expertise".
Of course there's no denying we have lots of creative and talented new musicians, but very seldom do I think they beat "the greats", or are even on par. Usually they feel more like knockoffs, and I find I'd rather go back and listen to the original instead.
I'm not familiar with these artists, but I had a listen to about 20 of them, and I will say that I can hear where a lot of them got their inspiration from, but they (not all of them) feel lightweight compared to artists from back in the day.
In these genres I'd much rather listen to the following artists than any of the ones you mentioned:
Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Townes Van Zandt, Earth, Wind & Fire, The Isley Brothers, Johnny Cash, Coltrane, Gillespie, Miles Davis.
"Nate Smith" in particular sounds so much like your stereotypical modern artist. Everything from the production, melodies, his voice and vocal chain sounds like at least 20 other artists. Very uninspired in my humble opinion. This is what we can expect AI to produce.
I think you may have found a different Nate Smith than the one goosejuice was referencing. They were likely referring to the drummer named Nate Smith (he's collaborated with at least one of the groups mentioned).
The guy has a lot of interesting work, but I think the thing that blew me away the most is the composition 'Warble'. If memory serves, that's the piece where he explored 64th note and dotted 32nd note displacements in order to mimic J Dilla's 'wonky' swing. I've tried capturing the Dilla swing; it's nearly impossible to do on the drums without sounding like you don't know how to play the instrument. Nate Smith, on the other hand, makes it sound fantastic.
Of course they were inspired by existing artists and by a greater set of them! This is central to my argument that music is only going to get better with greater exposure.
Those are all great artists you listed but to attempt to quantify that they are any more talented or creative than contemporaries is a silly exercise. It's art.
This is a small list of random artists that I've listened to over the past few years. Jacob Collier is a perfect example of exceptional generational talent who not only is technically mind blowing but also incredibly original. I bet every one of those artists you listed would say the same about him (if they haven't passed of course).
Nate Smith likewise would be welcomed as the drummer in any one of those bands. Did you listen to the right Nate Smith?
I don't know, maybe you're just not hearing what I'm hearing. Watch Cory Henry on Snarky's Lingus. Jacob Collier do his recent crowd work with the NSO. Cory Wong talk about Vulfpeck and their MSG show and never rehearsing. Hiromi and Tank and the Bangas on NPR's tiny desks. I'd say Abigail Lapell adds tremendously to the folk of the era you are referencing.
Watered down is just not how I'd describe any of the musicians I listed
Show me someone great who when you go to their inspiration you can't find they themselves very much creating watered down versions of their inspirations.
You seem hyper focused on comparing all that you hear to what you already know you like. If you really want to appreciate new music, cut it out. You're introducing bias at the outset. If you approach a new artist as if their work is isolated, and give it some time to settle in, I think you'll be surprised.
At the risk of just mouthing off my favorites, there are a lot of genres today are the best they've ever been. The post-punk revival out of the UK is great. The "chambery" Black Country, New Road and the "mathy" Black Midi are some of the best we've seen and there are other exceptional talents in that scene. Noisy-shoegazy-indie rock is also a great scene right now with artists like Jane Remover and Mitski releasing what will be important albums for ages to come.
Note, Mitski debuted in 2013 but most of the strongest records over the past few years, from hip-hop, pop to experimental rock to metal, seems to be by artists or individual who've been making music for around a decade-ish roughly. Maybe this disqualifies the whole lot and you're trying to highlight some weakness in the debuts of the past few years. If so, maybe you should wait a decade? If not, I can assert that some of the most talented artists of history are making music today. By any metric.
I could spend hours writing a response to this. I am mid 30 and my style of music changes with every season I am not within trends but most songs I enjoy most are not older than 3 or 4 years. Not all of them are well known.
Even something established like Punk reached new heights with more modern approaches (ex. Sleaford mods, Team Scheisse in German)
I think music is very subjective still but new music never stopped to impress me.
I just discovered Team Scheisse a week ago (they are from city!) and now I come across them on HN, what a coincidence (obviously this might be the Baader-Meinhof-Phenomenon at play but since they are a comparatively small band I would say the effect is rather small)!
FWIW most of the top charting music of the 90s, 80s and so on were also "worse" and have mostly been forgotten. Few songs remain popular or regain popularity. A lot of chart hits are really just springboarding off "you had to be there" cultural moments or experiences or simply a general "vibe" that are fleeting and trivial enough not to stick around even in nostalgia.
As an extreme example, I'd argue the popularity of David Hasselhoff's I've been looking for freedom in Germany is almost entirely a result of "retconning" (if not fabricating) its supposed popularity at the time of its original release. It would have probably been forgotten entirely if it hadn't been rediscovered "ironically" in the context of ridiculous claims about its influence on the fall of the Berlin Wall. Heck, I remember owning a casette of the album as a kid only because "it's the guy from Knight Rider". For adult women his claim to fame was co-starring alongside Pamela Anderson in Baywatch as one of the few men regularly appearing bare-chested on daytime television - I'd say his musical talents played a very small role in his original popularity and it's telling nobody remembers any other songs than the one he performed on a TV show. He was never considered good, he was just a familiar face (and body) and made a catchy tune.
> 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, what the majority of people are exposed to.
Unfortunately, very few repliers are addressing the first point that I made in my comment: "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music."
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.
> it's all there for free with an Internet connection
The "Internet" is just hand waving. The internet is massive. Almost everything is available on the internet, but that's a problem, not a solution. Sometimes it's like finding a needle in a haystack.
> If one can't find new music to ones taste it's not because of what's being produced.
So what is the explanation for "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music", which again, you haven't addressed.
You shared a single infographic without a source, but taking it as fact I would take a guess that it's easier to discover old music now and there's more music to listen to thus flattening the curve.
I'm sorry that it's difficult for you to find what you like. My tastes are very broad and I find new artists every week just listening to Spotify, Bandcamp, YouTube while working. My wife and I and our friends share music that we like with each other. We see live music and get exposed to openers we've never heard of.
> Unfortunately, very few repliers are addressing the first point that I made in my comment: "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music."
Seems very hard to accurately measure, could be that people don't know what was released in their decade but the stuff from the 80s is easy to pinpoint.
If you consider the top charting music and the typical fart noises uploaded to soundcloud which have 3 listens, yes it is worse.
If you're only considering your 25 favorite new songs out of tens of millions then sure, it's better. But also there is recency/novelty bias which counteracts and may overcome any past/nostalgia bias
In conclusion, if all you're doing is listening to music alone in your apartment then it's never been better. Until you step out into the real world and realize that, best-case scenario, everyone hates your music and everything that it represents. More likely they will be completely bored and indifferent.
The world's been hating my music tastes and telling me to turn stuff off since the 1980s. And then, ten years later they love it, and 10 years after that my ex-is bragging how she used to listen to it decades ago.
And definitely don't like things based on the real world, the real world is shit.
Plenty of people live in the woods. If we all lived in the woods everything would be fine! I'm sure our GDP wouldn't fall and no one would starve to death at all. Nope; Not a bit.
Why don't we all just wear VR headsets all day?
LOL enjoy your atomized Balkanized tower of Babel existence. If it has to be explained then you're consitutionally incapable of understanding it anyway.
I think you're thinking way to hard about this my friend. What part of seeing a local band at a bar or listening to family members make music leads you to bring up GDP and VR? Either you're completely misunderstanding this discussion or you're extremely out of touch.
What gave you the idea that I'm not interested in community and shared culture? That's precisely what I'm promoting. My point was that it doesn't matter what's popular in the mainstream.
This is no place for personal insults, so I'll call it here as this clearly isn't a genuine exchange.
>If you enjoy it and the musicians are making it what else is there?
LOL.
Also, a kiwi, a german, and an uzbek in a discord channel does not a community make. I'm talking about people playing banjo on their porch because that is what people do in their community and their region
The problem is they aren't blockbusters, so you don't remember them. From the same link:
> While the number of movies based on original screenplays has been increasing since the late 2000s, their box office share has continued to fall. In 1984, 73% of the box office were original screenplays, whereas forty years later in 2023, that figure was just 30.6%. And that’s despite their production share being similar (i.e. 60.4% vs 55.9%).
And from a separate post:
> Sequels were twice as frequent in the late 1980s than in the 2010s, if we use production figures as our measure
I wonder who's producing those movies though. My comment did specify Hollywood. The indie film scene, most of which consists of original screenplays, is very active, and now it's easier than ever both to shoot a film—on a smartphone!—and to distribute a film—over the internet. (Likewise, it's easier than ever to record and distribute a music album.) However, those films aren't getting mass marketed, getting seen by the majority of people, or making a ton of money. Unfortunately, the linked articles didn't specify the producers, or even the absolute number of movies produced each year, which is also relevant. Whatever the cause, the public's appetite for sequels, as reflected in box office proceeds, has indisputably increased. Those are the movies getting seen the most. Is that a "natural" desire of consumers? Is it a result of marketing? Something else?
> 39% of top movies released 2005-14 were truly original, i.e. not an adaptation, sequel, spin-off, remake, or other such derivative work.
I don't know, I watch most of my movies at home (I have a nice setup) and watch as many old movies as new. I never feel like I have any trouble finding an original film. The blockbusters may soak up all the ticket sales, but there's just no shortage of original films to me.
> The blockbusters may soak up all the ticket sales, but there's just no shortage of original films to me.
But my comment was not about you. ;-) My original point was "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music." And if you "watch as many old movies as new", that's certainly not a ringing endorsement of new movies.
I'm GenX and a movie buff, but not much of a music listener, so I replied to the Hollywood part of your comment. There's always going to be more old movies than new and I watch enough movies that I run out of the new ones.
That is indeed right. People confuse their own perception of their surroundings with actual changes in the world. We're human beings, with a rich inner world, which always evolves as we age and there is a lot going on in there, both on a chemical / biological level, and spiritually. We are not really built to be objective observers.
I certainly have plenty of biased but late 70s early 80s seems like a really good era. Especially because it was so diverse and not dominated by a single sound.
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 always liked to think of this as some kind of survivor bias. There is trash music in everybtime period, but the good music will be listend to more often and thus shape the collective musical memory of a decade. The time we're in hasn't had the chance for that to happen yet, so it seems arbitrary and random as it happens and more defined in hindsight.
It also matters where you look. The 80s have a very recognizable pop music, but it also has Punk and multiple other things.
In my case, I'm from 1987 and pop music from the early 90's was as bad as the one from 2000's, because I remember it well from my parents (and, well, by age 9-10 I was more than aware of the Spice Girls, as every girl in my Elementary school was into dances).
Later, in 2000's, with P2P and streaming radios, I was astounded by some music genres. And, a bit further, with Jamendo and Magnatune, I found incredible gems not found anywhere.
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 showing of survivor bias. Sure, Tupac, Biggie, Beastie Boys etc are classic but people are rarely listening to the bland safe music from that era. So so many songs where the rapper couldn't think of anything more inventive than "oh you're having FUN well wait till I go and get my GUN I'll shoot you dead and you'll be DONE"
In 30 years, people will hear Kendrick's discography and think "god no one makes meaningful hip hop anymore" while forgetting about the "pop music but instead of a guitar solo, it's a bad rap verse" or the vast amount of emo/trap/SoundCloud stuff where the good stuff is rare.
The exciting thing about living now is the ease that someone can send a link to me. Constantly my friends and I are finding recently released or decade old music that we can simply message the other and say "you'll love the production on this" - whereas for years, you saved up your pocket money and bought one album and that's all you had until you could afford another.
People who say modern music is rubbish rarely make any effort to actually find any. You've kids now talking about bands like Arctic Monkeys but they don't realise the indie landfill of shite guitar bands that all had the same look, same twangy sound, same trajectory. For every Panda Bear/Animal Collective - there was 100 bland animal based bands all copying the same formula in the hope of being as big as Pigeon Detectives lmao
Be aware that grouping things by the respondents "generation" is actually meaningless[1] and likely to make you combine several real processes into random "effects".
Trying to explain these arbitrary aggregations with a single story is obviously fruitless and mostly a good way to make up nonsense arguments.
The return of the 80s is, or rather was, just a current trend. Next up will be the 90s/00s, which can already be seen in make up and fashion, and I'm sure media will follow soon as well.
Wrt/ Hollywood: I think they are not the monopoly they used to be, because the powers are shifting by streaming, and short video services. Similar to how AAA games are more stagnant than the indie gaming scene.
"Music" is too broad to "get worse". There are trends in music that can be considered bad, such as the lessening dynamic range of the recordings - the Loudness War[0]. But there is more music than ever, computerized or not, so if you find that some source of music is bad, you just need to look elsewhere. Music production is easier than ever, so even very niche sounds are kept alive, like the lofi sound of post-punk decades ago[1].
> The return of the 80s is, or rather was, just a current trend. Next up will be the 90s/00s, which can already be seen in make up and fashion, and I'm sure media will follow soon as well.
Is it a "return of the 80s", or is it a rejection of newer music? Again, "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music." This is a difference from previous generations, which tend to hold on stronger to the music of their times. The current trends of current pop culture have always had a much stronger influence on young people than any "nostalgic" trends. When I was young, nostalgia from earlier decades had almost no influence on myself or my peers.
I believe that music's role changed a lot first with the wide spread of the internet and then smartphones and streaming. The internet gave rise to a global culture, and a new channel where culture can form, and then streaming completely changed how people consume music.
I see rejection, disappointment and disillusion as a general theme that's going on in culture, but I can't say that these weren't present in the past cultures as well - going back some decades, the popularity of punk and its offshoots show just how much these feelings resonated with the audience back then.
I think that with the widespread access and nonexistent barrier to entry to past cultures via streaming, attention just spread over the existing cultural palette, resulting in lower average consumption of the new and current. It's not that the new and current is rejected - it's rather that long tail is longer and taller.
The return of the 90s is not next up, it's right now.
For the past 2 years, mainstream chart-toppers like David Guetta or Calvin Harris have been (respectively) covering 90s eurodance songs or making new ones in the same style.
Music was always like this. It used to be even more like this 100 years ago. How many twelve bar blues songs use the exact same chord progression? Maybe thousands if you managed to catalog them all. Maybe hundreds with the same lick between verses. As music started being recorded you had people writing dozens and dozens of songs a day to be owned by a label. They’d find some starlet with a voice and give her a book of these songs from the basement to record on the album and market her for a few years. If anything we are reverting to this model more today, as bands are no longer in vogue as much as individual artists whose material they perform has probably 20 writers credited.
I was born in 1980, so it would be before my musical "peak" so to speak, but I dislike pretty much anything from the 80s popular enough to have been on the radio in the 80s. Right now the 80s style is so popular, I find myself even disliking a lot of modern music that has that "80s retro feel"
I was in the car with an older Gen-Z'er last year and they expressed jealousy at me having grown up in the 80s because they "like the music so much" and were shocked to find out I didn't.
I think it's the opposite of corporatization and consolidation.
Computerization? Yes, of course, but it gave everyone the possibility to make music at a very affordable cost. A $100 MIDI controller comes with a license for a full blown music production software and literally anyone can record, mix, master and release an album. I know several people who are not professional musicians, not even formally trained - just happen to like making sounds - who have their albums on Spotify and/or Soundcloud.
It's the opposite - we're way less centralized now. No one cares about what's on the radio or MTV anymore. We have infinite access to every song ever* for $11 a month, and the recommendation algorithms will happily show you music outside the mainstream and outside the current decade if that's what keeps you listening.
> No one cares about what's on the radio or MTV anymore.
Why not?
> if that's what keeps you listening.
That's the key, though. Kids are generally biased toward new music. This phenomenon is perfectly natural and consistent over the generations, as shown in the article. In the 1980s, it wasn't particularly hard to "discover" 70s or 60s music, and indeed parents might want their kids to listen to their music, but that's not necessarily what the kids want to listen to, because it's not cool. Parents are uncool. Kids want their own music.
What's interesting, though, is that GenZ and Millennials appear to be less biased toward the new music and less biased against the old. The fact that every song ever is available for streaming doesn't mean that people want to listen to every song ever. My understanding is the streaming plays are very top-heavy toward the top artists, and smaller artists are struggling mightily under the streaming payout system.
Nirvana and early Linkin Park seem to be much more popular among GenZ and Millenials than their own music, and lasting, not just trending or being a fad.
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 typically we find our tribe in our early teens, and money is tight so again, you buy what you know you are going to like.
I imagine though that streaming may change this, since you can dive into just about anything. 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'm lucky, my musical taste has always been broad, and if anything, it's got broader as i've got older. I do find myself reaching for older stuff that i've not heard for a while rather than new music, so when I catch myself doing this too much, the 'i've not heard something I don't like' alarm goes off, and I track down something that a session player I like has played on that i've never heard before, and try and find something new.
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 (willingly)
Now, you can just ask the algorithm to play "something I like".
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.
There was never one culture, but the fragmentation was far more coarse.
I was into D&D, so I was exposed to anime, comics, Monty Python, Mel Brooks, and Tom Lehrer, because those were a certain subculture.
I was never a comic-book nerd, but I could probably name a dozen different series from image comics in the 90s because I was surrounded by people who read them.
I flat out dislike watching Mel Brooks movies, but I can quote about 90% of Spaceballs or Blazing Saddles because that was a part of the vocabulary of that group.
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.
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.
It's a mixed bag; on the one side I agree that during that era, people were exposed to a somewhat broad range of musical styles if they watched TV or listened to radio - early to mid teen me would be exposed to the likes of Madonna, Rammstein, Eminem and Slipknot all in one day. But as someone else pointed out, it was all within the "bubble" of what was popular at that time, and the options to break out of there were limited because there were only so many music television and radio channels, and they would have a limited playlist of <1000 songs at a time, probably even less than that.
Nowadays if you have a streaming subscription or even Youtube, you have instant access to millions of songs and a multitude of curators creating playlists to fit any mood. Granted, Spotify and co will curate some popular playlists, and discovering curators outside of that bubble takes some more effort. But it's there.
We live in interesting times where on the one side we can be overwhelmed by choice, while at the same time delighted with new discoveries. Where budding artists can create from their proverbial basement and self-publish to a potential audience of billions.
>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 wish we had something like /mu/ flowcharts[1] but in a more general way. So after playing a song you can get a question or a prompt of what you liked and get some suggestion based on the input.
But IMO, music recommendation peaked 10 years ago with Last.fm and it's only been downhill since then, which is a shame because we had a lot of cool music in the last years, but the exploration is getting harder. But who knows, maybe I'm just getting old and I don't hang around the hip places anymore.
I really enjoyed 8tracks back in its prime: it was a social network for user-created playlists, and it made finding cool new music really easy. The playlists were often very well thought out; nothing like the playlists you'll find on Spotify.
There is rateyourmusic.com, which is positioned as sort of a Letterboxd for music, but I haven't used it much.
Music discoverability is a big problem I'd like to solve, especially now that I'm in my 30s and don't really have the sort of social circle these days that would expose me to cool new music.
I've toyed with the idea of making an 8tracks-like service, where tastemakers can create playlists to share, and the streaming happens via the API of whatever streaming services you're subscribed to (Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, whatever).
If anyone is interested in a project like this, feel free to reach out.
last.fm is still around, although I don't use it for recommendations.
I've recently enjoyed using RYM to find music. Start with an artist/album I like, click on the genre, and try out the top-rated artists/albums.
It's a manual version of the flowchart, you're right that it'd be neat to automate that. I haven't even tried using RYM tags, but they'd probably be useful input, too.
Yeah, when I mentioned last.fm I meant last.fm radio, a short lived service that if I remember right, it was only supposed to be available on the UK, although with the easily bypassed checks of that time.
The description you make about rym sounds similar, so maybe i’ll take a look.
I started with a very narrow taste as a teen: pretty much just metal, and mostly just black & death.
But it grew broader over time, so that's possible. Now I might dig pretty much any kind of music.
I feel like trying to understand new types of music has an effect beyond just getting familiar with them: brain adapts to process a broader range of stimuli, so that also helps to understand other unrelated genres in future.
I experienced biggest change with Autechre: it was rather difficult to listen to (and I specifically took it as a challenge), but after Autechre I can listen anything :)
And in teens I had to listen something at least 5 times to start enjoying it. Now I can dig it right away. So it feels like brain processes music differently now
>> 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'.
For me almost all of the music I discover is through the personal recommendations or AMVs (are they still called AMVs if they aren't anime related?) or video memes.
Finding new music is easier if people aren't penalized for using it in their own artistic pursuit. [[placeholder for a rant about current implementations of copyright laws being stuffling for artists. There are a lot of those out there, so pick any rant you are comfortable with]]
All artistic works categories should intertwine more, imo. But that's hard when we have one site for music, another for art, and another for video. Social networks like facebook or twitter almost solved it (although, I prefer to think that blogging platforms like tumblr or myspace solved it better).
Common creatives is a very good license for this very reason (relatively easy artistic borrowing), and we should propagandize it more.
That's to say, many people have no good reason to engage with new anymore, having found the stuff that they like and other things they prefer doing.
Which is cosmic, in my opinion.
Not only they do what they like to do listening to the things they like, but also if everyone was always seeking out the newest thing, it would be a neck-breathing horse race between artists.
> 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 like this one, etc. I'm so sick of it.
The way to branch out of your rut is other people. Some band I'd never have listened to, and if I accidentally had, would have skipped it 30 seconds in, have become my favorites simply because someone I had a connection with played it or recommended it. Movies I wouldn't have picked, but watched with someone else, are often better than anything I'd have picked based on my past preferences.
These days, more and more, I am realizing how rewarding it is to read a book or try a new restaurant based on nothing except that a friend with completely different taste likes it. If it turns out to be a dud, it's worth it for when I find something completely new that I do like.
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)
> in another domain, at some restaurants it's possible to order dishes which don't appear on their menu
I've experienced this in Italy. Our host took us to a restaurant where he knew the manager and looked at the menu. He then asked 'but what have you really got?'. After a long very Italian debate (which I didn't understand) with a lot of gesticulation etc we were brought a multi-course meal that was absolutely delicious and involved various things that had just come into season, things that the manager kept back for friends, etc.
I think feeds are practical, it's just that pretty much all mainstream non-RSS feeds are designed to take control away from you and stand in your way, rather than let you be free to explore and discover.
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.
I'd skip less if I could trust that the algorithmic playlists followed "reasonable" paths. But all to often the transitions are really jarring.
(Also, big pet peeve: they need to take into account time of day and factors like weather to do well, as well as habit; I will not respond the same way to a track on a rainy grey winter evening as on a sunny summers day)
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.
> 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?
100% the case. I keep telling my kids that, but they don't seem to get it.
> I imagine though that streaming may change this, since you can dive into just about anything. 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'.
So much so. Spotify became really popular when I was in my 30s and I tried it, listening to the "Discover weekly" for about 6 months. It was 10 weeks before I heard a track I had not heard before and the closest it came to playing an artist I hadn't heard before was a track from a 1-album super-group with two frontmen I was familiar with from their other groups.
Doing the math: I didn't play the list religiously so figure about 20 weeks worth of songs would be 600 songs. I had heard over 80% of the songs before. I had heard nearly all of the artists before. It played a single digit number of songs that I didn't like. If I'm liking 99% of what I'm hearing, something is wrong.
One 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/Benny Goodman instead of Count Basie/Duke Ellington/Slim Gaillard. The services have that music (I can find the songs and seed stations from it) but for whatever reason all of the ones I've tried (Spotify/Apple/Amazon/Pandora, and I have a feeling I've tried others and forgotten) just don't want me to listen to the style I'm looking for.
The technical reason for this is just that the algorithm fails to distinguish between these two groups. Probably its just a hard problem to solve from a sample of what people listen to. I suspect a significant fraction of people that like black swing also like white swing and that results in the algorithm being unable to resolve that there are two features there and not one.
You really need a level of manual curation that a big data statistical model just can't provided at scale.
What I find curious about it though is that it's obviously recognizing the style - it plays 1-2 musicians from the "black" group, then circles into only playing Miller/Goodman/Rat pack and never comes back around to playing the music that I originally was trying to play. If it was behaving the way you are thinking, I'd expect it to mix the two styles.
I think the problem is that the algorithms are based on statistical probabilities from other users. I.e users who listen to X also like to listen to Y. So we’ll add Y to the queue. Then Y becomes the new reference point. I mean that is a gross simplification but essentially if your musical taste is outside of 2 standard deviations of the norm all the algorithms are gonna suck. For me they do.
I’ve definitely trained tidal that I prefer some pretty whacky sub genres (this Northern European country, but only metal with strong brass sections, or contemporary accordion, hurdy gurdy, and a dozen other clusters like that).
I’d guess if you created a profile and loaded it up with just black swing bands from the 30-50’s, it’d do OK.
If not, and I understand their algorithm correctly, it would not only be because no current listeners make that distinction (as discussed up thread).
It would also be because the metadata doesn’t give any signal for it. They seem to use information such as record labels, song writers, producers, guest musicians, etc.
If that metadata has no signal, then my guess is that you’re trying to get it to racially segregate music that was produced before the big interracial marriage scare.
People were worried that if their kids listened to the same musicians, then whites and blacks (or worse!) might marry, so they created white radio stations and black radio stations.
Before that, I imagine there was a lot more interracial collaboration, and the metadata wouldn’t find clean clusters along race boundaries.
It could also be that the old metadata was never digitized.
I wonder if this is the case, or if the model just has year as a heavily weighted factor, because bluntly, Ella and Louis were vastly superior musicians to Frank and Tony. I honestly can’t hear the similarity. It’s like thinking “Oh. You liked The Killers, here’s some One Direction”
The other replies are interpreting this as the algorithm failing, but I have interpreted these sorts of things as intentional design choices, wherein they want the recommender to keep trying to diversify your interests so it's harder for you to just quit the service and move to another one which might not have the same variety (or where you'd have to try to "teach" the recommender again). They've determined that the potential benefit is much better than somewhat annoying you.
This interpretation of their behavior is why I've stuck to buying my music (fortunately that's still common for the genres I'm into).
In this instance - and others in my experience listening to the recommendations on this and similar services - "diversify" is used when "dilute" would be more appropriate.
It’s not really though - if it was known in advance that you did not like a track then there would be no reason to recommend it. It’s the classic precision vs recall trade off: I can create a recommendation algorithm that only recommends your favourite song, forever, and that will have perfect precision but miserable recall. To increase recall we have to accept a drop in precision.
I’ve found that most algorithms tend to reinforce a taste by trying to provide more of the same. They rarely try to bring in something that diverges from the pattern. Of course, the libraries have limits and the algorithms will often match against characteristics that you do not consider relevant.
I would love diversifying, but it does not do that. It does "revert to mainstream" trying to push you toward the most generic thing accestible by association from what you like.
I encounter similar behaviour as you in an entirely different genre - I've long since suspected that Spotify keeps redirecting me back to songs that are either less royalties for them to play, or located closer to me on the CDN to save serving costs.
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 ?
I’d guess it’s just because the algorithm is not smart enough and is just looking at the category as a whole and then playing the most played. So Glenn Miller and Count Basie are in the same category, but more Spotify people who listen to that category listen to Glenn Miller.
Maybe one day, they’ll get smaller clusters and lump you in with other listeners who favor black musicians within that category.
This is my problem with these services in that they are very generic and smooth out the outliers. So it’s good for pleasing the 80%, but people with specific tastes are out of luck. Big time regression to the mean.
I'm personally a fan of the old stuff (Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Chick Webb, Jimmie Lunceford, Slim Gaillard, Ella Fitzgerald to name a few) but the best thing you can do is go to dances and lessons, and when you hear a song you like, go up to the DJ and ask them what it was. The best music is the music you like and that makes you want to dance, regardless of who made it.
On pandora I find every channel I make eventually slides into the nearest "standard" repetive theme (often abandoning the seed content entirely). I always assumed it was nudging me towards the content with the lowest licensing costs.
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.)
The simple explanation is that largely only white artists played on radio stations. Popular songs would be sanitized for white radio by recording what we would now consider as covers. However, it was also rather commonplace for a whole slew of artists to record a popular song at nearly the same time. The proliferation of covers wasn't so overtly motivated by bigotry since an original recording wasn't regarded with the same esteem as today.
>I'm a little puzzled as you're describing a music stylist on skin colour, black vs white
You may not realize this, but in the 1930-1950 era being described in America, there was something called "Segregation" where black people were considered legally inferior to white people. As such, there was a very hard line between "black" and "white", a line that was aggressively enforced by every level of society from lawmaking, policing and justice, to radio and TV access, to education, to neighborhoods, and frankly everything else.
With that context, I think it's very easy to see how there can be "black swing" and "white swing" -- it was in a society that forcibly separated everything into "black X" and "white X".
People not deep into music have hard time verbalize difference between metal and rock or hiphop and rap. Despite differences being super obvious when listening.
>You should be able to describe the sound differences if the music is that distinct.
They are and I can, however the existence of Black Swing is in no way predicated on a difference in sound only.
Consider this: white culture in America continually stole from a legally repressed black culture, including white swing which stole the black art and commercialized it. Even if a 1950 white swing song sounds similar to a 1940 black swing song, there is still a "black swing" and a "white swing".
Frankly, I think trying to reduce history of music down to "the sounds themselves" is a way to whitewash the history and destroy the true knowledge of what happened and why. The context is very important.
Go listen to Straight Otta Compton and then Vanilla Ice and you'll get it. Or for Swing Count Basie vs. the slicker more commercial Glenn Miller but it's subtle.
And then Coltrane and Orman and Davis come and change the whole jazz world.
I didn't ask for examples, I'm familiar with what race these artists are.
My point is if the music actually is so different, it should be noticable and describable without knowing the race of a particular artist. So how would you describe the black music that describes only black musicians but not white musicians from this period, and vice versa.
"Should be describable" is a false metric. We can hear differences between categories and not be able to verbalize what we're hearing. It's the same for anything -- you could walk through a museum showing abstract expressionism and action painting, and feel that one of the styles speaks to you, and yet not be able to put into words how the two styles are different.
The brain can categorize much more easily than it can create a concrete definition for those categories.
> We can hear differences between categories and not be able to verbalize what we're hearing. It's the same for anything
For some reason, the view is widely held that internal thoughts are expressed in words. This would mean that anything you can think can easily be verbalized.
The fact that this view is quite obviously false seems to bother very few people.
There’s an assumption to your argument that I don’t believe holds true, that there is such a significant difference that it should be easily describable.
Talking about the arts is difficult. In everyday conversation, well known phrases for describing the arts include “I know it when I see it” and “if you have to ask, then you’ll never know”. I’m a fan of “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. It just isn’t easy to describing differences in performance and interpretation.
Since it’s widely recognised that describing music is difficult, and since you’re familiar with the artists in question, perhaps you could accept the point in good faith or put into words why you don’t think they are any different?
Sure. 99% of the white musicians at that time were total sellouts who played extremely straight, boring, conservative and no-frills music without any embellishment or soul.
The most obvious difference is the energy level and "rawness" of songs - those white bands had really carefully choreographed performances with minimal deviation, even solos were often written out in similar big bands.
Black musicians often shouted, yelled or mugged during performances - all of these are completely absent in white performances at that time.
Ya you're not being honest in the slightest. The OP likes the music made by the group he mentions. You instead say he's being racist for liking music of that group. I'm having a hard time discerning if you're trolling or serious.
That's extremely patronising, I know well about segregation of that era, and that segregation functionally continued far longer than the 1950s. Blatantly there's a difference, that was what I was asking about the effect of, which you ignored. At least @ Pannoniae provided an answer.
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.
Also isolated by force in many cases: even in states which didn’t have official segregation laws, things like redlining and police enforcement meant you had very distinct communities. This especially went for anything where alcohol is consumed (being drunk leads to deadly mistakes and could lead to crimes being ignored or minimized) or, especially, sexual contexts - if you’re a young black man, you’re probably not going to find it relaxing to be at a club where various white guys are stopping by to mention what’ll happen if you look at a white woman.
Looking of that period is a very sobering reminder of a very dark stain in our national history - and I’ve read too many stories about even well known performers being told they can’t play at certain venues or have to leave immediately afterwards to think everyone wasn’t aware of the stakes:
As an example of how widespread this was, it took Marilyn Monroe at the height of her fame intervening for _Ella Fitzgerald_ to be able to play at a club in Los Angeles! Not the Deep South, not 1917, but very modern California.
> In October 1957 Monroe made a call to the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles, on behalf of Fitzgerald. Monroe used her social status and popularity to make a deal with them. If they allowed Fitzgerald to perform, Monroe promised that she would take a front-row seat every night
The closest I can come to a silver lining for this is that it allowed more artists to find a niche where they weren’t competing with the major national artists but that’s nowhere close to compensation for so much tragedy.
Hey! I have a quite similar music taste. (my favs definitely include Slim Gaillard and Fats Waller, that kind of stuff)
If you have Discord, I've been curating a musicbot with a similar music rotation since I've also been completely fed up with streaming services pushing more Glenn Miller/similar straight bands, not the hip ones :) If you are interested, join my server, the bot is running 24/7: https://discord.gg/wjsC2TUZPK
I haven't used last.fm for a long time and it seems like a shadow of its former self, pre acquisition. I've discovered so much music on there, and I'm getting really disappointed by spotifys repetitiveness. Is last.fm still good to discover new music or is it just harvesting scrobbles?
In this case it's not that ridiculous because "black" here isn't just a skin color, but primarily a subculture/subgenre with some distinct musical attributes.
Nobody finds separating French electronic music into its own subgenre ridiculous. Same with Italian Disco.
Such distinct movements are quite usual, so dissatisfaction about Black Swing on streaming services is understandable.
I think many here are missing the point being made. Of course there are stylistic differences between some groups of artists. The thing is that they probably aren't coded by skin color let alone period location etc, so of course it will bleed. Playing some swing and expecting it to continue to stay within very blurry racial lines is unrealistic, silly, and maybe irresponsible for a recommendation algorithm.
As it's been said, there are better methods of discovery for this purpose. In your example, I'm sure there are Spotify playlists for Italian disco that have been curated.
Also, the subculture exists in the US because of hundreds of years of intentional effort by the majority to destroy any preexisting cultures among black people and prevent any integration with the mainstream.
No, he's saying that within the genre of mid-20th century Swing there are distinct musical traditions found in black vs white bands, which he wishes he could partition against. What's ridiculous about that?
I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s listening to classic rock, and a lot of it I can’t even stand any more due to the incredibly small playlists that most classic rock stations use.
In my 20’s I started listening to a lot of classical and then jazz. In the 90’s a lot of grunge which’s I still love. After that was trance in the 2000’s, then ambient, techno and IDM after that. I still listen to all of these genres today depending on my mood.
I don't think you're completely alone, but you're probably statistically insignificant (don't worry, I'm right there with you).
Like you, I can't stand the music I grew up with all that much (maybe a few songs here and there), but I went through the trance/electronic fixation in the 2000s. Now it's almost anything that I enjoy, which probably doesn't say much, but I'm presently listening to some chillstep and was listening to metal covers of the sea shanties "Santiana" and "Roll the Old Chariot Along." A few weeks ago, I was listening to Norse-inspired works by Einar Selvik.
I can't imagine we're that statistically significant or if streaming may have some impact on availability and interest. I'm unwilling to believe it's a personality trait, for instance. (For another data point, I was born in the early 80s.)
I actually wonder if staying receptive to new music into or past middle age is enhanced by autism. I am a male on the spectrum, in my late 30's, and absolutely nothing about this article rings true to me. I generally operate on a 5 year cycle where I completely reinvent my musical interests, stop enjoying lots of tracks that I used to love (I hate just about eveything I loved at 14), and hang onto a handful of tracks that I consider timeless.
I am already feeling myself reach the end of one of these cycles where I am digging through netlabels and indie internet radio stations looking for the next niche subgenre to become addicted to.
Brains have to have repeated exposure to a stimulus before they find it pleasurable. This is why you may need to try a new food a few times before you develop a liking for it, and the same goes for new music genres.
If you purposefully go out and listen to new music, you'll quickly get accustom to the sounds of new genres. On the other hand, people who are not in the habit of trying new things never train their brain to enjoy new types of music.
It seems plausible. I'm not on the spectrum (so far as I know), but my receptiveness to new music generally has some association with previous genres I enjoyed. I definitely don't experience the "reinventiveness" trait so much as gradual evolution. I don't like early 2000s electronica anymore, some trance I used to enjoy I don't, but now I just love some other genres that are tangentially related (chillstep, etc). On the other hand, I still enjoy some of the same metal groups that I used to (Disturbed, Epica, etc) even though I don't listen as often.
Perhaps there is, if you pardon the expression, a spectrum of receptiveness.
I'm thinking there's something to your speculation, though.
On the other hand, I really appreciate the minimalism of some modern ambient scores, but I'm not sure me from 15-20 years ago would have had any tolerance of it.
I'm the bane of any recommendation algorithm. They just give me random crap because nobody, not even me, can figure out my taste. I like a little bit of virtually everything, with no rhyme or reason.
I find this very interesting, as my path is nearly identical, with the added note (like some other replies) that I just can not stand 60s-70s rock any longer... but I find my musical interests are much wider, and I am listening to more new music than ever before (trance, IDM, experimental, jazz, classical).
I do know people who turn on some streaming service and basically listen to the same genre all day long. I am not sure how they do it. Maybe we are in some small demographic that goes nuts if we do not discover new music?
Spotify gives me half a dozen suggested playlists, and they’re each broadly compartmentalized into different genres (or collections of similar genres).
> I can’t even stand any more due to the incredibly small playlists that most classic rock stations use.
That's every bloody station nowadays. It doesn't matter if its radio, SiriusXM, Spotify, or whatever they all degenerate into a small number of repeated songs.
I loathe this pigeonholing. It makes finding something new you might like REALLY hard.
For example, I don't want an "80s station" with the same old crap. How about a station that plays all the songs released since 1990 by those 80s artists? Nope. Nada.
Or, how about just the other tracks from the same albums. Sure, you've heard "Faithfully" from Journey's "Frontiers" album a zillion times and hate it. Have you heard "Chain Reaction", "Edge of the Blade" or "Frontiers" from the album? Bet you haven't and if you hate their sappy ballads you're likely to enjoy those tracks.
Or, God forbid, brand new artists that sound like what you want. Try coughing up Blossoms from liking 80s. You might get there if you really work by starting from the very specific "jangle pop" angle.
Ever heard anything from "Blackstar" out in public? I know I sure haven't.
However, I would also argue that music is simply a LOT less important to today's youth. It's background noise while doing some other activity and not an activity in and unto itself.
> However, I would also argue that music is simply a LOT less important to today's youth. It's background noise while doing some other activity and not an activity in and unto itself.
Maybe. But then you get t-swizzle teenagers with turntables who rediscover the idea of sitting and listening to an album.
I too listen to different genres of music depending on mood, and I hate when they mix. I used to make mix tapes and later audio CDs like "Alt Rock #" and "EDM #" and I had dozens of those.
Since I went to digital music, I've had the same problem with practically every bit of software and streaming service. They all seem to have some mode where it wants to just mix stuff between genres and it drives me nuts.
My current service is Google Music, and the (auto-generated) "likes" playlist, which really contains only songs that I genuinely really like, even annoys me due to the mixing of genres.
I've found what works best for discovery is to make playlists (by genre, of course) and then from there pick "Start Radio". That is my main way of discovering new music, and when I find songs I enjoy I try to add them to the playlist, too, and "Like" them if they're especially great.
But I do always feel like I'm against the grain, wondering how anyone can ever use any of the auto-generated playlists that aren't constrained by genre, and why anyone would ever build such a thing.
I use Pandora and I'm able to maintain genre-specific stations pretty well. Sometimes it will try to mix something new in but I just dislike that song and it happily keeps playing the genre(s) that I chose for that channel.
I don't know about Pandora, but I've always been cautious to use "dislike" in that way, because I don't know the scope. There's a difference between "I don't want to ever hear this" vs "I don't want to hear it on this station". I use it for the former but not the latter.
My experience has been that dislikes are station specific. I regularly dislike songs on channels in order to shape the genre, even if I actively listen to that song on other stations. Pandora's whole identity revolves around stations, so it would be weird if dislikes were global.
I've found the pandora community post below that seems to confirm it, though I'm not sure whether the community admin answering the question is actually a pandora employee or not.
Yeah, the opaqueness of your actions in Pandora and in other streaming services is always annoying.
Likewise, Pandora allows you to create a station with multiple seeds, or (is it the same?) like songs within a station.
I used to use that, and then I felt like it was narrowing the breadth of the station. I realized that in my mental model I wanted it to be a station of Artist A plus Artist B, so a more expansive station, but Pandora seemed to be treating it as "Artist A ∩ Artist B," i.e. just the small intersection.
I’m similarly weird. I grew up in the 90s and listened to a lot of grunge when I was 14 (the music age we seem to prefer according to the article). But I can barely listen to the music from that time anymore. It just sounds so dated, maybe because I listened to it too much? Something like Pearl Jam or Soundgarden just sounds so dreadful now.
Instead, music has become much more timeless for me. 50/60ies jazz, 70s prog rock, Bowie, 2010s hiphop, it’s really all over the place.
> It just sounds so dated, maybe because I listened to it too much?
Something like that happened to me, again and again.
Overlistening things I love (not necessarily because of me, sometimes it's third parties piling upon my own listening), then at some point I start to not like it anymore to a point ranging from "I have no interest in it anymore" to "it makes me cringe".
Then if I manage to avoid it for some time, often I end up rediscovering it (often by accident) and like it again, but the reason I re-like it is usually deeply different from the original one, and certainly far removed from nostalgia.
Not listening for some time indeed sometimes helps. I now try to avoid listening music I really really like too often. It's something beautiful you take out of its box every few months/years. Stuff like Ole Coltrane or Miles Davis' Filles de Kilimanjaro.
Me too, but it may be because as a teenager I listened to heavy metal. It was awesome, and I still like hearing those songs occasionally. But it's so loud and exhausting that I don't seek it out. Instead, I'm usually drawn back to Motown and R&B from the 60s and 70s, which is definitely before my time.
They use a set of researched tracks by Arbitron and others seeking to maximize AD revenue by demographic.
There is a TON of great classic rock to enjoy that never sees airplay and the reason is the researched tunes have "known" demographics that can be sold.
I have started a little research project wherein I have been harvesting the feeds of various Internet-active radio stations so I can look for the "deep cuts." Not just for classic rock, but for various "new wave" stations, as well as combining old "top 500" lists, and so on. I am nowhere near done, but I have made some notes that confirm old suspicions.
One, you're quite right about classic rock having a lot of deep cuts that just don't make it outside of some specific instances. On the other hand, not only was new wave not entirely congruent to the 1980s, but a lot of what gets called new wave on various stations is only music that existed in the 1980s, rather than being actual new wave. New wave was fairly tight and the rest is padding.
"Darkjazz" really came and went, and it's unfortunate. I'm still working my way through it but there was a hell of a drop-off.
Speaking of researched tracks, I think when an artist dies, there's a contraction of what of their tracks get played on air.
Another thought, this one purely math. If you bought, say, ten CDs every year, new releases, well, the average age of your collection will age at about half your own age rate. The only ways to prevent that, if this concerns you, is to either jettison your old music or gather ever-increasing amounts of new music.
All of this is to say that, unless your preference is "whatever is on the radio ... played a reasonable volume" (Pictures for Sad Children), you're swimming upstream, against the fantastically evolved. Taste gave way to faddishness, then payola, and now, well, The Algorithm. It's a fight to find what you might like rather than what is just being extruded like soft serve.
Indeed! Your comment resonates with my own thought and experiences.
In another comment, I said it helps to be around others seeking new tunes. It helps a lot! Their bias into our system can bend things back into a fairly normal curve. It is like rolling back the clock on our music age.
Right now, I am living that with people at their music seeking peak. Super fun and very invigorating.
Aww hell yeah, dark jazz is great. I assume you know Bohren & der Club of Gore and Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble? (curious of any recommendations if you know more good stuff!)
I am working on one of my Master Lists, but the /r/darkjazz subreddit was good. Now, it is mostly dead but for spam from randos who aren't within miles of the sound trying to flog their own efforts. Black Chamber, Free Nelson Mandoomjazz, you might try those for giggles.
I had expected that some of Badalamenti's stuff would have opened up since his death, like his score for Witch Hunt, but no luck. His stuff was sort of a wellspring, among others, which intermingled into that little creek we called darkjazz, for a while.
I originally got into it as a primary component of a long set of mixes for a particular mood, namely that I would have instrumentals (primarily darkjazz) buffering slow tempo "torchy" kinds of songs (Mel Torme, Julie London, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday) and the "once every ninety minutes" track which was a little newer. The idea being that the darkjazz doesn't call too much attention to itself and keeps the mood going.
Im much the same, but today I'm constantly in the search for anything new, anything in any genre that breaks the well-worn formulae and surprises me, but it's honestly hard to find, everything is derivative.
I want a station that plays everything that was ever in the rock top 100 from around 1950 to around 2010. There has to be all kinds of great stuff that never gets played on "oldies" stations. Probably a bunch of duds too, but if they made it as far as the top 100, there can't be that relatively many.
You could do this with almost any genre, I suspect.
I listen to anything new I can get my hands on without a bunch of ads disrupting the vibe.. YouTube is my favorite music resource these days, as the videos are better in telling me more about whether an artist is genuine (non Ai, and non-industry-plant).
The genre is not really defining in most cases for me, because so much is mislabeled, or not even labeled at all, and I've found in searching music by genre, that most of the recommendations are flooded with SEO spam, and typically never the best music within the genre to begin with...
Ai recommendations will also primarily be based on what makes platforms and their partners the most money, which is often coincidentally the generic sounding pop drivel we're all so used to being played in every retail outlet around us, the best music I've noticed is often hidden below 10k views or less.
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.
I had the realization a few weeks ago that I no longer listen to very much from before 2016. I didn’t pay attention to how it happened, but less than 20% of what I have actively listened to in the past 3 years going by all these recap playlists is from before 2016 and I keep adding new music every year. Half of the music from before that cutoff point is basically music that was new to me in the last few years even though it’s older.
I couldn’t imagine thinking that would ever happen 15-20 years ago. I’ve also realized that I’m not interested in trying to change that at all, because I’m now of the opinion that so far music has gotten better every single decade I’ve been alive; and the 2020s are off to a great start on that front.
On average, music is big for people during the teenage years, then other things in life take over and that same music continues the biggest music for them.
This is very different if music is a lifelong hobby for you. I'm in my forties and some of the artists I most listen to today I discovered during recent years. Still I find articles like this interesting because I can learn something about a larger demographic while being different myself.
> 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 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.
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.
> If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you.
Assuming what's "actually important to you" remains fixed as you age. The article suggests otherwise, with caveats:
> At the same time, stagnation is not a certainty. Research suggests that open-eardness and the discovery of new songs can be cultivated. Finding new music is a challenge, but it is achievable with dedicated time and effort.
Yeah - my taste has pretty steadily churned slowly over and over and over and that's how I like it.
There's so much music out there. It's like asking "when do you stop finding new books": you only stop finding if you stop looking. I enjoy the looking, and I see no risk at all of running out even if no more new stuff is ever made.
Yep. I'm in my 40's and I still every day check what new albums were released, and listen to as many of them as I can. Of course I take charades to old music every now and then, but over 50% of what I listen is new albums...
I think already this albums thing might leak my age. I guess people don't really listen to albums anymore...
Me neither, for two reasons. One, I was a DJ briefly as a young person and digging crates for new discoveries and hidden gems is still as fun as ever. And two, I exercise a lot, and you can only run to the same song so many times before it loses its juice (at least temporarily).
> 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.
Where did I say people engage relatively casually with music? I highlighted a form of engagement that is (a) extremely serious, but (b) actively undermined by novelty.
You're right that a lot of people seem to view lyrics as being at best an annoyance; I've seen multiple people on HN argue with a straight face that in order to translate a song from one language to another language, it's not necessary for the meaning of the new lyrics to be similar to the meaning of the old lyrics.
This is not a sense of "translation" that I'm familiar with for other linguistic phenomena.
I've also seen people take offense at the idea that the concept of a "song" might involve singing.
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?
- 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.
How deep are you digging that you can say most that is out there isn't good? I find this surprising. Or do you mean good as in to your liking? The amount of talent out there is kind of mind blowing to me.
This mostly an assessment at scale. By volume, irrespective of genre, and even accounting for subjectivity, most of the material that gets published isn’t very good.
That being said, I generally don’t agree with conclusions like “culture is frozen”. You are correct that there is _more_ high quality material available than ever before. The challenge is just that it’s harder than ever to find it.
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.
For 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 those times now I would probably mostly listen to Cat Stevens, Neil Young, The Who, The Ramones, The Dickies, The B-52s, Devo, Queen, The Urban Verbs, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, The Moody Blues, Kansas, The Clash, The Dead Kennedys, Kate Bush, Synergy, Jean-Michel Jarre, Talking Heads, and a few I'm forgetting.
If I decide I want to listen to some current popular music I might listen to something the the Billboard Hot 100 playlist on Spotify.
Of course I'm going to find that nearly everything on there is not nearly as good as the music from artists listed above.
But I'd find the same thing if instead of today's Billboard Hot 100 I listened to a playlist of a Billboard Hot 100 list from the '70s or '80s, or listened to a recording of a random day's broadcast of a '70s or '80s popular music radio station.
And I'm sure that in 2040 if I ask someone who is 37 to make me a playlist of music from 2024 (when they were 21) that playlist is going to sound a lot better to me than the 2024 music I hear now when I decide to check out current music.
Just like my list above is the '70-80s artists that I'm still listening to 50 years later, that 37 year old's playlist will be the 2024 music that he's still listening to 16 years later.
> it is a small subset of what they were actually listening to back then.
I think there was also more variation on that than there is now. Music cost a fair amount of money to buy so what you heard as a kid depended on what people around you were spending hundreds of dollars on, and radio stations were far more diverse in the era before ClearChannel bought everything and consolidated onto a handful of choices. My wife and I had relatively similar suburban upbringings in many ways but there are a ton of 80s and 90s bands I was more familiar with because I happened to live within range of two different college radio stations at different points, and she basically had only very big commercial options.
There’s still variety these days but I think it’s undercut a lot because every teenager with a smartphone has access to pretty much anything, and the social media pressure to like the big names has never been stronger.
a lot of this is your choices. You may be choosing to engage less with new music.
I spend at least an hour each week doing something that I can also listen to new music at the same time, and I add it to my favorites, so that those dark AI recommendations start adding similar recommendations to my listening mixes. I don't listen to top 100 because by and large I don't like it. In modern music my taste has shifted away from prog rock and classic into techno/psytrance/etc. All it took was spending a bit of time looking, every week, to enrich my taste in music and make sure I wasn't repeating the stuff I heard on the radio growing up forever.
It's up to you to do it. It's your choice to make.
SXM satellite radio has channels based on decades, and they often do top 100 countdowns for this day in that decade, and for the most part the selection is absolute crap until they get to the top 5-10.
So, yeah, survivorship bias is what you are seeing here, and only the best 0.1% of songs of any decade will be played decades later.
I’m not convinced that we stop finding new music, we just become less zealous or outward about it as we get older. When I was young, I was all about talking music, having the right DJ list for roadtrips, etc, etc and now? I just hit play and don’t think too much about it. Probably because it’s harder to attend shows, less relevant to my social life, etc. I’ve also found as I’ve gotten older that I just care less about the specifics of what the song or artist is. I’ll anchor to a song I really like and then let Apple’s infinite play loop take it from there.
>I’m not convinced that we stop finding new music, we just become less zealous or outward about it as we get older. When I was young, I was all about talking music, having the right DJ list for roadtrips, etc, etc and now? I just hit play and don’t think too much about it. Probably because it’s harder to attend shows, less relevant to my social life, etc.
Well, older people (40, 50, even 60+) more passionate about music, they still do all of those (going to concerts, discussing music, crafting the right playlist for roadtrips), not unlike like they did in their 20s.
So, yes: most people do care less about music and stop finding new music.
This is maybe true if we talk about superstar kind of show. But I think it's now easier than ever to find out about little gigs, which were hard to find before social networks.
I live in medium size capital city (Belgrade), there are options to listen to live music every single day. Sometimes it's just classic music, sometimes there are cover bands, but quite often there's a chance to listen to original music. And these small gigs are quite cheap or even free. I very often listen a song or two (Spotify or youtube really help with this!), then if it looks promising I listen to some more while walking to the show.
Sure, sometimes it's not good. But very often I like it a lot and you can bet I listen to it much more focused then if that same music came on autoplay at home.
If you're in big enough city or have something bigger nearby - find a way to discover new gigs, follow venues, event organizers, local cultural institutions, festivals, etc. That's my main use of Facebook.
The artists have made it harder. They've pushed for aggressive one sided fan behavior policies (phone less), they've increased aggressively with the prices, the quality has gone down with many established bands, pushed large shows without building a performance with the space, and they've done a ton of things that don't help their product.
It feels more like greed in the business than an experience.
That being said I'm still sitting on the idea of paying 123$ for cage the elephant show on an album I haven't heard yet.
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.
Thank you for pointing this out. Everytime I bring up the "phone free" thing, everyone keeps jumping on and saying "well i don't like people filming". The situation that you mentioned is exactly how I do that and what I've seen.
The exception to this is extremely mainstream performances that attract people, where it may be the one big thing they do in the year or the next.
They just want to brag about it, I guess. Like with photos of their meals and... well, lots of things. To each their own, but I stopped attending most shows mainly because of the annoying seas of phones in front of me.
I'd bet that most of such recordings are not even shared or perhaps even looked at by the author (personally, I'm guilty of this). It's just some sort of compulsion to record it.
There are far better ways to address people holding up their phones to record than to outright ban them from everyone. There are strong reasons (Bataclan) to need and have those there.
What's with the sympathy for the performer? It's hard for them to even see the audience. Most of the light is focused on them and the audience is in the dark.
What's the better way? I'm not saying phones need to be physically removed from people, just kept in pockets/bags/whatever.
As for my comment about the performer, I'm just picturing it from their perspective and to me it would feel odd to go from looking at people to looking at phones. I'm sure there are lots of people who film with their phone lights on, so that's got to be noticeable through the stage lights.
> There's nothing worse than hundreds of phone screens glowing in your face while you're trying to enjoy a live act.
Plenty of worse things. People throwing up on you. Harassment. Tarps. Passing out. Being sold water even though it's supposed to be free. Taking bottle caps away from you. People talking during the show. People yelling about politics.
I don't enjoy all the phones either, but it is what it is.
I listened to a lot of Apple Music recommendations while getting my three kids to sleep over the years. I would say that in my 40s I’m discovering more new music, and music I genuinely love, than I did in all my teens. I don’t get to go to a lot of gigs, but I go to one big festival a year and it’s the bands in a tiny font that I get excited about. Yeah most stuff is shit, but there’s just so much of everything.
What were you trying to do? After Rdio folded, I switched from Spotify after failing to get it to give me anything other than top 40 pop (no matter what I started with, it was two tracks and then “have you tried our top hits? You will!”). Apple Music wasn’t as good as Rdio back then but it’s gotten better even within relatively obscure sub genres in my experience.
Yeah I'm more open minded now than I was when I was younger. All my taste seems to stem from the same roots (for example I like a wide variety of electronic music but the common thread is sounds and/or harmonies rooted in funk/soul/jazz/blues) but when I was a teenager I was only interested in rap music.
“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 anywhere as cynical as this take.
On another note, I find Elton John’s Rocket Hour on Apple Music to be refreshing in terms of how earnestly he approaches new music and new artists. If you haven’t heard it, it’s nothing like what you might expect based on the title. It’s not “Elton plays songs from his back catalog and talks about them,” but rather “Elton plays new songs you haven’t heard by artists you haven’t heard of yet, and interviews them as his peers.”
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).
The Runaways? Ford and Jett both started their careers there, and while I don't know if Ford ever anchored herself in the literature, Jett covered "I Love Rock&Roll" and had it covered in turn by Parton, which then leads to a fair chunk of that century.
Been a while but I thought it was pretty interesting when I watched it, coming from a black metal and punk background that was too underground when that pop cultural thing happened to notice.
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 to clean up the documentation if there's interest
This looks great - how do you then keep the subset that you want to continue listening to in the longer term? Is there an "extract to my music collection" feature - or is this your music repository?
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!
It doesn't seem like the article makes much of a distinction between newly released music and music that you haven't listened to yet. Personally, as I get older I've lost the ability to listen to the same Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd etc albums for the 100th time. I cringe every time I hear the opening of Don't Stop Believing. So I've kept trying to get deeper into prog and other genres lately as I'm just burnt out on the old (good) stuff.
To me it depends a lot on the music... if it's more complex, or has more emotional depth I can usually continue to enjoy it almost indefinitely and get something new out of it each time.
I'm sad to admit Led Zeppelin has lost some of it's charm after many listening, which makes me sad because I enjoyed it so much in the past. I've found a lot of Pink Floyd stuff is complex enough that I'm still enjoying it and noticing new things after many decades of listening to it. Watching videos of Floyd playing live also opened up a whole new appreciation for the music.
Lots of the music I enjoyed as a kid/teenager had themes I can only now understand in my late 30s, and didn't really appreciate or fully grasp back then.
Overall, a lot of prog really seems to have enough complexity to remain interesting for a long time. Most of Tools albums, I seem to not enjoy much at first, but enjoy more, and notice more things each time I listen, even after hundreds of listens.
The same music that is complex enough to remain interesting over time, usually doesn't compress well and is really damaged as a low bitrate MP3. I've found those same albums I listen to most year after year are the ones I sought out lossless versions of.
Even on crappy old junk headphones, still an awesome song that I don't think I'll ever get tired of.
Granted, I don't generally let services make a playlist for me, and I don't beat the old songs to death. I like more variety than that.
I have however, rolled my eyes when listening to services that have an "80's rock" or "top 90's songs" only to have them play the exact same dozen-or-so songs that they did the last time I visited that channel. No thanks!
That's also probably one of the reasons I rarely listen using a service-generated playlist/channel. I think they are maximized for the service's profit, not for the listener's enjoyment.
I still like Nirvana, and think they defined a moment, but let’s be honest here. Dave Grohl has had a longer career with Foo Fighters, and Cobain hasn’t put out new stuff since 1994.
Prog is making a bit of a comeback. Black Midi brought it back to the limelight for critics I think and the london scene is kind of all in on the sound.
Possible confounding factor: they only studied Spotify and Deezer users. This is like studying Kindle users for insights on readers at large. I would not be surprised if there were a correlation between using streaming services (or not) and openness to new music. Study, say, Bandcamp users, and I bet you get a different picture.
I love opening the bandcamp homepage and seeing the live purchases scroll past, people all over the world buying music I've (mostly) not yet discovered!
I think the main thing that reduces music discovery as a parent is sheer exhaustion, you just don’t have as many hours anymore. It’s not just that you’re listening to less new music, you’re listening to less, period.
Meanwhile, having a kid getting into music is fabulous. I’ve been forced to listen to every Taylor Swift album. I know who Olivia Rodrigo is. I managed to discover Wet Leg all on my own. Steve Lacy, Mitski, Zutomayo, sohodolls…
And then there’s The Crane Wives. Honestly one of the best things I have heard in a very long time. Try “Keep You Safe”, if you don’t like it the rest is probably not going to be your thing. If you do, there’s a lot more like it.
Well I'm in my 50s, and I mostly stopped finding new music when record labels, streaming, and social media destroyed the prospects for people who would otherwise make that new music for me to find.
New stuff still arrives (you're not going to predict that me-at-15-loving-Megadeth will much later also love Billie Eilish or Gin Wigmore or Mirel Wagner or ...) but most "new music" is garbage by the standards set by about 50 years of music (much of that before I was alive and thus well before my "peak influence").
I suspect the "findings" of the article suffer from environmental effects that weren't considered/controlled.
I'm closing in on 50s, and what I miss the most out of the music I grew up with are actual cohesive albums that work as a single artistic unit. I think the 70s were the golden age of albums, and then slowly we moved towards the world of albums being just random collections of tracks, with one or two good ones and the rest "filler." Now, do many modern musicians even bother to release albums anymore? Seems like it's just track after track now.
You might really like the new Cindy Lee double album[1]. The artist decided to only release it as one long video on Youtube instead of separating the songs so it can be played by streaming companies.
For people who want to purchase the album, they can purchase the entire album, or none of it.
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.
A peek at billboard 100 from 2004 might surprise you. Same themes, new style and production. That said the rise of trap, particulary the repetitve autotuned bars, certainly hasn't helped in the lyricism dept.
You'll of course find great talent in every generation. While I don't like the majority of the current top billboard there's some talent behind those tracks.
Have you tried adapting to newer discovery methods like http://rateyourmusic.com/ or http://last.fm/ or subreddits like reddit.com/r/LetsTalkMusic , reddit.com/r/IndieHeads , reddit.com/r/HipHopHeads ?
I 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 was first east coast hip hop (KRS One, M.F. Doom) then psychedelia and classic rock adjacent music (by that time I was really sick and tired of overplayed classic rock, one time I was tripping on acid at 2 am and called up the local college station to complain about the Doobie Brothers song they played that is on a twice a day during drive time and the program manager picked up, I told him to play what he thought was good music and he put on Miles Davis.)
Since then I have had pulses of being interested in "new" (to me) music but it's usually been a bit old. The last round has been the Super Furry Animals (Mwng for the win!) and similar UK bands like The Charlatans. I just found out that I like some of Cyndi Lauper's later albums. Before that it was early Japanese electronica like Yellow Magic Orchestra and Isao Tomita. Before that Synthesizer by Information Society was a revelation.
Recently my son got into the big hits of Fleetwood Mac but I was amazed that they made a lot of music before they hit it big and some of it I like.
I don't listen to a lot of "new" music in the sense of "released in the last few years" and I'd be inclined to blame the prevalence of auto-tune for that. People I know in the music industry make all sorts of excuses ("Don't you like the vocoders on Daft Punk?", "... look I like the vocoders in Laurie Anderson's work and in Neil Young's *Trans&", "Isn't T-Pain talented?", "... I got no problem with T-Pain, I've got a problem with all the other rappers who sound like T-Pain") but if I hear something on the radio that is auto-tuned I'm pretty quick to change the channel.
My next project is to learn something about traditional and contemporary Chinese music.
When I lived in South Korea, one of the things that struck me was how much "flatter" the generations there were in terms of pop culture and music taste and awareness, compared to the US. I worked in an office with a bunch of suit-and-tie businessmen who were mostly in their 40s to 60s, and if you were to ask them about any current K-pop group, they all knew their hit songs.
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.
Pandora has introduced different tunings that help a bit with this. Not a continuous slider but provides some presets to indicate how wide a net to cast in different dimensions. Normal, Crowd Favorites, Deep Cuts, Discovery, Newly Release.
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.
So true. I remember those days very fondly. There was a real community of listeners back then. Within that circle you shared albums and playlists, commented on and discussed them.
Plus, it had a persistant queue that could handle single songs as well as albums and playlists as individual items which could be moved freely. Everything I was interested in was added to the queue and I could be certain it'd still be there tomorrow. Sort of like a musical backlog.
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.
> This study identifies 33 as the tipping point for sonic stagnation, an age where artistic taste calcifies, increasingly deviating from contemporary works
In the time since I turned 33 I've experienced an almost-complete switchover in genre preference, from pop/rock/light metal to country. Almost all of it has been found through Spotify's Daily Mix N, where n >= 2.
As best I can figure #1 is your 'guaranteed hits' - songs that you have listened to the most. As you go higher it may be your most-loved music of a different genre or the 1st genre again but with more new-to-you music.
As a middle aged guy, I've used TikTok to find new music.
Spotify recommendations are kind of crap after a bit. It's a fundamental problem with similarity based recommendations and people getting stagnant. I don't want to listen to the greatest bands of the 90s and 00s. I want to listen to new bands that were influenced by those bands.
I have a similar issue with Spotify too. Everywhere on my page is stuff I am completely bored of listening to, but since its the only thing I can easily access, I end up listening to the same things and Spotify thinks I want more of it.
Instagram has the same issue. I watch a few horse videos and all of a sudden my feed is horses for months.
Whatever. I find new stuff all of the time. Anything but show tunes, most country, and recent pop music is fair game. Tidal has good shit whereas Spotify will randomly reach into your account to delete playlists or remove content without warning. Also, the Spotify app no longer controls volume across devices uniformly, doesn't work at all on Apple TV, and is generally getting buggier and crappier with popups and moving things around for no reason. I'm downloading elsewhere to use with PlexAmp and buying vinyl because you just can't get everything via streaming.
>the Spotify app no longer controls volume across devices uniformly
I actually really enjoy this feature myself - all my devices need to be at different audio levels to not blow out the speakers, so having per-device (or virtual device via Spotify Connect) control is great.
I'm saying it worked but now it doesn't work as well as it did. I don't use the Everywhere group. The Marantz app (or the iPhone app) is absolute shit because it starts at some random volume and goes up or down huge amounts. Instead, I'll use the Tidal app because that at least doesn't fuck with the volume or end up overdriving my mains and 5 kW sub.
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."
I'm just 40 but it sounds like we are like minded in a lot of ways. Never stop being curious. There's always something new out there. The joy of discovering some obscure metal band with 7 followers on Spotify or bandcamp that you intensely resonate with is unmatched. It's one of my favorite experiences.
One of the things I've learned about myself over the past decade is I'm an outlier in terms of the listener profile. I crave albums over songs. That crafted experience an artist creates for the listener makes it all for me. Perhaps it's because I'm also a musician, but something about a group of songs becoming greater than the sum of it's parts has an endearing, emotional impact on that listening session. I think a lot of playlist driven listening loses out on that.
The unstated underlying assumption that only a commercially constructed popular zeitgeist qualifies as “new” for self-discovery purposes is corporate lickspittle fawning at its most conceited.
The author also appears to trip over the ecological fallacy in responding to population results as though they apply to themselves the individual. They do not. This is broad information of interest to anthropologists and marketing droids, it doesn’t define or describe a person.
- 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.
I'm in my 40s and still vibing on a mix of novel and nostalgia. I don't know what my secret is but I've never been in a position where discovering new music was difficult. I don't listen to much radio, but when I do, it's a community station with people that care about music. I don't use any streaming services. I have a large, physical music collection that I still add to, both CD and vinyl, supplemented by a digital collection from places like Bandcamp. I explore a bit on Youtube and Discogs, I read music zines and local whats ons, I take recommendations from friends, I go to gigs: local pubs, concerts, festivals. Music seems to come easily if I put myself in front of it.
I went to a gig last night and saw a great band I found a few months ago with two other new (to me) bands and came home with a head full of tunes, strengthened friendships, and a CD from the merch stand.
It's just part of my life and I give it some time each day. :)
Most people stop making an effort to expand their taste in art at a young age because it's not useful for them. People can afford to have narrow tastes and still enjoy music. If parents made being exposed to different types of music as important to one's growth as being exposed to different types of vegetables, I doubt we would have this cultural phenomenon.
Theoretically, I should have given up trying to find new music years ago, but that hasn't happened. This is because music is the only artform that resonates with me on a spiritual level. Finding new music is important to me because it is a part of my identity. Contrast this with the fact I haven't been to a cinema since 2022. I don't broaden my taste in cinema because it has little impact on how much I enjoy films.
> as being exposed to different types of vegetables
I am told there was a time in ireland when every restaurant, no matter what the cuisine, offered a "meat and two veg" plate for the grandparents; somehow I doubt there was much variety in those vegetables.
I loved this article. I have about 4k songs saved in my "liked" playlist on Spotify, majority of them were from when I was 20 to 24, then it tapered off a lot. I turned 30 this year and I still like to discover new music but not as much as I did in my early 20s.
This is why folks in their 40s+ end up still listening to the same stuff. lol. The article was right about that.
Acts like Greta Fleet help bridge those gaps between old school sounds and new music. Electronica has never been easier to get into as well and there’s a nostalgia for those old school synthwave vibes.
Like all things, there’s an ebb and flow to music and musical taste over time. You’ll find as you understand music more, you’ll be listening to classical on a Thursday morning just as much as you’ll listen to pop, rock, or jazz.
By the time you reach 60, your musical tastes should be broad enough to appreciate all music, hopefully. Obviously some will reach that point faster than others. Musicians tend to be the fastest since they are students of music.
I still have a rock playlist I created in my late 20s on Spotify that I listen to this day. Mostly started as a digital version of my in-car CD collection.
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 meet someone and cycle again. lol.
My Spotify Remix in 2020 was pretty much all depression music.
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 end of John and Christine McVie's marriage, as well as Buckingham and Nicks's long-term romantic relationship. Fleetwood, meanwhile, was in the midst of divorce proceedings from his wife, Jenny, and had also begun an affair with Nicks. The pressure on Fleetwood Mac to release a successful follow-up album, combined with their new-found wealth, led to creative and personal tensions which were allegedly fuelled by high consumption of drugs and alcohol.
Nothing like a musical star to provide a good corn king/wicker man sacrifice on behalf of society...
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.
Agreed. I'm 27 and still save a lot of new music. But I've looked back at my older playlists from college and was probably saving 10x more songs back then. Full-time job definitely affected that
Coincidentally, Fishbone was part of the wave of awesome music in the early 1990ies when I was finding new music because there was good music and before music started not being quite so good any more.
It's such an amazing coincidence that they made the good music right when I was young. I got lucky, I guess.
I remember reading a headline that Despacito had been displaced from the #1 position on Billboard after a 16 week run, while I had never heard the song. At that point I became a bit more intentional about trying to find new music.
Very interesting to see these things observed in numbers. Impressive 80ies peak among us gen X!
My music taste brain was initially formatted by that 1990ies idea of MTV mainstream vs independent (which paradoxically, also defined itself through existing on MTV, just in different niches), and from there it had been a slippery slope towards ever nichyer niche. Stuff where the big hits now have accumulated total Spotify plays in four-digit range, if they do exist there. When eventually I realized that winning at niche one-upmanship is a lonely celebration, what followed was mostly silence.
I think my new music discovery slowed down because the music distribution system stopped propagating metadata. I discovered a lot of new music by looking at the back of the album cover or CD case and following the threads. Who else has this producer or session musician worked with? Who actually was the songwriter and what else have they done? What other albums are on this label? Now none of that is discoverable from streaming. It's just primary artist and song title--every track is just an isolated data unit apparently not even made by people.
This is fantastic, thank you so much. It reminds me of the Bernard Lenoir show on France Inter back in the days. Will be spending days digging this new treasure trove from Montreal :)
Glad to help! Fehmiu's show is also good. And I should add that once I loaded the song's into Apple Music and started favoriting + adding to playlist, Apple has been able to suggest many similar songs and artists for me. I'm sure Spotify etc can do the same.
There seems to be a focus on something about the brain "calcifying" or people getting stuck in their own pattern over time here.
That may be a component, but I think anothet thing that correlates heavily with the graphs presented in the article is simply: When you have enough spare time to prioritize music. (although you could explicitly prioritize it like some commenters mention)
I still find lots of new music, but it always comes in periods of my life when I have some leeway, and those are fewer and farther between now.
I don't believe music was better in my day but I do think the older you get the harder it is to find things that sound truly fresh (e.g. someone like black midi would probably blow me away if I was 16 now but instead they just keep reminding me of various acts I've heard before years ago)
Similarly I find myself being a lot more interested in competent but not especially ambitious late period albums by acts where their comfort with knowing what their sound is and how to play with it can be the main source of interest.
My old process (still the same) was going on RateYourMusic and looking at the user lists. If a list has a title that resonates with me I tend to find some really cool albums in there. I'll listen to a sample on YT and grab it on Soulseek, and if I really like the album I buy it on vinyl.
I used Spotify for 10 years or so and it never seemed good at recommending me music. Within the last two years I cancelled my subscription and have returned to the old ways.
The sad thing is, life is too short to hear all the amazing music out there!
There was a time when SXSW released one track from each featured artist on a massive torrent. That kept me going on new music for nearly the entire year. Repeat.
My 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.
Why's the writer listening to james blunt still, that your beautiful song sucked when it came out too lol
I used to be really into music, writing, releasing, curating everything. But yeah around my 30s idk, i lost interest i guess like any other hobby. I listen to podcasts now when I drive. In my 20s finding music was like hard work. I went through a lot music all the time.
One thing I think is interesting is older music seems to be sticking around more. Like maybe in the 60s and on more timeless music was written? like in 2000, Idk anyone that listened to 40s or really 50s music, music that would be 50-60 years old at the time. But in the 2020s, 1960s, 70s, 80s music is still around. I think still has a lot of cultural relevancy. Or maybe the kids today don't care about the beatles or jimi hendrix? I find that hard to believe though. In 20 more years are we going to say Queen and ACDC sucked and never listen to it again?
What do rebelious kids and angsty teens listen to now? Who are the red hot chili peppers, and weezers and blink182s right now.
This doesn’t match my personal experience at all. I hardly liked any of the music I heard on the radio as a teenager. (That would be the 90’s). Later on, I found that I liked the current music better- and there are still songs from my 20’s that I come back to. But each decade I discover new artists, I stay with those records for a while, then they start sounding dated and I move on. I do put deliberate effort into discovering new artists though. And, I’m a musician myself so maybe that’s part of it. I really listen to almost nothing from my teenage years though. There is such an incredible amount of new music coming out every day that it’s hard to keep up with it! Right now I’m listening to 100 gecs a lot, childish gambino, narrow head, ohtis, thee oh sees, fazerdaze, and wimps.
Anybody who really just gets stuck on music from their teens is missing out on so much I can’t even express it.
The author seems to be describing what happens when one's primary relationship with music is one of consumption. It is easy (for me at least) to find new music when you are looking for inspiration in your own practice of making music. Most people don't make music though so I'd imagine it's easy to get stuck in that rut.
I see what you're saying in terms of additional motivation to find new music.
But, is your average person's relationship with music "one of consumption" in such a way that causes stagnation? This comes off as gatekeepy. People may not make their own music, but I imagine many people listen to music as a form of inspiration.
Ya, I'm positive that familiarity with creating music skews listening preferences towards new music. Which is funny because then people that shit on modern, new music are statistically the ones not being able to create and not as deeply familiar with music.
I still don't get why after all this investment in AI Spotify can't just give me a seamless never ending stream of music. I need to keep selecting from playlists they generate which often repeat some songs extremely often. All I want from a Spotify interface is play/pause/skip/like/dislike. Then use those to continuously adapt the selection of the next song. If you want to be fancy add a warmup mode where you ask me some questions or show me some songs to like/dislike for that particular moment so that the initial selections start warmer. If I had that I could explore a lot more music. Because I don't I end up just listening to the greatest hits of things I remember and then that further pollutes the dataset to the point where my musical tastes must stagnate.
It’s been a decade at least since I heavily used Pandora but I remember it being even worse than Spotify at this. The algorithm seemed to latch on to one or two tracks from any given artist and they’d continue popping up no matter how I trained it. Great as a discovery tool for artists I guess, but as endless radio Spotify does a way better job at least trying to reach into back catalogs and including more than one or two songs. There’s still a lot of room for improvement, and it does seem to get hung up in similar ways.
You can ban a particular song from appearing on a Pandora station. I've found this to be an effective way to get out of song ruts. The algorithm does have a tendency to replay certain songs more than is warranted, but if you get rid of them it recovers into a state with a decent amount of variety.
2 of my favorite Pandora stations have turned into a mix of the artist’s discog and I suspect it only happened because I liked too many of their songs in the same day. The variety is better in terms of similar artists but I cant say I find much new music this way.
"Ah…there it was again: an example of how someone’s musical tastes evolve with age… it’s just something that happens with most people… most of take that as a given…not me, though…this is something that’s always fascinated me…there has to be some science behind why we listen to different types and styles of music as we go through life… So I tracked down this science and I have some answers…we’ll call this episode “what a drag it is getting old—musically”…"
Not being a user of Spotify nor other services, I can only say that I continue to find new music in each decade. And I like much of newer music better than the old classics (which is saying something because I started listening in the 1960s). Thus what Parris says doesn't speak to me.
I can't buy an argument about there being too many options. If there were a lot of options, and you liked a lot of them, you could just randomly sample new albums, or listen to whatever Spotify told you to listen to, and there would be no problem finding new music. I suspect the issue is there's a lot of music out there and none of it sounds like what you want.
Note that this isn't saying music today is bad, it's got nothing to do with that.
At a certain point, changing trends in music cause it to drift too far from your internal model (developed in youth) for what a song should be, and it becomes hard to take, decreasing returns with increasing effort, and you say "fuck it, I'll just listen to what I already like for the rest of my life".
I also listen to a ton of music in languages I don’t understand, from Balkan dance music to Brazilian pop and psychedelia.
And there’s a certain DJ in New Orleans (Mark LaMaire) I listen to every week who has turned me onto a whole mountain of music I’d never heard of before.
Age 13-29, I mostly had oodles of free time to listen, explore music and a network of friends sharing their discoveries.
Age 30-40, I got really busy and had more people involved in my professional and private life so it became harder to fit in music exploration (something I really enjoy). And less friends sharing their music.
I think streaming has a lot to do with this as my parents had a monthly record club they organized. A bunch of friends with their kids got together at someones home, made dinner, drank and listened to new music in the background.
my thought is that music is a hobby and people mislead themselves into themselves into thinking that it’s their hobby or that everyone has music has a hobby. I think music is just a phase for most people, as have been most things I’ve personally tried but wasn’t really into
but I’m in my 30s, am still into finding my music, and I can’t see that ever going away.
and I know people love listening to music from their formative years and don’t get me wrong, I too was obsessed into 2010’s indie rock and pop punk too, but I think it’s just people reliving the phase.
personally I will only pretty much listen to 2020’s indie rock and pop punk from new bands if I do. you will rarely catch me listening to music that I used to listen to. it was good then. now it’s tired and boring.
It might be worth revisiting that music in a decade or two. My wife recently found an old Michael Jackson CD cleaning out an box of something in the garage. That sparked a let-me-listen to some more 70's and 80's music. Lot's of great "timeless" Michael Jackson songs. Not so much for Madonna for some reason. The Carpenter's and select ABBA gets a thumb's up from me as well.
For young people just starting in life, money may be a gating Factor or at least it was when you had to buy vinyl. but as you get older, the resource you most worry about is time. Watching a 2-hour movie that you don't like is 2 hours gone from the rest of your life, which is a greater percentage than it is for young people.
In my early years I was obsessed with music and listen to all different kinds to try to expand my sphere of Appreciation. but now, I worry that I might spend a lot of time and then find that I don't really enjoy that artist, and the investment of time was not worth it.
You people can not be guaranteed that they will reach the 'get older' stage so technically they are risking a larger percentage of their total life to watch a 2 hour movie.
The real answer is obvious though. As an old man cool music doesn't make me cooler. In fact, for an old man listening to 'cool' music might actually make me less cool, and being old I have less time left to recover my coolness quotient. I can't afford to risk listening to new music.
For those interested in finding new music, let me strongly recommend some good radio station youtube channels. KEXP and KCRW both come time mind. In that vein, sometimes you can find good new music through labels. For example, 4AD. I'm not sure why, but YouTube often suggests good stuff seemingly at random, especially in the electronica genre. Radio stations have music only streams on their websites, too. I've often found artists I like going to local shows and paying attention to who they like. YMMV
It also helps to pay attention to the bands you like and where they end up. For example, the band Marriages split up and Emma Ruth Rundle went solo and the guitarist started Drab Majesty.
When I was in my teens, I really had nothing to do. Not that I was a loner - I was in a sports club and I had a pretty active social life. But the thing is - compared to having a job, the time I spent at school each day left me with so much more spare time than today [1], you gotta do something with that. And my knowledge of music was still pretty limited, so of course exploring new styles of music and new bands was exciting! Plus, everyone of my friends was doing the same, and at that age, doing what the peer group does was very important...
[1] By which I mean, having a day job, commuting back and forth, oh, and having a family with little kids, which basically means zero spare time.
The conclusions of this study - that musical open-mindedness drops off in the late twenties - is consistent with the fact that (pop) music creators also peak in their twenties, with a rapid decline into creative insignificance afterwards.
There's a lot of comforting analysis here on social and cultural development reasons why that might be, but the likely ugly truth is the same faced by creatives in some other areas - a clear cognitive decline, it's just too universal within those fields to be anything else than a physical cause.
With very rare exceptions old people don't make good pop music, there's no reason to expect listeners to not mirror the decline.
What are those other areas which display age-based creative decline? Other creative fields I can think of off the top of my head - scientific research, animation, fiction writing, architecture - are overwhelmingly dominated by older people.
Even in pop music, I'd argue that artists are doing very little of the actual heavy lifting compared to the producers and the writers. Pop singers have a much shorter shelf life than producer/writers due to the importance of image in appealing to younger fans. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin for an example.
Eg. Maths, physics, poetry. All dominated by the young, as pop music.
Note that I'm talking about creative brilliance - ie the outlier contributors that define or excel in the forms - not workmanlike producers of commercial trustworthiness as in your example (though I would assume that generally the same trend holds).
I said "some" because I'm aware that some fields (eg literature) do not follow the clear example in those.
Pop songs are typically written by songwriters who are much older than the performer. I'm estimating, but that's probably true of most pop songs in the top 100 history. Maybe someone has the stats on that.
I think there is developmental biological factor, but how quickly you’ve leapt to cognitive decline betrays an underlying ageism. First, cognitive abilities don’t drop suddenly at the age of 30, and crystallized intelligence continues to grow for at least couple of decades past 30. Second, you need to square your conclusions with the fact that the average age for the best work by classical composers was 40 rather than 30, and this was in a period where health outcomes were much poorer. Further, writers, working in perhaps the most creatively demanding field of all, have their best work often in their 40s, 50s, and beyond. Need I mention the great painters of the last 500 years too?
how quickly you’ve leapt to cognitive decline betrays an underlying ageism
This is a belief I've developed over years, I used to believe the same as everybody else - that social etc factors like raising kids got in the way.
But its too universal within pop music (and I think some other fields mentioned in another comment) to be explained as anything but age-related cognitive decline - which by definition will be "ageist" if you want to resort to that sort of language.
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.
I’m 38, and I don’t think my exposure to and discovery of music has ever been so high.
I joined a metal discord last year (though my favorite album of the year so far is actually chamber folk / Americana from a recommendation there):
* general recommendations
* seeing what other people listen to
* "themed history months" (Screamarch for Screamo, Finlapril for Finnish metal etc.),
* sampling of any new release that seems slightly interesting (usually about 20 releases per week that I spend a few seconds to minutes with to gauge my enjoyment)
All those expose me to a constant stream of new and old music that I usually never even heard of before.
But then, not using streaming services probably makes me a statistical outlier anyway.
There’s something biological going here I would think. 30 is about the age where fluid intelligence peaks but crystallized intelligence continues to grow for a few more decades. Also, 30 is about the age where a lot of us come into our own as the person we will more or less be for the rest of our lives. I know for myself that in my teens and twenties, music was part of the process of defining myself. By my early thirties, I had grown out of that phase and mine or someone else’s taste in music was irrelevant to how we viewed each other. Interestingly, like many men, I have not touched a video game since the age of thirty even though I’ve had the time.
I'm curious about your experience with older men not playing video games? I'm in my mid-thirties and I would say that the overwhelming majority of my male friends and co-workers play video games recreationally. Video games are more popular and accessible than ever, so I guess I'm confused about why someone would age-out of the hobby?
Perhaps it’s just been my personal experience or maybe a Gen X thing? I tried getting back into playing video games a few years ago. I gave up after a weekend. It was dead boring. I’d much rather read the paper.
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.
I discussed this with a friend pretty recently. I wondered whether I was getting "older" because I couldn't find anything I liked about the current rappy-pop or soft, high-pitched chic-pop that you hear over loudspeakers at the grocery store, gym, etc. It's grating to listen to, majority of the stuff I can't even determine what the melody is supposed to be.
Then I realized that I'm listening to new alt/indie stuff that I didn't know about three years ago, and that it's probably not me. It's probably just that this mass-music for the masses is indeed awful.
And at the same time, publishing music has never been easier. There is so much good stuff out there but you aren't going to find it if your process for finding new music is letting the same guys that made top 40 with payola jam their same lowest common denominator shit down your through with algorithmically generated playlists.
> In 2006 Slichter said that payola was how his band Semisonic turned their song "Closing Time" into a hit. Slichter stated: "It cost something close to $700,000 to $800,000 to get 'Closing Time' on the air."[4]
Damn near a mil to push that song up the charts, in the 1990s, and it wasn't even a crap song. I think of that track as iconic of the late-90s, I was surprised they had to run payola at all.
Age has affected my taste in music, but I continue to discover new music as I reach my mid 40s. As a teenager, I wanted to listen to grunge, punk, and metal. In my 20s, I had a strong preference for indie music. In my 30s, I got into blues and American folk music. Now, I’m in a jazz phase and appreciating classic guitarists from the 1950s and 1960s. I have always loved classical music, and I still appreciate a lot of the music from my past decades of development, but I hear a lot of it filtered through nostalgia and historical experiences more than from an angle of objective enjoyment.
As a teenager it really bothered me that adults seemed to have lost the ability to appreciate good music simply because it was new- I vowed to make a point of regularly trying new music with an open mind as I grew older, and not to grow up like that. My own parents who loved good music when they were younger, and whose music tastes I could appreciate well, literally heard my music as basically random noise, and couldn't even process it... stuff that was deeply inspiring and meaningful to me. It seemed like such a loss and a shame that they were incapable of enjoying it.
Overall, in my late 30s, I would say it's worked pretty well. I try to spend a decent amount of time sampling new music, and my music tastes have evolved a lot over time. In just the last two years I came to appreciate two entire new genre of music I had never really paid attention to, and listen to them a lot. Although, I will admit that most of my overall favorite music is still the same stuff I liked as a teenager.
I think a lot of it is simply taking the time to sample new music, and to develop the mental pathways to process new music styles. Old people can do it just as well as young people, but generally, older people have less time and interest in doing so. Kids generally don't understand what its like to be a parent with a job, and how little free time adults have, and how precious it is to them.
Also- regarding the author's comments on "American Idiot." I've always found it amusing how American capitalism loves to unironically sell people whatever they are willing to buy, especially including rebellious and anti-capitalist products and services, which are a big business overall. Reddit is currently worth 7 billion, and caters largely to people that like to complain to one another about how evil they feel capitalism is, and especially how evil Reddit in particular is.
I think the same. And tbh, if music variations are finite, I'm quite sure it's big enough to fill my entire life with new song, sounds, arrangement, voices, lyrics...Also music is not only sound, but also performances.
Completely agree on performances... I've had a renewed appreciation for a lot of music after seeing it performed live (even on video), and/or hearing live album versions.
On the other hand, I'm listening to a new album at least three times a week. Using tools like last.fm and some private trackers helps to keep things fresh. Never give up on finding that next tune!
The trend towards flatting the curve with the preferred decade of music for each generation is cool to see. I had assumed this was happening anecdotally, but it looks like a pretty large effect here.
Music just plays with the signals in our brains, just like drugs, food, feelings and pretty much all input does.
One day, an AI invented a new song, one that could never be heard, for it was outside the range of human hearing. But all who heard it wept with anger, sadness and finally joy; for the song pulled levers and pressed buttons inside our brains, and made us want to buy Coca Cola.
Interesting article. I expect today's streaming tech will drive some change in these patterns, between easy access to a massive library and recommendation features.
Much of my music discovery is aided by Spotify - some automated (radio, "Made For You"), some more manual ("Fans also like" related artists). However, as I continue to use Spotify, some of these features seem less effective. It's like I'm filling in interconnected regions of Spotify's graph of music and there are less edges to unvisited nodes.
I'm mostly into punk/hardcore myself but music is probably one of my numerous passions that never seems to fade and nowadays I love to listen to radio to be exposed to music I wouldn't be exposed thru algorythms. Sometimes I don't like it and it's ok, but I often encounter great discoveries. https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip is perfect for it. Give it a try !
I really love to dig new old music. Still discovering artists from 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, 50s, 20s. I like that the list grows naturally. Been on the train from 90s.
I really enjoy music but realized after trying to follow several hundred artists—and failing that it is merely a question of bandwidth. For example the Doobie Brothers have released new albums post-2020, while at the same time I'm trying to be up on the latest from B. Eillish for a nearby young person. Just can't keep up.
Haven't even mentioned my weirder tastes. At some point something has got to give if you have a job, family, or another interest or two.
You stop when you want to stop. I picked up an affinity for K-pop in my 30s. Currently exploring a few other genres and also enjoying music that my kids are finding.
I have discovered better music in my 30s and 40s and sort of regret my musical decisions in my teens and 20s.
Music to me is linked to my emotional state and like I’ve matured I’d like to think my music tastes have too…
but then I remember I’ve stopped listening to silly music of Fugazi and replaced it with the artistic stylings of Taylor Swift and I’m right back in my pit of despair knowing my musical sophistication is still out of reach.
Just happened to listen to Steady Diet of Nothing the other day. Maybe the first time in almost 30 years. That music is as good as ever. And could Reclamation be a more relevant song in 2024?
Yeah but none of this music slaps as hard as it did in my 20s. Don't get me wrong I appreciate it the same I'm sure, there's just such a thing as youth and emotion and I wouldn't trade that exploratory musical phase for anything.
The article hints at, but doesn't really nail the strong associations between music and our past that develop as we age. The older we get, the more listening to old music takes on the role of time machine, teleporting us to an earlier time where we can forget all the bad parts, leaving just the good.
Strangely enough, the same thing can be said about cars, and even software.
Most of the music I enjoyed was made before I was born. I don't listen to music anymore. I stopped when I went fully remote a decade ago and didn't need anything to drown out the office noise anymore. I'll play music on an instrument, but that's about it.
I actually bought a nice stereo system with bose 901 speakers to set up in my house, but it's still sitting in storage 9 years later.
This is how I've solved this problem for myself: by using monthly playlists as a forcing function to motivate myself to find new music every month, where the whole ends up being greater than the sum of it's parts: https://transitivebullsh.it/my-10-year-music-diary
I've found two somewhat surprising effective ways for new music discovery:
1. Spotify Weekly Discover (personalized) ~ Still can't work their silly UX, but their recomms are good. Is it time yet for "Bring Your Own Client" to their API ??
2. Online Communities: Many a twitch streamer has music bots or accept music request while streaming. Has been a great source for new discovery.
I'm 53 and love Spotify and Reddit's 80s subreddits for music discovery.
I love finding new stuff (IDLES, Shame, and High Vis are recent faves) and finding old stuff that's new to me (I flew across the country to see The Cult playing in LA as their old band name -- Death Cult -- and never knew there was a live album version of Dreamtime that's terrific from back in the day).
I wish there was a music service that actually provided recommendations based on features of the track itself, like similar chords, tempo, rhythmic composition, emotional tone, etc.
Instead it all seems to be variations on "people who liked this also like", which--while obviously easier to code--is rather disappointing compared to what I thought we'd have by now.
I only have one criteria and it is “high production values”. After that I have no century or genre constraints. So far there is no recommendation algorithm up to the task.
I would guess there's a strong correlation with trait openness to someones ability to integrate new music into their collection. IDK if its a lot, but I listened to 90 genres in 2023. I do find myself frequently liking music that is about 10 years old, but I think that's a function of discovering it, not of a willingness to try new sounds on for taste.
I've only been listening to the BBC Essential Mix since ~2005. Pretty much nothing else, it's always about the latest music and trends (especially if it's something from the UK like dubstep, grim etc.). 2x2 hour episodes are absolutely perfect for a week (there's a Classic show where they play the old ones again)
I know the article is mostly true, but I'm apparently the contradiction that proves the rule. I've listened to music from the current decade for decades, but also discovered old stuff that was new to me along the way.
Life is too short to listen to the same music over and over.
I've been using http://somafm.com and it's really the only thing that got me back into listening to music. ( https://radio.garden is also interesting )
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.
I am 45+ and constantly and exclusively seek out new music, rarely listening to anything more than a year old. However... I think this may have as much to do with a life-long novelty seeking manifestation of ADHD than anything entirely neurotypical. But I'm okay with that!
I deleted/tossed my entire music collection, subscriptions/accounts about two years ago. I decided it was kind of keeping me in a mental rut and reinforcing old patterns rather than supporting new ones im modifying my life with.
I listen to a lot of music, and thanks to Spotify, regularly find new material across a decent range of genres.
But at the back of mind, I hear the echoes of Steven Pinker's words: "music is auditory cheesecake". Capable only of conveying emotions, unless lyrics are involved.
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.
My musical tastes have changed a lot, I've found new bands and artists pretty much every year of my life. I listen to music from my teenage years now & then, but more often than not I'm listening to completely new music.
I feel like the more I listen to it, the less new patterns I find. In addition to auditory sensory stimulation, spiritual identification is also increasingly important, and the latter is not easy to be constantly fond of the new and dislike the old.
I find this argument interesting though I have found that the same Jungle music I listened to in the 90s is now cutting edge again similar to around 2007 when 80s Italo House was considered the most stylish and hippest thing to listen to.
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.
Since song have no time limit, and notes can be combined in numerous ways to form chords, there is no limit to the number of melodies. And that's before you consider musical temperaments.
Overall, music plays its own specific role for each person. For some, music is a significant part of life, almost like a whole life, while for others, it's simply meant to be in the background.
From the perspective of this parent - toddlers are loud. They make so much noise, continuously, either by playing or talking or, more often, both at the same time, that when I get a moment of silence I don't want to ruin it by playing music. I just want to hear nothing for a while, or chat with my partner in peace.
Only in the last few months, with the youngest being almost 5, do I feel the urge to listen to the music again - and I have a 10 year gap to catch up with.
> I wonder why parents consistently listening to older music than their childless peers
Oh that one is easy. They probably watch Bluey with their children. That show features stuff by Rossini, Offenbach, Tchaikovsky, Holst (Jupiter!), etc... which then gets played in the house because it's so much fun.
I know my kid can't stop dancing when John Ryan's Polka (Bluey episode Fairies) is on! :)
Wonder if this has gotten worse as music listening has become more of a private thing (solitary ipod/iphone listening). prior to that, i think many parents (myself included) found themselves exposed to lots of new music simply because it was hard to avoid not hearing whatever their children/spouses were listening to at home or in the car.
This rapidly becomes an exercise in classifying music which I always felt a bit silly. Try to put God Is an Astronaut in a genre, I wish you good fortune in the wars to come. https://youtu.be/ZmWYCIZhBgk at one time Wikipedia had them as "Post-rock, electronica, ambient, Space rock" then just gave up and labelled them as post-rock.
My brother and I, less than two years apart in age, when we were 18 years old listened to the same music, power metal, mostly. By now, some three decades later he have veered off in a direction of high BPM while I am deep in folk metal land sometimes leaving metal behind. Where does folk metal end and where does (neo)folk rock start? I do not know and I couldn't care less if I tried. I simply enjoy https://youtu.be/mQWmryiIcxY a lot without trying to label it.
Maybe I missed this in the article but I agree this is a major consideration. I find a lot of people might like "new" music but it's very much a slight riff on stuff they liked a long time ago. As a 30yo, good luck introducing anyone in the 25+ category to new albums that actually experiment into novel sounds and become the music of the current 20yo generation.
It's a little sad too because the internet unlocked so much "bedroom producer" potential from the entire world where before you had to be musically trained or get a lot more lucky. There's actually a talent explosion right now.
>good luck introducing anyone in the 25+ category to new albums that actually experiment into novel sounds and become the music of the current 20yo generation
Both here and in the article there's a conflation of "new music" with "contemporary mainstream popular" which seems invalid. Is the Billboard Hot 100 any more or less innovative in 2024 than it was in 2004, or 1974? I think that most "mainstream" music is precisely "a slight riff on stuff [written] a long time ago." You have to go outside of the mainstream to find music and artists that are experimenting with novel sounds, just like you did in decades past.
As you say, there's been an explosion of independent creativity, thanks to the Internet. There's no reason for anyone who is interested in music to listen to the same old mainstream dreck.
Other than the opportunity for a misplaced pun on the term “spiral”, why would you take an otherwise linear-in-time graph and make it radial? Why would age 0 to 50 be somehow cyclical?
i'm a huge spotify user and my goal much of the time i'm listening is to find new music... last.fm tells me that 27% of the artists i listened to this week are ones i'd never listened to before (the yearly report says 55% of the 1,512 artists i listened to last year were new to me). i also like the "yearly rewind" and "recent rewind" playlists because it automates putting those newly discovered artists of tracks into my rotation.
I hate this article. Can’t we do some philosophical introspection instead of just this data driven drivel? There is even a clue in the empty nesters vs parents section but no discussion. Is the author just afraid of saying something offensive? Age being causative is just taken as fact.
I’d suggest that music discovery is centered on having the desire to do so. As people get older they often stop caring about being cool[+] (take a look at the author) and only listening to the same old music is lame. “We stop being interested in new music at $AGE” is just unimaginative, lazy, and counter to the facts.
Being “with it” is a choice.
[+] And, btw, nobody gets to decide what “cool” is(and your mom definitely doesn’t), but it is by nature always changing.
Finding "new" music is a concept that the music industry has marketed to you like being skinny or that cola is a lifestyle. In times past people were happy with one genre or slight variations of that genre for millennia. Now we are spoiled for choice but are yet still made to feel ashamed if we are not consuming the newest and discarding the oldest. As if there is sickness to be found in enjoying something old and well worn.
i feel like a majority of people don't seek out "new" music, so i see how you apply that to the music industry as a marketing concept. with whatever app, if you get people listening to more new stuff, you can get them engaged longer etc.
however, i've sought new music since i was young. its something i share with my father who would purposely grab new records or cassette based on trivial things (title, art, price..) and then listen to the album several times. i love exploring different cultures and music is a great reflection of that. at the same time, i often go back to the old and well worn music i grew up with, and even that my parents or their parents grew up with. i think there's a lot of beauty out there and it's a shame to shun something new because you feel it falls within an industries agenda.
> Now we are spoiled for choice but are yet still made to feel ashamed if we are not consuming the newest and discarding the oldest. As
Actually I've found Gen-z's to have surprisingly wide listening patterns. As a few datapoints I was surprised that my friend's teenager could actually name several Nirvana songs, knew who the Smashing pumpkins were, and also the Talking Heads. (all rose and fell from fame before her birth)
My friend (who's the same age as me) has a 14 year old son who's learning guitar and he asked me for a lesson. The first thing he wanted me to show him was some riffs from AC/DC songs that came out before I was born.
I think it's easy to sit and judge someone as being "uncultured" because they listen to music that was popular when they were a teenager, but fundamentally it's not like they're hurting anyone. I listen to mostly late-90's-early-2000's punk rock even still, and I don't think it's a moral failing that I don't listen to the latest stuff all the time, just like I don't think it's a moral failing for my mom to mostly listen to The Beegees.
Music is, first and foremost, a means of entertainment, and it's not like it really buys you anything to be up to date in music for most careers. If your job is, I don't know, marketing director of a company, then sure, maybe you should keep up to date with the latest trends all the time, but most of us have pretty utilitarian jobs where it doesn't really matter what we like.
I think where it gets harmful is acting like "the stuff I listened to as a teenager is objectively better than what the kids listen to now", which I will admit is a mentality that I sometimes have to actively fight against. I think it can sometimes be a proxy for shitting on the next generation of humans, and I am very actively against needlessly divisive and reductive stuff like that.
> and I don't think it's a moral failing that I don't listen to the latest stuff all the time
I’ve personally enjoyed going the other way and exploring earlier and earlier singers and genres.
Quite fun.
For those interested, there’s also "Excavated Shellac"[0]. I can’t say I’ve liked or even enjoyed most of it, but it’s been an intriguing and interesting discovery nonetheless.
Yeah, I've done something like the theme of Excavated Shellac with old CDs a couple times. I will buy a bundle of 100 random CDs on eBay and go through and rip anything that seems remotely interesting. Occasionally I've found stuff from obscure artists that I end up liking, and even stuff that never made it to Spotify.
It's time consuming and I probably won't do it again but it was fun to do a few times.
> I think it's easy to sit and judge someone as being "uncultured" because they listen to music that was popular when they were a teenager, but fundamentally it's not like they're hurting anyone.
I think the antagonism usually goes in the other way. Most people get crystallized music tastes pretty soon into their life and the second the new generation comes up with something different, it's all "music is crap these days, silly kids, back in my day the 90s had the best music." There are several examples in this thread without a hint of the irony of this article.
Old foreign language books had translations for phrases along the lines of "the lobster makes a good salad" and "my husband is unwell, can you call a doctor?"
If I were to use YouTube for a corpus, I could probably write contemporary translation books for many languages, as long as the phrases were along the lines of "still listening in ${YEAR}" and "new ${GENRE} isn't this good"
I don't even blame them, clearly the article shows there's a biological or cultural phenomenon to it. It's just unfortunate when you're the 2% outlier that thinks music is progressing, as you can't share with others the appreciation that sounds are actually getting better.
>I think it's easy to sit and judge someone as being "uncultured" because they listen to music that was popular when they were a teenager
Pretty funny, especially since I just attended a sold-out performance of Mozart's Requiem last month. Back when I was younger, I think the dominant perception was that classical music was "cultured" and popular / current music was lacking in refinement
Maybe the word "uncultured" isn't right, but I feel like when I say "I don't really listen to much that was written in the last fifteen years", people kind of act like I'm some kind of luddite. I also think a lot of people feel like the smartest people go way back and listen to the classical stuff. Personally, I've never really been able to get into classical music outside of movie soundtracks, and for awhile I was kind of embarrassed by that fact, but I'm not really anymore. As I said, music is about entertainment, and you like what you like.
Kind of related, when I was a teenager, I liked to read a lot, but I didn't have any money. I discovered Project Gutenberg and started reading a lot of public domain stuff (a lot of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Dickens, etc), purely out of cheapness. Teachers would think I'm smarter than I actually was because I knew obscure literary references from old books in my essays and when I would answer questions in class, despite the fact that it doesn't really require a 10,000 IQ to download a PDF file from the internet and read it.
> I also think a lot of people feel like the smartest people go way back and listen to the classical stuff. […] and for awhile I was kind of embarrassed by that fact
That says a lot more about those who think that it does about than those who do or do not listen to "classical" music.
> Personally, I've never really been able to get into classical music outside of movie soundtracks,
Not implying it will or should be the same for you, or even that you should try it, but in my limited experience headphones and speakers have hardly ever done any justice to "classical" music.
It also seems some of it needs the listeners to have lived a little, so it can resonate with them. As an example, I couldn’t care less for operas as a teenager. Fifteen years later, two live operas are among the few pieces that have so far managed to make me cry.
I did however try seeing some Beethoven performance a few years ago and I didn’t really enjoy it. I can respect and appreciate the talent of the musicians, and I didn’t hate it or anything, but I still didn’t really have that much fun.
I’m in the the unique (and at times, unenviable) position of spending the last 4-5 years building out a music app (getradiant.app for the curious) and I agree with what others are saying here, it’s about exposure.
My music taste has expanded and shifted a lot in the past half decade, which also happens to coincide with the first half of my 30s, mainly because I’m exposed to new stuff constantly through my consistent testing of my app.
Your 30s is typically when people start noticing the growth of the circle representing their radius of musical interest start to slow. Mainly because it collides with having less time for choice (life gets busy, responsibilities increase) coupled with a decreased capacity for new experience.
I’ve also noticed TikTok has exposed me to a ton of new stuff.
So the TLDR; is, the time you have to discover on your own will become ever more limited. Your best bet to keep the party going is to find one or two low-effort, lean back discovery services and stick with them.
for me never. The older I get I find more interesting new music.
Maybe because I play an instrument and live in a very diverse and rich physical cultural context, not in a playlist or AI generated content.
It's like junk food next to you in versus in a cupboard upstairs. One you eat now impulsively the other you won't eat due to the effort needed as minimal as it is it still slows you down.
If you put in a cassette tape and let it run you would usually always listen to it in order. To some extent a CD too but it and vinyl were easier to jump song to song.
Radio was even more uncontrollable it made you wait for your favourite song while it played other songs. Sometimes a day or two waiting for that new song to appear. Radio mercilessly teased you too. Even Top 40 radio shows you had to wait not knowing was your song now higher up making you excited but it meant you had to wait, excitement grows. Or was it lower down and it played sooner (a dreadful feeling) or you missed it completely!
I've noticed this over the years that more and more I rarely listen to anything new just what I know from years past.
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.
I have to wonder how much of this is societal expectations as you age? or "Being an adult".
The idea that once you reach a certain age, you settle down, get into a routine, doing less new things, etc.
While yeah, a music streaming service could introduce you to new music. Maybe you will just find yourself in less situations where you will experience new music?
Listening to a new song on your phone is a drastically different experience to overhearing it while traveling, with friends, whatever.
I know I have a number of songs that bring up an emotional response due to certain events tied to them. And some of them are genres I would not have normally found myself listening too.
A 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.
Spotify 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, and have a wide array of music offered (within the theme of the station).
Spotify now has the ability to engage in a legal version of "digital" payola, so their handcrafted group of artists by major labels are peppered into their hundreds of in-house playlists, disguising this business practice as a wide array of music selection.
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.
So you're discovering new music, but none of it is memorable, because listening to music in 2024 (for a lot of people) is often a wall of slightly groovy background noise, with the occasional standout track that you probably toss into your own personal playlist.
How I fixed this:
1. Disable the 'autoplay' feature
2. Don't use playlists and listen to albums (except for when I'm in a pinch or hosting a party)
3. Intentionally discover a new genre every few months and go down a rabbit hole. My current new genre is South African Amapiano. Excellent stuff.
4. Discover music across different genres and time periods using RateYourMusic.
> 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 artists at a time.
I look at the discover weekly / release radar. If I like a song, I’ll listen to the album. If it I like the album, I’ll listen to the discography.
Most music is not great, but it’s easy to sample and dive deeper.
> 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.
> so DJs had to break new songs, styles, and have a wide array of music offered (within the theme of the station).
I'm an older Zoomer and this was never the case for radio in my lifetime [1]. I heard "college radio stations" being a bastion of this but I've never listened to one myself.
One of the earliest internet services I remember loving was Pandora because it recommended me artists I never heard on the radio and was the start of my love of music.
[1] I'm guessing it was related to all radio stations being owned by the same companies.
Late Gen-X/Early Millennial here; there was a time before the consolidation of radio stations and invasion of iHeartMedia (at the time named Clear Channel) where DJs had the final word in what got played and most were quite good at introducing new music. Here's my experience form the outside of the industry: once consolidation started there was a push to use canned (pre-recorded) intros, outros, and interstitial announcements to reduce costs. Stations often kept some talk shows, but few kept real DJs. This let stations use a small number of voice actors for a large number of stations. Combined with centrally controlled playlists they were able to push the costs down and increase profits to the point that older style stations with bespoke DJs couldn't compete financially and either adopted the same model or they sold out.
EDIT: I may be misremembering, but there used to be a limit on how many stations a company could own in a given market.
I recently switched off Amazon Music and went back to Pandora (must have started using it in like 2010 and then gone on a 13 or so year long diversion into the on-demand streaming services).
I guess it isn’t surprising because it is their core value proposition, but the Pandora discovery algorithm seems so much better than the competition, at least to my ears.
I miss the ability to hyper-focus and play an album over and over, but on the other hand, it is probably better not to burn out on an album, and anyway, if I really want to, I can buy the album I guess.
Pandora + Bandcamp reminds me of what the internet looked like it could be. Sad that Amazon and their ilk have to silo everything.
Last.fm was pretty good too. I wonder how they are holding up…
Pandora was my go-to circa 2007-2009 and I haven't thought about it in years. Looking back, I discovered a disproportionate amount of the music I like in that timeframe... I'm honestly kind of surprised they're still around (and, if I'm reading your comment correctly, haven't morphed into something entirely unrecognizable in the meantime?)
I use Pandora and subscribe to Premium which allows me to listen to albums on demand. When I started out as a free user after I gave up on Youtube in the background apps, I didn't like Spotify because it kept forcing me to listen to awful songs that it pushes on everybody instead of what I actually wanted to listen to. Pandora was a much better experience as a free user because their "radio" plays music similar to what you've already told it you like.
How does Spotify "force" you to listen to stuff? I have a very different experience. Pandora (many years ago when I tried it) did not let you choose what you wanted to play (e.g. am album) and Spotify did (and still does). I have hundreds of my own playlists on Spotify, and my listening time is split between those, Spotify's "daily mix" playlists (generated from your personal music tastes) and occasionally "discover weekly" (one way I discover new music). I like choosing what music I listen to.
Dude... THANK YOU. I just logged back into Pandora and the recommendations are just as excellent as I remember. I also remember discovering some of my absolute favorite songs/albums via Pandora.
One thing that Pandora has is GENRE based stations. I don't know of any other service that can do that. This will be a game changer for when I dive into new genres.
Since I'm not seeing anybody mention it yet but it's one of my favorite ways to find new genres, I'd highly recommend everyone check out everynoise.com because they seem to have scraped Spotify's genres (you'll need Spotify to listen to more than 30 second samples, but probably still useful even if you don't use Spotify). The number of genres they have listed in the THOUSANDS, and I guarantee they will have something you've never heard of, but it's a great rabbit hole to go down when looking for new music. If you like a genre, they'll already have multiple playlists for it, and if you like a particular artist, they'll have those too. I am not affiliated with the website, but try to turn everyone I know onto it because there's just so much out there to discover that I wouldn't have otherwise.
(everynoise.com developer, if you're reading this, I love you <3)
Read my comment again. If you're listening to a playlist, you're not mindfully choosing each song. There's nothing wrong with playlists, but my point was to describe how listening to music from Spotify's playlists often isn't a mindful experience (excluding when your attention is grabbed the occasional standout track).
A GOOD playlist can keep your attention, and those are often handcrafted by other users. Just look at some of the other responses in this thread. Plenty of people have the same experience.
I also said that music from playlists is often (not always) groovy background noise - This isn't a mindful experience - And that's okay.
How did you discover Amapiano? I ask because Tyla has become massively popular in the last year and I'm wondering if the discovery was truly coincidental or undercover marketing?
> 2024-01-05 status update: With my layoff from Spotify on 2023-12-04, I lost the internal data-access required for ongoing updates to many parts of this site. Most of this, as a result, is now a static snapshot of what, for now, will be the final state from the site's 10-year history and evolution, hosted on my own server. Some pieces may get disabled and reenabled over time, and some that only made sense with current data may never return. But we'll see.
This is the same defense used in radio. Note the wording ... "no one can pay". Favors and indirect payment are used excessively in the music industry. Note that I also said that payola was the act of "direct payment".
An example of indirect payment in radio would be the record label gifting a set of expensive tickets to the station.
Remember those contests in the 2000s where the radio station would play a collection of songs over the course of a few hours, and if you could call in and be caller number 15 and name all the songs, you could win free concert tickets?
The record label didn't pay the radio station with money - The tickets were gifted to the station for free. But as a result, the radio station played [insert band name]'s songs for 2 hours straight (and possibly other artists on the same label).
This is a win-win, because a ton of people talk about this contest with their family and friends, so the station gets free promo, and the artist gets exposure.
I don't know how Spotify is doing this in the digital era, but ask anyone connected to the music industry. This 100% happens.
For a lot of casual listeners, Spotify editorial playlists are the new radio station.
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.
I used it for like 5 minutes before paying for it, it's obviously great, and the "pro" upgrade has the funniest best feature ever (exclude ratings by the age of the rater).
Also - just don't use Spotify. It has a UX that is just consistently opposed to album-centric listening. Or any sort of focused listening, really.
There are alternatives. Apple music is fine. Tidal + Roon is also pretty good.
For discovering music, Roon provides a much more album-centric way to browse and learn about different albums and genres. I use that combined with subreddits for particular genres and good old fashioned album reviews and artist interviews.
I’ve wondered for a while if Spotify skews playlists in favor of cheaper songs. I have no evidence of this, but it’d make business sense to use the equivalent of store brand music (even if that just means outsourced to a cheap agency) for generic study music playlists and such.
I noticed Google Play do this with Soundcloud Rap.
Their amorality has caused me to enjoy SoundCloud Rap at a formidable age, now I cannot shake it. My kids listen to it, swear amorally, and the cycle continues.
All because Google Play didn't want to shell out an extra 60 cents per year for paid Rappers.
Strongly disagree with your take on albums. I'm a music lover, spotify wrapped always puts me in the top 5% for most artists. I never search by album, always song, and if it's great I'll click in to check to see if the album is to my taste.
I have discovered so much music on spotify. I'm not going to listen to a whole album to see if I like a new artist, lol.
>> labels pay Spotify to put certain songs on large playlists
What are you talking about. IM going to need you to back this one up with some proof.
1. The labels have a giant back catalog that remains popular. It does not need promotion. Huge long tail profits there.
2. The labels dont have a lot to sell any more. The big artists tend to get out of the system (and make money on tours) and small artists get nothing. And lots of artists have bought back their catalogs, again long tail.
The album, as a vehicle is mostly dead. Hell songs are mostly dead, if you cant hook someone in the time of a ticktock video your going to have a lot of trouble getting them. And there you need to be "background music" with a groove.
Anecdotal, but I was close friends with someone who managed a niche (but popular) artist’s social media and streaming service presence. We discussed this fact and this person mentioned it could be $10k+ to be on some playlists 1st song spot for just a few days. I doubt it’s only Spotify official playlists.
My previous genres were dozens of Techno subgenres. Check out the 2023 Coachella lineup. That year had a strong focus on 'World Music'. I went last year and that's how I discovered Amapiano.
If you like Amapiano, check out a song titled 'Ungowami' by Sha Sha
Check out 'Big Flexa' by Costa Titch. Awesome music video too. Huge dance culture in South Africa.
Also check out 'Abo Mvelo' by Daliwonga (this song gets me hype during workouts)
And check out Uncle Waffles' Boiler Room mix. Truly awesome performance.
> So you're discovering new music, but none of it is memorable, because listening to music in 2024 (for a lot of people) is often a wall of slightly groovy background noise, with the occasional standout track that you probably toss into your own personal playlist.
Yea, I tried streaming for a while, and found exactly that. When I play some genre-specific stream with a goal of discovering new music, I find it's basically full of unremarkable, generic musak, punctuated by maybe 0.1% memorable, great tracks that I'm motivated to bookmark for later. Are these few needles worth slogging through hours of haystack? After a few years I have sadly concluded "no."
Not sure why this is. Has it always been this way (0.1% great stuff in a sea of mediocre?) or are "content creators" of today just more focused on churning out quantity than artists of the past?
So now I was on the German and the English Wikipedia entry of the Principle and noticed a noteworthy difference:
English: While it is common to refer to pareto as "80/20" rule, under the assumption that, in all situations, 20% of causes determine 80% of problems, this ratio is merely a convenient rule of thumb and is not, nor should it be considered, an immutable law of nature.
German: The 80-20 distribution in the Pareto principle often leads to the false assumption that a sum of 100 is mandatory. In fact, however, any other distribution is possible, in which, for example, 50 % of the efforts lead to 90 % of the effect, and again 50 % of the efforts lead to the remaining 10 % of the effect. This is easy to see in the trivial case that 100% of the efforts are the cause of 100% of the success. [0]
It's interesting how this explanatory information is lacking in the English version. Should be a cool project for an LLM to transfer information between the different language versions of a Wikipedia entry.
It's "true", yes, for almost everything, but there is a lot to gain from recognizing the difference between 80/20 and 90/10 or even 99/1, etc. Just like 99%, 99.9% and 99.99% uptime are VERY different promises to meet, while looking virtually identical to a layman.
I haven't read the article, but I know the answer pretty definitively for me: the second I stopped listening to the radio, which happened in 2008 (when I was 17), because my favorite radio station in Orlando that used to carry a lot of punk rock music got rebranded to music for the 50+ demographic. I'm not even going to pretend that I know the reasons why they did that, but it was the only station I was listening to regularly, and pretty much my only source for new music as a result.
Gradually I stopped seeking out new music, instead just focusing on buying CDs for bands I already knew until I got Spotify in 2012, and that just kind of became an echo chamber.
I have a SiriusXM account now, and I do try and seek out new music that way occasionally via their phone app, but it's been a bit difficult since I don't drive since I moved to NYC. My car was probably 80+% of my music-listening time and now I don't really have that anymore. I can't really listen to music with lyrics while working (way too distracting for me), so the only music I listen to during most of the day is video game music from the 90's: stuff that's meant to be pleasant to listen to, but also easy to tune out by design.
I also have that problem with lyrics in music while I'm working. That pushed me toward more electronic music during the workday. Got into various forms of house that way.
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.
Music as an art form is simply not that important to a lot of people. It's more a mood drug. And you're right about the algorithms. In general, the algorithms are judged by the amount of listening that occurs because of them. It's a poor metric for user happiness, but it's what gets used. And in an A/B test, the one that plays familiar tunes is going to win over one that plays challenging tunes.
The more novel the thing is, the more likely it is that you won't like it. I can tell if I'm truly exposing myself to new music by how often I hear a song and say "Yeah, that's just not for me." It makes sense that by the time one is in their 30s they say "I have 1000 songs I know I like, why do I need to look for more songs, many of which I won't like"
Which is basically a long winded way of responding to:
> 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.
With:
There's a non-zero cost to seeking out new things, so the "special way you are wired" involves considering that cost to be worth it.
> There's a non-zero cost to seeking out new things, so the "special way you are wired" involves considering that cost to be worth it.
Sure, but my (perhaps incorrect?) assumption is that most people are doing that with something. For me, music is one of those somethings. For others, it isn't.
I have no data to support it beyond my personal anecdotes, but I believe that the majority of people are still seeking out exposure to new experiences in at least some hobbies or interests past the early 30s number given in the article. I would hazard a guess that that time might be when people become particularly more selective in the sort of new things they want to experience.
I find it interesting that GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
The 1980s are still doing quite well among all but the oldest generation.
Is it possible that music may actually be getting worse? Corporatized, consolidated, computerized.
Look at Hollywood now too: everything is a sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, or adaptation. There’s hardly anything original anymore.
Music has become more stratified. The 90s through the present have been an ongoing escalation of music being democratized more and more, from the rise of the DAW in the late 90s to iTunes and P2P sharing to YouTube and music streaming. So there is vastly more music now, and people have more opportunity to find things that suit their tastes.
People listen to a wider variety of music and the same Billboard notion of popularity doesn't really paint a useful picture anymore. What plays on the radio or in TV ads is the lowest common denominator corporate waffle, and is played heavily, but it doesn't represent what people listen to overall.
I have personal playlists of everything from House music and 90s Eurodance to all kinds of J-Pop to 19th century folk music to early 2000s rock to 80s synth pop to orchestral music. I couldn't name a single Taylor Swift song offhand, but apparently she's pretty big.
This seems like a really good take on the situation. I usually disagree that discoverability as a problem. Discoverability could be why my tastes have stagnated.
I enjoy music but its not a hobby or anything for me.
There's tons of music out there and I find the plethora of niche subgenres now fairly overwhelming and don't even know how to classify the stuff I enjoy listening to.
Recommendation engine feedback loops do not aid in discovery, just repetition.
On that note, to me, the current year has been the best year for music for a long time. Simply because of volume and variety.
Care to share a playlist?
Try anything with a cover photo https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0KIAnFKMUOzSahATUBlR5f?si=...
Lots of good stuff in there!
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 earlier and in more variety and in turn we get more musicians.
It's only going to get better.
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.
Let me preface by saying I listen to a lot of genres, but that jazz & funk is not my "main expertise".
Of course there's no denying we have lots of creative and talented new musicians, but very seldom do I think they beat "the greats", or are even on par. Usually they feel more like knockoffs, and I find I'd rather go back and listen to the original instead.
I'm not familiar with these artists, but I had a listen to about 20 of them, and I will say that I can hear where a lot of them got their inspiration from, but they (not all of them) feel lightweight compared to artists from back in the day.
In these genres I'd much rather listen to the following artists than any of the ones you mentioned:
Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Townes Van Zandt, Earth, Wind & Fire, The Isley Brothers, Johnny Cash, Coltrane, Gillespie, Miles Davis.
"Nate Smith" in particular sounds so much like your stereotypical modern artist. Everything from the production, melodies, his voice and vocal chain sounds like at least 20 other artists. Very uninspired in my humble opinion. This is what we can expect AI to produce.
I think you may have found a different Nate Smith than the one goosejuice was referencing. They were likely referring to the drummer named Nate Smith (he's collaborated with at least one of the groups mentioned).
The guy has a lot of interesting work, but I think the thing that blew me away the most is the composition 'Warble'. If memory serves, that's the piece where he explored 64th note and dotted 32nd note displacements in order to mimic J Dilla's 'wonky' swing. I've tried capturing the Dilla swing; it's nearly impossible to do on the drums without sounding like you don't know how to play the instrument. Nate Smith, on the other hand, makes it sound fantastic.
The guy is a wizard.
You're right, stumbled upon the wrong Nate.
Of course they were inspired by existing artists and by a greater set of them! This is central to my argument that music is only going to get better with greater exposure.
Those are all great artists you listed but to attempt to quantify that they are any more talented or creative than contemporaries is a silly exercise. It's art.
This is a small list of random artists that I've listened to over the past few years. Jacob Collier is a perfect example of exceptional generational talent who not only is technically mind blowing but also incredibly original. I bet every one of those artists you listed would say the same about him (if they haven't passed of course).
Nate Smith likewise would be welcomed as the drummer in any one of those bands. Did you listen to the right Nate Smith?
> Of course they were inspired by existing artists and by a greater set of them!
Inspiration is a given, and nothing wrong with that. But I often feel like instead of inspiring to new heights we get a watered down version.
I don't know, maybe you're just not hearing what I'm hearing. Watch Cory Henry on Snarky's Lingus. Jacob Collier do his recent crowd work with the NSO. Cory Wong talk about Vulfpeck and their MSG show and never rehearsing. Hiromi and Tank and the Bangas on NPR's tiny desks. I'd say Abigail Lapell adds tremendously to the folk of the era you are referencing.
Watered down is just not how I'd describe any of the musicians I listed
I come back to that keyboard solo on Lingus every couple of months and it never fails to make my hairs stand on edge. Absolutely legendary.
Larnell Lewis also delivered a world-class performance on that entire album.
Show me someone great who when you go to their inspiration you can't find they themselves very much creating watered down versions of their inspirations.
You seem hyper focused on comparing all that you hear to what you already know you like. If you really want to appreciate new music, cut it out. You're introducing bias at the outset. If you approach a new artist as if their work is isolated, and give it some time to settle in, I think you'll be surprised.
Yam Yam and Karina Rykman would fit in your list. Thanks for it.
Rykman is awesome. I'll check out Yam Yam, thanks!
At the risk of just mouthing off my favorites, there are a lot of genres today are the best they've ever been. The post-punk revival out of the UK is great. The "chambery" Black Country, New Road and the "mathy" Black Midi are some of the best we've seen and there are other exceptional talents in that scene. Noisy-shoegazy-indie rock is also a great scene right now with artists like Jane Remover and Mitski releasing what will be important albums for ages to come.
Note, Mitski debuted in 2013 but most of the strongest records over the past few years, from hip-hop, pop to experimental rock to metal, seems to be by artists or individual who've been making music for around a decade-ish roughly. Maybe this disqualifies the whole lot and you're trying to highlight some weakness in the debuts of the past few years. If so, maybe you should wait a decade? If not, I can assert that some of the most talented artists of history are making music today. By any metric.
I could spend hours writing a response to this. I am mid 30 and my style of music changes with every season I am not within trends but most songs I enjoy most are not older than 3 or 4 years. Not all of them are well known.
Even something established like Punk reached new heights with more modern approaches (ex. Sleaford mods, Team Scheisse in German)
I think music is very subjective still but new music never stopped to impress me.
Team Scheisse, new heights? What exactly brings punk to new heights with this band?
There's no hiding the "influence" of Sex Pistols, and I'd much rather listen to Sex Pistols, Ramones, and also Rancid than this band.
Do not see the appeal.
I just discovered Team Scheisse a week ago (they are from city!) and now I come across them on HN, what a coincidence (obviously this might be the Baader-Meinhof-Phenomenon at play but since they are a comparatively small band I would say the effect is rather small)!
FWIW most of the top charting music of the 90s, 80s and so on were also "worse" and have mostly been forgotten. Few songs remain popular or regain popularity. A lot of chart hits are really just springboarding off "you had to be there" cultural moments or experiences or simply a general "vibe" that are fleeting and trivial enough not to stick around even in nostalgia.
As an extreme example, I'd argue the popularity of David Hasselhoff's I've been looking for freedom in Germany is almost entirely a result of "retconning" (if not fabricating) its supposed popularity at the time of its original release. It would have probably been forgotten entirely if it hadn't been rediscovered "ironically" in the context of ridiculous claims about its influence on the fall of the Berlin Wall. Heck, I remember owning a casette of the album as a kid only because "it's the guy from Knight Rider". For adult women his claim to fame was co-starring alongside Pamela Anderson in Baywatch as one of the few men regularly appearing bare-chested on daytime television - I'd say his musical talents played a very small role in his original popularity and it's telling nobody remembers any other songs than the one he performed on a TV show. He was never considered good, he was just a familiar face (and body) and made a catchy tune.
I recently encountered the term 'Tempoflavanoids' - the flavour of a particular moment in time. I love the concept, it speaks to the artist in me.
Though I thought David Hasslehoff's 'True Survivor' music video for the Kung Fury kickstarter was a banger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTidn2dBYbY
I agree with this take.
“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.” comes to mind
> 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, what the majority of people are exposed to.
Unfortunately, very few repliers are addressing the first point that I made in my comment: "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music."
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.
> it's all there for free with an Internet connection
The "Internet" is just hand waving. The internet is massive. Almost everything is available on the internet, but that's a problem, not a solution. Sometimes it's like finding a needle in a haystack.
> If one can't find new music to ones taste it's not because of what's being produced.
So what is the explanation for "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music", which again, you haven't addressed.
You shared a single infographic without a source, but taking it as fact I would take a guess that it's easier to discover old music now and there's more music to listen to thus flattening the curve.
I'm sorry that it's difficult for you to find what you like. My tastes are very broad and I find new artists every week just listening to Spotify, Bandcamp, YouTube while working. My wife and I and our friends share music that we like with each other. We see live music and get exposed to openers we've never heard of.
That said music is a big part of our lives.
> You shared a single infographic without a source
The source was the submitted article under discussion in these comments!
> I'm sorry that it's difficult for you to find what you like.
I never said that. I'm not even discussing me, or you for that matter. I'm discussing the aggregate differences between the generations.
Indeed it is! Shameful of me.
Apologizes, when you referred to it being a needle in a haystack I thought you were referring to your own experiences.
> Unfortunately, very few repliers are addressing the first point that I made in my comment: "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music."
Seems very hard to accurately measure, could be that people don't know what was released in their decade but the stuff from the 80s is easy to pinpoint.
> could be that people don't know what was released in their decade
It seems implausible that young people don't know that new music is new.
Why would the 80s be easy to pinpoint for people who weren't even alive in the 80s?
If you consider the top charting music and the typical fart noises uploaded to soundcloud which have 3 listens, yes it is worse.
If you're only considering your 25 favorite new songs out of tens of millions then sure, it's better. But also there is recency/novelty bias which counteracts and may overcome any past/nostalgia bias
In conclusion, if all you're doing is listening to music alone in your apartment then it's never been better. Until you step out into the real world and realize that, best-case scenario, everyone hates your music and everything that it represents. More likely they will be completely bored and indifferent.
The world's been hating my music tastes and telling me to turn stuff off since the 1980s. And then, ten years later they love it, and 10 years after that my ex-is bragging how she used to listen to it decades ago.
And definitely don't like things based on the real world, the real world is shit.
Music only matters to the producer and the listener. It's deeply personal.
I think you're missing the point.
This sounds like a parody of Western individualism
Why exactly do you care if music you enjoy listening to is also enjoyed by others? If you enjoy it and the musicians are making it what else is there?
Plenty of artists are just making art for themselves.
Plenty of people live in the woods. If we all lived in the woods everything would be fine! I'm sure our GDP wouldn't fall and no one would starve to death at all. Nope; Not a bit.
Why don't we all just wear VR headsets all day?
LOL enjoy your atomized Balkanized tower of Babel existence. If it has to be explained then you're consitutionally incapable of understanding it anyway.
I think you're thinking way to hard about this my friend. What part of seeing a local band at a bar or listening to family members make music leads you to bring up GDP and VR? Either you're completely misunderstanding this discussion or you're extremely out of touch.
LOL the classic "if I play dumb long enough he'll call me dumb and get banned"
You're disgusting.
Either that or you actually spit on the very idea of community and shared culture in which case you are yet more disgusting and are my enemy.
What gave you the idea that I'm not interested in community and shared culture? That's precisely what I'm promoting. My point was that it doesn't matter what's popular in the mainstream.
This is no place for personal insults, so I'll call it here as this clearly isn't a genuine exchange.
What gave me the idea?
>If you enjoy it and the musicians are making it what else is there?
LOL.
Also, a kiwi, a german, and an uzbek in a discord channel does not a community make. I'm talking about people playing banjo on their porch because that is what people do in their community and their region
> Look at Hollywood now too: everything is a sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, or adaptation. There’s hardly anything original anymore.
Vs:
> This may surprise some, but since 2000, just over half of all movies released have been original screenplays.
https://stephenfollows.com/are-movies-becoming-more-derivati...
The problem is they aren't blockbusters, so you don't remember them. From the same link:
> While the number of movies based on original screenplays has been increasing since the late 2000s, their box office share has continued to fall. In 1984, 73% of the box office were original screenplays, whereas forty years later in 2023, that figure was just 30.6%. And that’s despite their production share being similar (i.e. 60.4% vs 55.9%).
And from a separate post:
> Sequels were twice as frequent in the late 1980s than in the 2010s, if we use production figures as our measure
https://stephenfollows.com/are-there-more-movie-sequels-than...
I wonder who's producing those movies though. My comment did specify Hollywood. The indie film scene, most of which consists of original screenplays, is very active, and now it's easier than ever both to shoot a film—on a smartphone!—and to distribute a film—over the internet. (Likewise, it's easier than ever to record and distribute a music album.) However, those films aren't getting mass marketed, getting seen by the majority of people, or making a ton of money. Unfortunately, the linked articles didn't specify the producers, or even the absolute number of movies produced each year, which is also relevant. Whatever the cause, the public's appetite for sequels, as reflected in box office proceeds, has indisputably increased. Those are the movies getting seen the most. Is that a "natural" desire of consumers? Is it a result of marketing? Something else?
Here's an older post (2015) by the same guy about Hollywood films:
https://stephenfollows.com/how-original-are-hollywood-movies...
> 39% of top movies released 2005-14 were truly original, i.e. not an adaptation, sequel, spin-off, remake, or other such derivative work.
I don't know, I watch most of my movies at home (I have a nice setup) and watch as many old movies as new. I never feel like I have any trouble finding an original film. The blockbusters may soak up all the ticket sales, but there's just no shortage of original films to me.
> The blockbusters may soak up all the ticket sales, but there's just no shortage of original films to me.
But my comment was not about you. ;-) My original point was "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music." And if you "watch as many old movies as new", that's certainly not a ringing endorsement of new movies.
I'm GenX and a movie buff, but not much of a music listener, so I replied to the Hollywood part of your comment. There's always going to be more old movies than new and I watch enough movies that I run out of the new ones.
That is indeed right. People confuse their own perception of their surroundings with actual changes in the world. We're human beings, with a rich inner world, which always evolves as we age and there is a lot going on in there, both on a chemical / biological level, and spiritually. We are not really built to be objective observers.
I certainly have plenty of biased but late 70s early 80s seems like a really good era. Especially because it was so diverse and not dominated by a single sound.
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 always liked to think of this as some kind of survivor bias. There is trash music in everybtime period, but the good music will be listend to more often and thus shape the collective musical memory of a decade. The time we're in hasn't had the chance for that to happen yet, so it seems arbitrary and random as it happens and more defined in hindsight.
It also matters where you look. The 80s have a very recognizable pop music, but it also has Punk and multiple other things.
In my case, I'm from 1987 and pop music from the early 90's was as bad as the one from 2000's, because I remember it well from my parents (and, well, by age 9-10 I was more than aware of the Spice Girls, as every girl in my Elementary school was into dances).
Later, in 2000's, with P2P and streaming radios, I was astounded by some music genres. And, a bit further, with Jamendo and Magnatune, I found incredible gems not found anywhere.
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 showing of survivor bias. Sure, Tupac, Biggie, Beastie Boys etc are classic but people are rarely listening to the bland safe music from that era. So so many songs where the rapper couldn't think of anything more inventive than "oh you're having FUN well wait till I go and get my GUN I'll shoot you dead and you'll be DONE"
In 30 years, people will hear Kendrick's discography and think "god no one makes meaningful hip hop anymore" while forgetting about the "pop music but instead of a guitar solo, it's a bad rap verse" or the vast amount of emo/trap/SoundCloud stuff where the good stuff is rare.
The exciting thing about living now is the ease that someone can send a link to me. Constantly my friends and I are finding recently released or decade old music that we can simply message the other and say "you'll love the production on this" - whereas for years, you saved up your pocket money and bought one album and that's all you had until you could afford another.
People who say modern music is rubbish rarely make any effort to actually find any. You've kids now talking about bands like Arctic Monkeys but they don't realise the indie landfill of shite guitar bands that all had the same look, same twangy sound, same trajectory. For every Panda Bear/Animal Collective - there was 100 bland animal based bands all copying the same formula in the hope of being as big as Pigeon Detectives lmao
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.
Be aware that grouping things by the respondents "generation" is actually meaningless[1] and likely to make you combine several real processes into random "effects".
Trying to explain these arbitrary aggregations with a single story is obviously fruitless and mostly a good way to make up nonsense arguments.
[1] https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2021/05/26/open-lette...
The return of the 80s is, or rather was, just a current trend. Next up will be the 90s/00s, which can already be seen in make up and fashion, and I'm sure media will follow soon as well.
Wrt/ Hollywood: I think they are not the monopoly they used to be, because the powers are shifting by streaming, and short video services. Similar to how AAA games are more stagnant than the indie gaming scene.
"Music" is too broad to "get worse". There are trends in music that can be considered bad, such as the lessening dynamic range of the recordings - the Loudness War[0]. But there is more music than ever, computerized or not, so if you find that some source of music is bad, you just need to look elsewhere. Music production is easier than ever, so even very niche sounds are kept alive, like the lofi sound of post-punk decades ago[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
[1] https://desmonddoom.bandcamp.com/album/doom-and-bloom
> The return of the 80s is, or rather was, just a current trend. Next up will be the 90s/00s, which can already be seen in make up and fashion, and I'm sure media will follow soon as well.
Is it a "return of the 80s", or is it a rejection of newer music? Again, "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music." This is a difference from previous generations, which tend to hold on stronger to the music of their times. The current trends of current pop culture have always had a much stronger influence on young people than any "nostalgic" trends. When I was young, nostalgia from earlier decades had almost no influence on myself or my peers.
I believe that music's role changed a lot first with the wide spread of the internet and then smartphones and streaming. The internet gave rise to a global culture, and a new channel where culture can form, and then streaming completely changed how people consume music.
I see rejection, disappointment and disillusion as a general theme that's going on in culture, but I can't say that these weren't present in the past cultures as well - going back some decades, the popularity of punk and its offshoots show just how much these feelings resonated with the audience back then.
I think that with the widespread access and nonexistent barrier to entry to past cultures via streaming, attention just spread over the existing cultural palette, resulting in lower average consumption of the new and current. It's not that the new and current is rejected - it's rather that long tail is longer and taller.
The return of the 90s is not next up, it's right now.
For the past 2 years, mainstream chart-toppers like David Guetta or Calvin Harris have been (respectively) covering 90s eurodance songs or making new ones in the same style.
Music was always like this. It used to be even more like this 100 years ago. How many twelve bar blues songs use the exact same chord progression? Maybe thousands if you managed to catalog them all. Maybe hundreds with the same lick between verses. As music started being recorded you had people writing dozens and dozens of songs a day to be owned by a label. They’d find some starlet with a voice and give her a book of these songs from the basement to record on the album and market her for a few years. If anything we are reverting to this model more today, as bands are no longer in vogue as much as individual artists whose material they perform has probably 20 writers credited.
> Music was always like this.
This is not an informative response to the observation that "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music."
Also, there has been a lot of corporate consolidation in the music industry, the film industry, in almost every industry.
I was born in 1980, so it would be before my musical "peak" so to speak, but I dislike pretty much anything from the 80s popular enough to have been on the radio in the 80s. Right now the 80s style is so popular, I find myself even disliking a lot of modern music that has that "80s retro feel"
I was in the car with an older Gen-Z'er last year and they expressed jealousy at me having grown up in the 80s because they "like the music so much" and were shocked to find out I didn't.
I think it's the opposite of corporatization and consolidation. Computerization? Yes, of course, but it gave everyone the possibility to make music at a very affordable cost. A $100 MIDI controller comes with a license for a full blown music production software and literally anyone can record, mix, master and release an album. I know several people who are not professional musicians, not even formally trained - just happen to like making sounds - who have their albums on Spotify and/or Soundcloud.
It's the opposite - we're way less centralized now. No one cares about what's on the radio or MTV anymore. We have infinite access to every song ever* for $11 a month, and the recommendation algorithms will happily show you music outside the mainstream and outside the current decade if that's what keeps you listening.
*yes this is hyperbole
> No one cares about what's on the radio or MTV anymore.
Why not?
> if that's what keeps you listening.
That's the key, though. Kids are generally biased toward new music. This phenomenon is perfectly natural and consistent over the generations, as shown in the article. In the 1980s, it wasn't particularly hard to "discover" 70s or 60s music, and indeed parents might want their kids to listen to their music, but that's not necessarily what the kids want to listen to, because it's not cool. Parents are uncool. Kids want their own music.
What's interesting, though, is that GenZ and Millennials appear to be less biased toward the new music and less biased against the old. The fact that every song ever is available for streaming doesn't mean that people want to listen to every song ever. My understanding is the streaming plays are very top-heavy toward the top artists, and smaller artists are struggling mightily under the streaming payout system.
Nirvana and early Linkin Park seem to be much more popular among GenZ and Millenials than their own music, and lasting, not just trending or being a fad.
Music is certainly getting worse.
> Corporatized, consolidated, computerized. wtf, pick a word and say it. Stop spewing nonsense
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 typically we find our tribe in our early teens, and money is tight so again, you buy what you know you are going to like.
I imagine though that streaming may change this, since you can dive into just about anything. 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'm lucky, my musical taste has always been broad, and if anything, it's got broader as i've got older. I do find myself reaching for older stuff that i've not heard for a while rather than new music, so when I catch myself doing this too much, the 'i've not heard something I don't like' alarm goes off, and I track down something that a session player I like has played on that i've never heard before, and try and find something new.
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 (willingly)
Now, you can just ask the algorithm to play "something I like".
> 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.
There was never one culture, but the fragmentation was far more coarse.
I was into D&D, so I was exposed to anime, comics, Monty Python, Mel Brooks, and Tom Lehrer, because those were a certain subculture.
I was never a comic-book nerd, but I could probably name a dozen different series from image comics in the 90s because I was surrounded by people who read them.
I flat out dislike watching Mel Brooks movies, but I can quote about 90% of Spaceballs or Blazing Saddles because that was a part of the vocabulary of that group.
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.
There were multiple sub-cultures warring against each other and especially against pop MTV back then.
Mainstream always coexisted wirh smaller cultures.
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.
It's a mixed bag; on the one side I agree that during that era, people were exposed to a somewhat broad range of musical styles if they watched TV or listened to radio - early to mid teen me would be exposed to the likes of Madonna, Rammstein, Eminem and Slipknot all in one day. But as someone else pointed out, it was all within the "bubble" of what was popular at that time, and the options to break out of there were limited because there were only so many music television and radio channels, and they would have a limited playlist of <1000 songs at a time, probably even less than that.
Nowadays if you have a streaming subscription or even Youtube, you have instant access to millions of songs and a multitude of curators creating playlists to fit any mood. Granted, Spotify and co will curate some popular playlists, and discovering curators outside of that bubble takes some more effort. But it's there.
We live in interesting times where on the one side we can be overwhelmed by choice, while at the same time delighted with new discoveries. Where budding artists can create from their proverbial basement and self-publish to a potential audience of billions.
>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 wish we had something like /mu/ flowcharts[1] but in a more general way. So after playing a song you can get a question or a prompt of what you liked and get some suggestion based on the input.
But IMO, music recommendation peaked 10 years ago with Last.fm and it's only been downhill since then, which is a shame because we had a lot of cool music in the last years, but the exploration is getting harder. But who knows, maybe I'm just getting old and I don't hang around the hip places anymore.
1: https://4chanmusic.fandom.com/wiki/Flowcharts
I really enjoyed 8tracks back in its prime: it was a social network for user-created playlists, and it made finding cool new music really easy. The playlists were often very well thought out; nothing like the playlists you'll find on Spotify.
There is rateyourmusic.com, which is positioned as sort of a Letterboxd for music, but I haven't used it much.
Music discoverability is a big problem I'd like to solve, especially now that I'm in my 30s and don't really have the sort of social circle these days that would expose me to cool new music.
I've toyed with the idea of making an 8tracks-like service, where tastemakers can create playlists to share, and the streaming happens via the API of whatever streaming services you're subscribed to (Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, whatever). If anyone is interested in a project like this, feel free to reach out.
last.fm is still around, although I don't use it for recommendations.
I've recently enjoyed using RYM to find music. Start with an artist/album I like, click on the genre, and try out the top-rated artists/albums.
It's a manual version of the flowchart, you're right that it'd be neat to automate that. I haven't even tried using RYM tags, but they'd probably be useful input, too.
Yeah, when I mentioned last.fm I meant last.fm radio, a short lived service that if I remember right, it was only supposed to be available on the UK, although with the easily bypassed checks of that time.
The description you make about rym sounds similar, so maybe i’ll take a look.
I started with a very narrow taste as a teen: pretty much just metal, and mostly just black & death.
But it grew broader over time, so that's possible. Now I might dig pretty much any kind of music.
I feel like trying to understand new types of music has an effect beyond just getting familiar with them: brain adapts to process a broader range of stimuli, so that also helps to understand other unrelated genres in future.
I experienced biggest change with Autechre: it was rather difficult to listen to (and I specifically took it as a challenge), but after Autechre I can listen anything :)
And in teens I had to listen something at least 5 times to start enjoying it. Now I can dig it right away. So it feels like brain processes music differently now
>> 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'.
For me almost all of the music I discover is through the personal recommendations or AMVs (are they still called AMVs if they aren't anime related?) or video memes.
Finding new music is easier if people aren't penalized for using it in their own artistic pursuit. [[placeholder for a rant about current implementations of copyright laws being stuffling for artists. There are a lot of those out there, so pick any rant you are comfortable with]]
All artistic works categories should intertwine more, imo. But that's hard when we have one site for music, another for art, and another for video. Social networks like facebook or twitter almost solved it (although, I prefer to think that blogging platforms like tumblr or myspace solved it better). Common creatives is a very good license for this very reason (relatively easy artistic borrowing), and we should propagandize it more.
That's to say, many people have no good reason to engage with new anymore, having found the stuff that they like and other things they prefer doing. Which is cosmic, in my opinion. Not only they do what they like to do listening to the things they like, but also if everyone was always seeking out the newest thing, it would be a neck-breathing horse race between artists.
> 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 like this one, etc. I'm so sick of it.
The way to branch out of your rut is other people. Some band I'd never have listened to, and if I accidentally had, would have skipped it 30 seconds in, have become my favorites simply because someone I had a connection with played it or recommended it. Movies I wouldn't have picked, but watched with someone else, are often better than anything I'd have picked based on my past preferences.
These days, more and more, I am realizing how rewarding it is to read a book or try a new restaurant based on nothing except that a friend with completely different taste likes it. If it turns out to be a dud, it's worth it for when I find something completely new that I do like.
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)
> in another domain, at some restaurants it's possible to order dishes which don't appear on their menu
I've experienced this in Italy. Our host took us to a restaurant where he knew the manager and looked at the menu. He then asked 'but what have you really got?'. After a long very Italian debate (which I didn't understand) with a lot of gesticulation etc we were brought a multi-course meal that was absolutely delicious and involved various things that had just come into season, things that the manager kept back for friends, etc.
I think feeds are practical, it's just that pretty much all mainstream non-RSS feeds are designed to take control away from you and stand in your way, rather than let you be free to explore and discover.
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.
I'd skip less if I could trust that the algorithmic playlists followed "reasonable" paths. But all to often the transitions are really jarring.
(Also, big pet peeve: they need to take into account time of day and factors like weather to do well, as well as habit; I will not respond the same way to a track on a rainy grey winter evening as on a sunny summers day)
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.
> 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?
100% the case. I keep telling my kids that, but they don't seem to get it.
> I imagine though that streaming may change this, since you can dive into just about anything. 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'.
So much so. Spotify became really popular when I was in my 30s and I tried it, listening to the "Discover weekly" for about 6 months. It was 10 weeks before I heard a track I had not heard before and the closest it came to playing an artist I hadn't heard before was a track from a 1-album super-group with two frontmen I was familiar with from their other groups.
Doing the math: I didn't play the list religiously so figure about 20 weeks worth of songs would be 600 songs. I had heard over 80% of the songs before. I had heard nearly all of the artists before. It played a single digit number of songs that I didn't like. If I'm liking 99% of what I'm hearing, something is wrong.
>I imagine though that streaming may change this, since you can dive into just about anything.
my theory is maintaining a single complete playlist as the best way to not get stuck with only the safe and boring.
https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-complete-playlist-e8eb3...
One 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/Benny Goodman instead of Count Basie/Duke Ellington/Slim Gaillard. The services have that music (I can find the songs and seed stations from it) but for whatever reason all of the ones I've tried (Spotify/Apple/Amazon/Pandora, and I have a feeling I've tried others and forgotten) just don't want me to listen to the style I'm looking for.
The technical reason for this is just that the algorithm fails to distinguish between these two groups. Probably its just a hard problem to solve from a sample of what people listen to. I suspect a significant fraction of people that like black swing also like white swing and that results in the algorithm being unable to resolve that there are two features there and not one.
You really need a level of manual curation that a big data statistical model just can't provided at scale.
What I find curious about it though is that it's obviously recognizing the style - it plays 1-2 musicians from the "black" group, then circles into only playing Miller/Goodman/Rat pack and never comes back around to playing the music that I originally was trying to play. If it was behaving the way you are thinking, I'd expect it to mix the two styles.
I think the problem is that the algorithms are based on statistical probabilities from other users. I.e users who listen to X also like to listen to Y. So we’ll add Y to the queue. Then Y becomes the new reference point. I mean that is a gross simplification but essentially if your musical taste is outside of 2 standard deviations of the norm all the algorithms are gonna suck. For me they do.
So what you're saying is it's badly designed?
It's badly designed for your particular taste, but it probably works for most people which is why it's used.
I’ve definitely trained tidal that I prefer some pretty whacky sub genres (this Northern European country, but only metal with strong brass sections, or contemporary accordion, hurdy gurdy, and a dozen other clusters like that).
I’d guess if you created a profile and loaded it up with just black swing bands from the 30-50’s, it’d do OK.
If not, and I understand their algorithm correctly, it would not only be because no current listeners make that distinction (as discussed up thread).
It would also be because the metadata doesn’t give any signal for it. They seem to use information such as record labels, song writers, producers, guest musicians, etc.
If that metadata has no signal, then my guess is that you’re trying to get it to racially segregate music that was produced before the big interracial marriage scare.
People were worried that if their kids listened to the same musicians, then whites and blacks (or worse!) might marry, so they created white radio stations and black radio stations.
Before that, I imagine there was a lot more interracial collaboration, and the metadata wouldn’t find clean clusters along race boundaries.
It could also be that the old metadata was never digitized.
I wonder if this is the case, or if the model just has year as a heavily weighted factor, because bluntly, Ella and Louis were vastly superior musicians to Frank and Tony. I honestly can’t hear the similarity. It’s like thinking “Oh. You liked The Killers, here’s some One Direction”
The other replies are interpreting this as the algorithm failing, but I have interpreted these sorts of things as intentional design choices, wherein they want the recommender to keep trying to diversify your interests so it's harder for you to just quit the service and move to another one which might not have the same variety (or where you'd have to try to "teach" the recommender again). They've determined that the potential benefit is much better than somewhat annoying you.
This interpretation of their behavior is why I've stuck to buying my music (fortunately that's still common for the genres I'm into).
trying to diversify your interests
In this instance - and others in my experience listening to the recommendations on this and similar services - "diversify" is used when "dilute" would be more appropriate.
It’s not really though - if it was known in advance that you did not like a track then there would be no reason to recommend it. It’s the classic precision vs recall trade off: I can create a recommendation algorithm that only recommends your favourite song, forever, and that will have perfect precision but miserable recall. To increase recall we have to accept a drop in precision.
It's entirely possible to retain soul and widen reference.
Offering up bland imitations of authentic artists is hardly simply a drop in precision.
I’ve found that most algorithms tend to reinforce a taste by trying to provide more of the same. They rarely try to bring in something that diverges from the pattern. Of course, the libraries have limits and the algorithms will often match against characteristics that you do not consider relevant.
I would love diversifying, but it does not do that. It does "revert to mainstream" trying to push you toward the most generic thing accestible by association from what you like.
I encounter similar behaviour as you in an entirely different genre - I've long since suspected that Spotify keeps redirecting me back to songs that are either less royalties for them to play, or located closer to me on the CDN to save serving costs.
There are services like this that explain the behavior:
https://artistpush.me/collections/spotify-promotion
No idea if they work though.
Artists can also pay Spotify to promote their music:
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/promoting-mus...
I imagine that boosts “organic” engagement, leading to the same symptoms.
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 ?
Reminds me of the old webring concept from long ago.
Or of the old mailing list concept from even longer ago.
I’d guess it’s just because the algorithm is not smart enough and is just looking at the category as a whole and then playing the most played. So Glenn Miller and Count Basie are in the same category, but more Spotify people who listen to that category listen to Glenn Miller.
Maybe one day, they’ll get smaller clusters and lump you in with other listeners who favor black musicians within that category.
This is my problem with these services in that they are very generic and smooth out the outliers. So it’s good for pleasing the 80%, but people with specific tastes are out of luck. Big time regression to the mean.
Which swing tracks do you recommend to a noob who just got introduced to the swing music and dance?
I'm personally a fan of the old stuff (Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Chick Webb, Jimmie Lunceford, Slim Gaillard, Ella Fitzgerald to name a few) but the best thing you can do is go to dances and lessons, and when you hear a song you like, go up to the DJ and ask them what it was. The best music is the music you like and that makes you want to dance, regardless of who made it.
On pandora I find every channel I make eventually slides into the nearest "standard" repetive theme (often abandoning the seed content entirely). I always assumed it was nudging me towards the content with the lowest licensing costs.
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.)
The simple explanation is that largely only white artists played on radio stations. Popular songs would be sanitized for white radio by recording what we would now consider as covers. However, it was also rather commonplace for a whole slew of artists to record a popular song at nearly the same time. The proliferation of covers wasn't so overtly motivated by bigotry since an original recording wasn't regarded with the same esteem as today.
>I'm a little puzzled as you're describing a music stylist on skin colour, black vs white
You may not realize this, but in the 1930-1950 era being described in America, there was something called "Segregation" where black people were considered legally inferior to white people. As such, there was a very hard line between "black" and "white", a line that was aggressively enforced by every level of society from lawmaking, policing and justice, to radio and TV access, to education, to neighborhoods, and frankly everything else.
With that context, I think it's very easy to see how there can be "black swing" and "white swing" -- it was in a society that forcibly separated everything into "black X" and "white X".
You should be able to describe the sound differences if the music is that distinct.
People not deep into music have hard time verbalize difference between metal and rock or hiphop and rap. Despite differences being super obvious when listening.
>You should be able to describe the sound differences if the music is that distinct.
They are and I can, however the existence of Black Swing is in no way predicated on a difference in sound only.
Consider this: white culture in America continually stole from a legally repressed black culture, including white swing which stole the black art and commercialized it. Even if a 1950 white swing song sounds similar to a 1940 black swing song, there is still a "black swing" and a "white swing".
Frankly, I think trying to reduce history of music down to "the sounds themselves" is a way to whitewash the history and destroy the true knowledge of what happened and why. The context is very important.
Go listen to Straight Otta Compton and then Vanilla Ice and you'll get it. Or for Swing Count Basie vs. the slicker more commercial Glenn Miller but it's subtle.
And then Coltrane and Orman and Davis come and change the whole jazz world.
I didn't ask for examples, I'm familiar with what race these artists are.
My point is if the music actually is so different, it should be noticable and describable without knowing the race of a particular artist. So how would you describe the black music that describes only black musicians but not white musicians from this period, and vice versa.
"Should be describable" is a false metric. We can hear differences between categories and not be able to verbalize what we're hearing. It's the same for anything -- you could walk through a museum showing abstract expressionism and action painting, and feel that one of the styles speaks to you, and yet not be able to put into words how the two styles are different.
The brain can categorize much more easily than it can create a concrete definition for those categories.
> We can hear differences between categories and not be able to verbalize what we're hearing. It's the same for anything
For some reason, the view is widely held that internal thoughts are expressed in words. This would mean that anything you can think can easily be verbalized.
The fact that this view is quite obviously false seems to bother very few people.
There’s an assumption to your argument that I don’t believe holds true, that there is such a significant difference that it should be easily describable.
Talking about the arts is difficult. In everyday conversation, well known phrases for describing the arts include “I know it when I see it” and “if you have to ask, then you’ll never know”. I’m a fan of “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. It just isn’t easy to describing differences in performance and interpretation.
Since it’s widely recognised that describing music is difficult, and since you’re familiar with the artists in question, perhaps you could accept the point in good faith or put into words why you don’t think they are any different?
Sure. 99% of the white musicians at that time were total sellouts who played extremely straight, boring, conservative and no-frills music without any embellishment or soul.
The most obvious difference is the energy level and "rawness" of songs - those white bands had really carefully choreographed performances with minimal deviation, even solos were often written out in similar big bands.
Black musicians often shouted, yelled or mugged during performances - all of these are completely absent in white performances at that time.
So describe the difference between NWA and Vanilla ice to yourself while everyone else moves on.
Ya you're not being honest in the slightest. The OP likes the music made by the group he mentions. You instead say he's being racist for liking music of that group. I'm having a hard time discerning if you're trolling or serious.
That's extremely patronising, I know well about segregation of that era, and that segregation functionally continued far longer than the 1950s. Blatantly there's a difference, that was what I was asking about the effect of, which you ignored. At least @ Pannoniae provided an answer.
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.
Also isolated by force in many cases: even in states which didn’t have official segregation laws, things like redlining and police enforcement meant you had very distinct communities. This especially went for anything where alcohol is consumed (being drunk leads to deadly mistakes and could lead to crimes being ignored or minimized) or, especially, sexual contexts - if you’re a young black man, you’re probably not going to find it relaxing to be at a club where various white guys are stopping by to mention what’ll happen if you look at a white woman.
Looking of that period is a very sobering reminder of a very dark stain in our national history - and I’ve read too many stories about even well known performers being told they can’t play at certain venues or have to leave immediately afterwards to think everyone wasn’t aware of the stakes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_Un...
As an example of how widespread this was, it took Marilyn Monroe at the height of her fame intervening for _Ella Fitzgerald_ to be able to play at a club in Los Angeles! Not the Deep South, not 1917, but very modern California.
> In October 1957 Monroe made a call to the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles, on behalf of Fitzgerald. Monroe used her social status and popularity to make a deal with them. If they allowed Fitzgerald to perform, Monroe promised that she would take a front-row seat every night
https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/ella-fitzgera...
The closest I can come to a silver lining for this is that it allowed more artists to find a niche where they weren’t competing with the major national artists but that’s nowhere close to compensation for so much tragedy.
Back in those period it's still very distinct / segregated black vs white culture.
Hey! I have a quite similar music taste. (my favs definitely include Slim Gaillard and Fats Waller, that kind of stuff)
If you have Discord, I've been curating a musicbot with a similar music rotation since I've also been completely fed up with streaming services pushing more Glenn Miller/similar straight bands, not the hip ones :) If you are interested, join my server, the bot is running 24/7: https://discord.gg/wjsC2TUZPK
Thanks, I'll check it out.
I recently discovered everynoise.com, it can make a playlist of a genre for you, it has a lot of black*
Edit: spelling
everynoise.com
Last FM and music neighbors could have solved this.
I haven't used last.fm for a long time and it seems like a shadow of its former self, pre acquisition. I've discovered so much music on there, and I'm getting really disappointed by spotifys repetitiveness. Is last.fm still good to discover new music or is it just harvesting scrobbles?
It is also my experience that Spotify reverts to what's popular and last.fm doesn't.
Last FM was so good for this.
I'm sorry, but wanting your music algorithm to key in on the composer's skin color is a ridiculous expectation. Listen to albums or make a playlist.
In this case it's not that ridiculous because "black" here isn't just a skin color, but primarily a subculture/subgenre with some distinct musical attributes.
Nobody finds separating French electronic music into its own subgenre ridiculous. Same with Italian Disco.
Such distinct movements are quite usual, so dissatisfaction about Black Swing on streaming services is understandable.
Spotify won't be able to keep those genres separate either.
I think many here are missing the point being made. Of course there are stylistic differences between some groups of artists. The thing is that they probably aren't coded by skin color let alone period location etc, so of course it will bleed. Playing some swing and expecting it to continue to stay within very blurry racial lines is unrealistic, silly, and maybe irresponsible for a recommendation algorithm.
As it's been said, there are better methods of discovery for this purpose. In your example, I'm sure there are Spotify playlists for Italian disco that have been curated.
But these were different music styles.
Also, the subculture exists in the US because of hundreds of years of intentional effort by the majority to destroy any preexisting cultures among black people and prevent any integration with the mainstream.
That's funny, because a lot of 'black' music in that period came from irish musical influences and totally did not come from what you are claiming.
No, he's saying that within the genre of mid-20th century Swing there are distinct musical traditions found in black vs white bands, which he wishes he could partition against. What's ridiculous about that?
Because they all borrowed from each other and the line is blurry if it even exists at all.
I must be some sort of freak.
I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s listening to classic rock, and a lot of it I can’t even stand any more due to the incredibly small playlists that most classic rock stations use.
In my 20’s I started listening to a lot of classical and then jazz. In the 90’s a lot of grunge which’s I still love. After that was trance in the 2000’s, then ambient, techno and IDM after that. I still listen to all of these genres today depending on my mood.
I don't think you're completely alone, but you're probably statistically insignificant (don't worry, I'm right there with you).
Like you, I can't stand the music I grew up with all that much (maybe a few songs here and there), but I went through the trance/electronic fixation in the 2000s. Now it's almost anything that I enjoy, which probably doesn't say much, but I'm presently listening to some chillstep and was listening to metal covers of the sea shanties "Santiana" and "Roll the Old Chariot Along." A few weeks ago, I was listening to Norse-inspired works by Einar Selvik.
I can't imagine we're that statistically significant or if streaming may have some impact on availability and interest. I'm unwilling to believe it's a personality trait, for instance. (For another data point, I was born in the early 80s.)
I actually wonder if staying receptive to new music into or past middle age is enhanced by autism. I am a male on the spectrum, in my late 30's, and absolutely nothing about this article rings true to me. I generally operate on a 5 year cycle where I completely reinvent my musical interests, stop enjoying lots of tracks that I used to love (I hate just about eveything I loved at 14), and hang onto a handful of tracks that I consider timeless.
I am already feeling myself reach the end of one of these cycles where I am digging through netlabels and indie internet radio stations looking for the next niche subgenre to become addicted to.
Brains have to have repeated exposure to a stimulus before they find it pleasurable. This is why you may need to try a new food a few times before you develop a liking for it, and the same goes for new music genres.
If you purposefully go out and listen to new music, you'll quickly get accustom to the sounds of new genres. On the other hand, people who are not in the habit of trying new things never train their brain to enjoy new types of music.
It seems plausible. I'm not on the spectrum (so far as I know), but my receptiveness to new music generally has some association with previous genres I enjoyed. I definitely don't experience the "reinventiveness" trait so much as gradual evolution. I don't like early 2000s electronica anymore, some trance I used to enjoy I don't, but now I just love some other genres that are tangentially related (chillstep, etc). On the other hand, I still enjoy some of the same metal groups that I used to (Disturbed, Epica, etc) even though I don't listen as often.
Perhaps there is, if you pardon the expression, a spectrum of receptiveness.
I'm thinking there's something to your speculation, though.
I'm going on mid 40s and could have written a very similar comment, except my five year cycle is more additive than reinventive.
Anecdotally for me it's that music is now more complex the simplicity of older music just doesn't please the senses as it did back then.
Kind of the same feeling where you upgrade to two monitors and if you have to use a workstation with one just isn't the same.
You know... this makes a LOT of sense to me.
On the other hand, I really appreciate the minimalism of some modern ambient scores, but I'm not sure me from 15-20 years ago would have had any tolerance of it.
I'm the bane of any recommendation algorithm. They just give me random crap because nobody, not even me, can figure out my taste. I like a little bit of virtually everything, with no rhyme or reason.
"You once listened to a cover from Metallica of an Ennio Morricone song? Here's Metallica entire discography as a suggestion!"
-- the recommendation algorithm
I like music with good lyrics, which similarly no algorithm can figure out.
I find this very interesting, as my path is nearly identical, with the added note (like some other replies) that I just can not stand 60s-70s rock any longer... but I find my musical interests are much wider, and I am listening to more new music than ever before (trance, IDM, experimental, jazz, classical).
I do know people who turn on some streaming service and basically listen to the same genre all day long. I am not sure how they do it. Maybe we are in some small demographic that goes nuts if we do not discover new music?
Spotify gives me half a dozen suggested playlists, and they’re each broadly compartmentalized into different genres (or collections of similar genres).
> I can’t even stand any more due to the incredibly small playlists that most classic rock stations use.
That's every bloody station nowadays. It doesn't matter if its radio, SiriusXM, Spotify, or whatever they all degenerate into a small number of repeated songs.
I loathe this pigeonholing. It makes finding something new you might like REALLY hard.
For example, I don't want an "80s station" with the same old crap. How about a station that plays all the songs released since 1990 by those 80s artists? Nope. Nada.
Or, how about just the other tracks from the same albums. Sure, you've heard "Faithfully" from Journey's "Frontiers" album a zillion times and hate it. Have you heard "Chain Reaction", "Edge of the Blade" or "Frontiers" from the album? Bet you haven't and if you hate their sappy ballads you're likely to enjoy those tracks.
Or, God forbid, brand new artists that sound like what you want. Try coughing up Blossoms from liking 80s. You might get there if you really work by starting from the very specific "jangle pop" angle.
Ever heard anything from "Blackstar" out in public? I know I sure haven't.
However, I would also argue that music is simply a LOT less important to today's youth. It's background noise while doing some other activity and not an activity in and unto itself.
> However, I would also argue that music is simply a LOT less important to today's youth. It's background noise while doing some other activity and not an activity in and unto itself.
Maybe. But then you get t-swizzle teenagers with turntables who rediscover the idea of sitting and listening to an album.
The local oldies station plays 1950-2004 (now-20) and does seem to delve a little past top 40 from time to time.
I too listen to different genres of music depending on mood, and I hate when they mix. I used to make mix tapes and later audio CDs like "Alt Rock #" and "EDM #" and I had dozens of those.
Since I went to digital music, I've had the same problem with practically every bit of software and streaming service. They all seem to have some mode where it wants to just mix stuff between genres and it drives me nuts.
My current service is Google Music, and the (auto-generated) "likes" playlist, which really contains only songs that I genuinely really like, even annoys me due to the mixing of genres.
I've found what works best for discovery is to make playlists (by genre, of course) and then from there pick "Start Radio". That is my main way of discovering new music, and when I find songs I enjoy I try to add them to the playlist, too, and "Like" them if they're especially great.
But I do always feel like I'm against the grain, wondering how anyone can ever use any of the auto-generated playlists that aren't constrained by genre, and why anyone would ever build such a thing.
I use Pandora and I'm able to maintain genre-specific stations pretty well. Sometimes it will try to mix something new in but I just dislike that song and it happily keeps playing the genre(s) that I chose for that channel.
I don't know about Pandora, but I've always been cautious to use "dislike" in that way, because I don't know the scope. There's a difference between "I don't want to ever hear this" vs "I don't want to hear it on this station". I use it for the former but not the latter.
My experience has been that dislikes are station specific. I regularly dislike songs on channels in order to shape the genre, even if I actively listen to that song on other stations. Pandora's whole identity revolves around stations, so it would be weird if dislikes were global.
I've found the pandora community post below that seems to confirm it, though I'm not sure whether the community admin answering the question is actually a pandora employee or not.
https://community.pandora.com/t5/My-Collection/What-if-you-l...
Yeah, the opaqueness of your actions in Pandora and in other streaming services is always annoying.
Likewise, Pandora allows you to create a station with multiple seeds, or (is it the same?) like songs within a station.
I used to use that, and then I felt like it was narrowing the breadth of the station. I realized that in my mental model I wanted it to be a station of Artist A plus Artist B, so a more expansive station, but Pandora seemed to be treating it as "Artist A ∩ Artist B," i.e. just the small intersection.
I’m similarly weird. I grew up in the 90s and listened to a lot of grunge when I was 14 (the music age we seem to prefer according to the article). But I can barely listen to the music from that time anymore. It just sounds so dated, maybe because I listened to it too much? Something like Pearl Jam or Soundgarden just sounds so dreadful now.
Instead, music has become much more timeless for me. 50/60ies jazz, 70s prog rock, Bowie, 2010s hiphop, it’s really all over the place.
> It just sounds so dated, maybe because I listened to it too much?
Something like that happened to me, again and again.
Overlistening things I love (not necessarily because of me, sometimes it's third parties piling upon my own listening), then at some point I start to not like it anymore to a point ranging from "I have no interest in it anymore" to "it makes me cringe".
Then if I manage to avoid it for some time, often I end up rediscovering it (often by accident) and like it again, but the reason I re-like it is usually deeply different from the original one, and certainly far removed from nostalgia.
Not listening for some time indeed sometimes helps. I now try to avoid listening music I really really like too often. It's something beautiful you take out of its box every few months/years. Stuff like Ole Coltrane or Miles Davis' Filles de Kilimanjaro.
I think we have the same taste from the 2000s on. If you had to recommend one artist\track I probably haven't heard of yet, which would it be?
"ambient, techno and IDM" is a broad bucket but my favourite noname I found post 2010s is a greek sampler going by Moderator
Closer to trip-hop maybe but has elements of ambient and some dance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX1SpTUdZQM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MjAGr09yWo
https://moderator.bandcamp.com/album/sinners-syndrome-2
If you're more into the techno / IDM side then maybe you'll like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMGkis0E2r8
it's the dustiest deep house track i've found in a decade
also this one makes me nostalgic for 90s rave scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpZ2s1BrLHI
I have a very similar history as well, so jumping in. You've probably heard of the artist, John Frusciante. But probably not the album, Maya.
The guitarist for RHCP is making the best modern IDM.
I'm not who you're asking, but this is a relatively recent release that put me on my ass:
The song Party Dozen by the band Party Dozen.
Follow rabbit hole from there.
WQXR plays an extremely shallow list. Very little 20th century, minimal baroque, sticks to the more well known romantics.
Me too, but it may be because as a teenager I listened to heavy metal. It was awesome, and I still like hearing those songs occasionally. But it's so loud and exhausting that I don't seek it out. Instead, I'm usually drawn back to Motown and R&B from the 60s and 70s, which is definitely before my time.
On rock, try this:
http://s2.stationplaylist.com:9460/guerrilla
On Jazz, Archive.org has full legal backups of Revolution Void, some gem I discovered wiatth the K.Mandla/Inconsolation blog (now defunct).
They use a set of researched tracks by Arbitron and others seeking to maximize AD revenue by demographic.
There is a TON of great classic rock to enjoy that never sees airplay and the reason is the researched tunes have "known" demographics that can be sold.
I have started a little research project wherein I have been harvesting the feeds of various Internet-active radio stations so I can look for the "deep cuts." Not just for classic rock, but for various "new wave" stations, as well as combining old "top 500" lists, and so on. I am nowhere near done, but I have made some notes that confirm old suspicions.
One, you're quite right about classic rock having a lot of deep cuts that just don't make it outside of some specific instances. On the other hand, not only was new wave not entirely congruent to the 1980s, but a lot of what gets called new wave on various stations is only music that existed in the 1980s, rather than being actual new wave. New wave was fairly tight and the rest is padding.
"Darkjazz" really came and went, and it's unfortunate. I'm still working my way through it but there was a hell of a drop-off.
Speaking of researched tracks, I think when an artist dies, there's a contraction of what of their tracks get played on air.
Another thought, this one purely math. If you bought, say, ten CDs every year, new releases, well, the average age of your collection will age at about half your own age rate. The only ways to prevent that, if this concerns you, is to either jettison your old music or gather ever-increasing amounts of new music.
All of this is to say that, unless your preference is "whatever is on the radio ... played a reasonable volume" (Pictures for Sad Children), you're swimming upstream, against the fantastically evolved. Taste gave way to faddishness, then payola, and now, well, The Algorithm. It's a fight to find what you might like rather than what is just being extruded like soft serve.
Indeed! Your comment resonates with my own thought and experiences.
In another comment, I said it helps to be around others seeking new tunes. It helps a lot! Their bias into our system can bend things back into a fairly normal curve. It is like rolling back the clock on our music age.
Right now, I am living that with people at their music seeking peak. Super fun and very invigorating.
Recommended.
Aww hell yeah, dark jazz is great. I assume you know Bohren & der Club of Gore and Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble? (curious of any recommendations if you know more good stuff!)
I am working on one of my Master Lists, but the /r/darkjazz subreddit was good. Now, it is mostly dead but for spam from randos who aren't within miles of the sound trying to flog their own efforts. Black Chamber, Free Nelson Mandoomjazz, you might try those for giggles.
I had expected that some of Badalamenti's stuff would have opened up since his death, like his score for Witch Hunt, but no luck. His stuff was sort of a wellspring, among others, which intermingled into that little creek we called darkjazz, for a while.
I originally got into it as a primary component of a long set of mixes for a particular mood, namely that I would have instrumentals (primarily darkjazz) buffering slow tempo "torchy" kinds of songs (Mel Torme, Julie London, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday) and the "once every ninety minutes" track which was a little newer. The idea being that the darkjazz doesn't call too much attention to itself and keeps the mood going.
Im much the same, but today I'm constantly in the search for anything new, anything in any genre that breaks the well-worn formulae and surprises me, but it's honestly hard to find, everything is derivative.
I want a station that plays everything that was ever in the rock top 100 from around 1950 to around 2010. There has to be all kinds of great stuff that never gets played on "oldies" stations. Probably a bunch of duds too, but if they made it as far as the top 100, there can't be that relatively many.
You could do this with almost any genre, I suspect.
I go through periods like that
Statistics are not descriptive of an individual. This data should not be used to make boundary assertions about anyone’s actual preferences.
I listen to anything new I can get my hands on without a bunch of ads disrupting the vibe.. YouTube is my favorite music resource these days, as the videos are better in telling me more about whether an artist is genuine (non Ai, and non-industry-plant).
The genre is not really defining in most cases for me, because so much is mislabeled, or not even labeled at all, and I've found in searching music by genre, that most of the recommendations are flooded with SEO spam, and typically never the best music within the genre to begin with...
Ai recommendations will also primarily be based on what makes platforms and their partners the most money, which is often coincidentally the generic sounding pop drivel we're all so used to being played in every retail outlet around us, the best music I've noticed is often hidden below 10k views or less.
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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.
I had the realization a few weeks ago that I no longer listen to very much from before 2016. I didn’t pay attention to how it happened, but less than 20% of what I have actively listened to in the past 3 years going by all these recap playlists is from before 2016 and I keep adding new music every year. Half of the music from before that cutoff point is basically music that was new to me in the last few years even though it’s older.
I couldn’t imagine thinking that would ever happen 15-20 years ago. I’ve also realized that I’m not interested in trying to change that at all, because I’m now of the opinion that so far music has gotten better every single decade I’ve been alive; and the 2020s are off to a great start on that front.
That's interesting. I'm of the opinion that music is getting worse as time progresses. I must be getting old
> 2020s are off to a great start on that front
Recommendations?
On average, music is big for people during the teenage years, then other things in life take over and that same music continues the biggest music for them.
This is very different if music is a lifelong hobby for you. I'm in my forties and some of the artists I most listen to today I discovered during recent years. Still I find articles like this interesting because I can learn something about a larger demographic while being different myself.
> 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 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.
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.
> If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you.
Assuming what's "actually important to you" remains fixed as you age. The article suggests otherwise, with caveats:
> At the same time, stagnation is not a certainty. Research suggests that open-eardness and the discovery of new songs can be cultivated. Finding new music is a challenge, but it is achievable with dedicated time and effort.
Yeah - my taste has pretty steadily churned slowly over and over and over and that's how I like it.
There's so much music out there. It's like asking "when do you stop finding new books": you only stop finding if you stop looking. I enjoy the looking, and I see no risk at all of running out even if no more new stuff is ever made.
Yep. I'm in my 40's and I still every day check what new albums were released, and listen to as many of them as I can. Of course I take charades to old music every now and then, but over 50% of what I listen is new albums...
I think already this albums thing might leak my age. I guess people don't really listen to albums anymore...
Me neither, for two reasons. One, I was a DJ briefly as a young person and digging crates for new discoveries and hidden gems is still as fun as ever. And two, I exercise a lot, and you can only run to the same song so many times before it loses its juice (at least temporarily).
> 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.
Where did I say people engage relatively casually with music? I highlighted a form of engagement that is (a) extremely serious, but (b) actively undermined by novelty.
You're right that a lot of people seem to view lyrics as being at best an annoyance; I've seen multiple people on HN argue with a straight face that in order to translate a song from one language to another language, it's not necessary for the meaning of the new lyrics to be similar to the meaning of the old lyrics.
This is not a sense of "translation" that I'm familiar with for other linguistic phenomena.
I've also seen people take offense at the idea that the concept of a "song" might involve singing.
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? - 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.
How deep are you digging that you can say most that is out there isn't good? I find this surprising. Or do you mean good as in to your liking? The amount of talent out there is kind of mind blowing to me.
Is this within a narrow genre?
This mostly an assessment at scale. By volume, irrespective of genre, and even accounting for subjectivity, most of the material that gets published isn’t very good.
That being said, I generally don’t agree with conclusions like “culture is frozen”. You are correct that there is _more_ high quality material available than ever before. The challenge is just that it’s harder than ever to find it.
> 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.
WFMU is indeed the one I’m referring to here :)
To get the freeform format with newer, “shinier”, and often more electronic sounding music, I also like NTS.
- https://radioparadise.com/ (!)
- https://fip.fr
Radio Paradise is really excellent, I think the name is kinda off-putting to people looking for good music though.
For 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 those times now I would probably mostly listen to Cat Stevens, Neil Young, The Who, The Ramones, The Dickies, The B-52s, Devo, Queen, The Urban Verbs, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, The Moody Blues, Kansas, The Clash, The Dead Kennedys, Kate Bush, Synergy, Jean-Michel Jarre, Talking Heads, and a few I'm forgetting.
If I decide I want to listen to some current popular music I might listen to something the the Billboard Hot 100 playlist on Spotify.
Of course I'm going to find that nearly everything on there is not nearly as good as the music from artists listed above.
But I'd find the same thing if instead of today's Billboard Hot 100 I listened to a playlist of a Billboard Hot 100 list from the '70s or '80s, or listened to a recording of a random day's broadcast of a '70s or '80s popular music radio station.
And I'm sure that in 2040 if I ask someone who is 37 to make me a playlist of music from 2024 (when they were 21) that playlist is going to sound a lot better to me than the 2024 music I hear now when I decide to check out current music.
Just like my list above is the '70-80s artists that I'm still listening to 50 years later, that 37 year old's playlist will be the 2024 music that he's still listening to 16 years later.
> it is a small subset of what they were actually listening to back then.
I think there was also more variation on that than there is now. Music cost a fair amount of money to buy so what you heard as a kid depended on what people around you were spending hundreds of dollars on, and radio stations were far more diverse in the era before ClearChannel bought everything and consolidated onto a handful of choices. My wife and I had relatively similar suburban upbringings in many ways but there are a ton of 80s and 90s bands I was more familiar with because I happened to live within range of two different college radio stations at different points, and she basically had only very big commercial options.
There’s still variety these days but I think it’s undercut a lot because every teenager with a smartphone has access to pretty much anything, and the social media pressure to like the big names has never been stronger.
a lot of this is your choices. You may be choosing to engage less with new music.
I spend at least an hour each week doing something that I can also listen to new music at the same time, and I add it to my favorites, so that those dark AI recommendations start adding similar recommendations to my listening mixes. I don't listen to top 100 because by and large I don't like it. In modern music my taste has shifted away from prog rock and classic into techno/psytrance/etc. All it took was spending a bit of time looking, every week, to enrich my taste in music and make sure I wasn't repeating the stuff I heard on the radio growing up forever.
It's up to you to do it. It's your choice to make.
The more time passes, the fewer relics from earlier eras survive and stay relevant, like a funnel.
Or like a sieve. What’s timeless stays and the rest filters out with time.
Are you including Tom Tom Club in Talking Heads?
SXM satellite radio has channels based on decades, and they often do top 100 countdowns for this day in that decade, and for the most part the selection is absolute crap until they get to the top 5-10.
So, yeah, survivorship bias is what you are seeing here, and only the best 0.1% of songs of any decade will be played decades later.
I’m not convinced that we stop finding new music, we just become less zealous or outward about it as we get older. When I was young, I was all about talking music, having the right DJ list for roadtrips, etc, etc and now? I just hit play and don’t think too much about it. Probably because it’s harder to attend shows, less relevant to my social life, etc. I’ve also found as I’ve gotten older that I just care less about the specifics of what the song or artist is. I’ll anchor to a song I really like and then let Apple’s infinite play loop take it from there.
>I’m not convinced that we stop finding new music, we just become less zealous or outward about it as we get older. When I was young, I was all about talking music, having the right DJ list for roadtrips, etc, etc and now? I just hit play and don’t think too much about it. Probably because it’s harder to attend shows, less relevant to my social life, etc.
Well, older people (40, 50, even 60+) more passionate about music, they still do all of those (going to concerts, discussing music, crafting the right playlist for roadtrips), not unlike like they did in their 20s.
So, yes: most people do care less about music and stop finding new music.
> Probably because it’s harder to attend shows
This is maybe true if we talk about superstar kind of show. But I think it's now easier than ever to find out about little gigs, which were hard to find before social networks.
I live in medium size capital city (Belgrade), there are options to listen to live music every single day. Sometimes it's just classic music, sometimes there are cover bands, but quite often there's a chance to listen to original music. And these small gigs are quite cheap or even free. I very often listen a song or two (Spotify or youtube really help with this!), then if it looks promising I listen to some more while walking to the show.
Sure, sometimes it's not good. But very often I like it a lot and you can bet I listen to it much more focused then if that same music came on autoplay at home.
If you're in big enough city or have something bigger nearby - find a way to discover new gigs, follow venues, event organizers, local cultural institutions, festivals, etc. That's my main use of Facebook.
The artists have made it harder. They've pushed for aggressive one sided fan behavior policies (phone less), they've increased aggressively with the prices, the quality has gone down with many established bands, pushed large shows without building a performance with the space, and they've done a ton of things that don't help their product.
It feels more like greed in the business than an experience.
That being said I'm still sitting on the idea of paying 123$ for cage the elephant show on an album I haven't heard yet.
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.
Thank you for pointing this out. Everytime I bring up the "phone free" thing, everyone keeps jumping on and saying "well i don't like people filming". The situation that you mentioned is exactly how I do that and what I've seen.
The exception to this is extremely mainstream performances that attract people, where it may be the one big thing they do in the year or the next.
They just want to brag about it, I guess. Like with photos of their meals and... well, lots of things. To each their own, but I stopped attending most shows mainly because of the annoying seas of phones in front of me.
I think humans have a natural instinct to share what they find cool / interesting.
Before this was mostly done through in person communicate, now this is primarily done through smart phones.
I'd bet that most of such recordings are not even shared or perhaps even looked at by the author (personally, I'm guilty of this). It's just some sort of compulsion to record it.
There are far better ways to address people holding up their phones to record than to outright ban them from everyone. There are strong reasons (Bataclan) to need and have those there.
What's with the sympathy for the performer? It's hard for them to even see the audience. Most of the light is focused on them and the audience is in the dark.
What's the better way? I'm not saying phones need to be physically removed from people, just kept in pockets/bags/whatever.
As for my comment about the performer, I'm just picturing it from their perspective and to me it would feel odd to go from looking at people to looking at phones. I'm sure there are lots of people who film with their phone lights on, so that's got to be noticeable through the stage lights.
Also, why can't phones have a "concert mode" where you can film with the screen off?
It's surprisingly difficult to keep something in frame without a viewfinder. Especially if you're standing at a concert and holding your phone up.
No thanks, security is already ridiculous.
> There's nothing worse than hundreds of phone screens glowing in your face while you're trying to enjoy a live act.
Plenty of worse things. People throwing up on you. Harassment. Tarps. Passing out. Being sold water even though it's supposed to be free. Taking bottle caps away from you. People talking during the show. People yelling about politics.
I don't enjoy all the phones either, but it is what it is.
>They've pushed for aggressive one sided fan behavior policies (phone less)
That's the best thing they could do for fans.
perhaps it's ill-behaved fans enjoying the art the wrong way? do we suppose the audience should be talking during a set too?
I am an adult but still love to make right DJ list for roadtrips
I listened to a lot of Apple Music recommendations while getting my three kids to sleep over the years. I would say that in my 40s I’m discovering more new music, and music I genuinely love, than I did in all my teens. I don’t get to go to a lot of gigs, but I go to one big festival a year and it’s the bands in a tiny font that I get excited about. Yeah most stuff is shit, but there’s just so much of everything.
I got stuck with apple music on a road trip. It was really bad IMO.
What were you trying to do? After Rdio folded, I switched from Spotify after failing to get it to give me anything other than top 40 pop (no matter what I started with, it was two tracks and then “have you tried our top hits? You will!”). Apple Music wasn’t as good as Rdio back then but it’s gotten better even within relatively obscure sub genres in my experience.
ymmv. It works great for me. Especially the new discover radio.
Yeah I'm more open minded now than I was when I was younger. All my taste seems to stem from the same roots (for example I like a wide variety of electronic music but the common thread is sounds and/or harmonies rooted in funk/soul/jazz/blues) but when I was a teenager I was only interested in rap music.
Any recommendations?
want electronic jazz? check out cumulus frisbee
or more electro funk with a gangster twist? vincent antone is superb
Digging these! I will trade you one cumulus frisbee for one soul supreme.
And in exchange for Vincent Antone, I will trade you one Chromeo
Recommendations on rap music or electronic music? Or funk/soul/jazz/blues?
From 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 anywhere as cynical as this take.
On another note, I find Elton John’s Rocket Hour on Apple Music to be refreshing in terms of how earnestly he approaches new music and new artists. If you haven’t heard it, it’s nothing like what you might expect based on the title. It’s not “Elton plays songs from his back catalog and talks about them,” but rather “Elton plays new songs you haven’t heard by artists you haven’t heard of yet, and interviews them as his peers.”
[1] https://www.billboard.com/music/rock/green-day-billie-joe-ar...
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).
From what I can tell from your list, it is 100% men. Where are the women? Heart might fit your list.
The Runaways? Ford and Jett both started their careers there, and while I don't know if Ford ever anchored herself in the literature, Jett covered "I Love Rock&Roll" and had it covered in turn by Parton, which then leads to a fair chunk of that century.
A video essay about the social impact of American Idiot and similar records from that period: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehbgAGlrVKE
Been a while but I thought it was pretty interesting when I watched it, coming from a black metal and punk background that was too underground when that pop cultural thing happened to notice.
I'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 to clean up the documentation if there's interest
This looks great - how do you then keep the subset that you want to continue listening to in the longer term? Is there an "extract to my music collection" feature - or is this your music repository?
There's a player with a repl. It puts your scoring in a flat file which you can run simple unix tools on and do with what you wish
There's a bit of Perlis's turing tarpit here but it's intentional
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...
[2] https://flathub.org/apps/net.line72.campcounselor
Ah this is very cool.
It doesn't seem like the article makes much of a distinction between newly released music and music that you haven't listened to yet. Personally, as I get older I've lost the ability to listen to the same Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd etc albums for the 100th time. I cringe every time I hear the opening of Don't Stop Believing. So I've kept trying to get deeper into prog and other genres lately as I'm just burnt out on the old (good) stuff.
To me it depends a lot on the music... if it's more complex, or has more emotional depth I can usually continue to enjoy it almost indefinitely and get something new out of it each time.
I'm sad to admit Led Zeppelin has lost some of it's charm after many listening, which makes me sad because I enjoyed it so much in the past. I've found a lot of Pink Floyd stuff is complex enough that I'm still enjoying it and noticing new things after many decades of listening to it. Watching videos of Floyd playing live also opened up a whole new appreciation for the music.
Lots of the music I enjoyed as a kid/teenager had themes I can only now understand in my late 30s, and didn't really appreciate or fully grasp back then.
Overall, a lot of prog really seems to have enough complexity to remain interesting for a long time. Most of Tools albums, I seem to not enjoy much at first, but enjoy more, and notice more things each time I listen, even after hundreds of listens.
The same music that is complex enough to remain interesting over time, usually doesn't compress well and is really damaged as a low bitrate MP3. I've found those same albums I listen to most year after year are the ones I sought out lossless versions of.
Just pulled up "Don't Stop Believing" as a test.
Even on crappy old junk headphones, still an awesome song that I don't think I'll ever get tired of.
Granted, I don't generally let services make a playlist for me, and I don't beat the old songs to death. I like more variety than that.
I have however, rolled my eyes when listening to services that have an "80's rock" or "top 90's songs" only to have them play the exact same dozen-or-so songs that they did the last time I visited that channel. No thanks!
That's also probably one of the reasons I rarely listen using a service-generated playlist/channel. I think they are maximized for the service's profit, not for the listener's enjoyment.
I still like Nirvana, and think they defined a moment, but let’s be honest here. Dave Grohl has had a longer career with Foo Fighters, and Cobain hasn’t put out new stuff since 1994.
I’m not really interested in reliving that time.
Prog is making a bit of a comeback. Black Midi brought it back to the limelight for critics I think and the london scene is kind of all in on the sound.
> 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.
I really like Roger Waters recently released Dark Side of the Moon Redux.
Possible confounding factor: they only studied Spotify and Deezer users. This is like studying Kindle users for insights on readers at large. I would not be surprised if there were a correlation between using streaming services (or not) and openness to new music. Study, say, Bandcamp users, and I bet you get a different picture.
I love opening the bandcamp homepage and seeing the live purchases scroll past, people all over the world buying music I've (mostly) not yet discovered!
Wasn't there already a "Tom the Dancing Bug" about the 13-14 thing over a decade ago?
I think the main thing that reduces music discovery as a parent is sheer exhaustion, you just don’t have as many hours anymore. It’s not just that you’re listening to less new music, you’re listening to less, period.
Meanwhile, having a kid getting into music is fabulous. I’ve been forced to listen to every Taylor Swift album. I know who Olivia Rodrigo is. I managed to discover Wet Leg all on my own. Steve Lacy, Mitski, Zutomayo, sohodolls…
And then there’s The Crane Wives. Honestly one of the best things I have heard in a very long time. Try “Keep You Safe”, if you don’t like it the rest is probably not going to be your thing. If you do, there’s a lot more like it.
Well I'm in my 50s, and I mostly stopped finding new music when record labels, streaming, and social media destroyed the prospects for people who would otherwise make that new music for me to find.
New stuff still arrives (you're not going to predict that me-at-15-loving-Megadeth will much later also love Billie Eilish or Gin Wigmore or Mirel Wagner or ...) but most "new music" is garbage by the standards set by about 50 years of music (much of that before I was alive and thus well before my "peak influence").
I suspect the "findings" of the article suffer from environmental effects that weren't considered/controlled.
I'm closing in on 50s, and what I miss the most out of the music I grew up with are actual cohesive albums that work as a single artistic unit. I think the 70s were the golden age of albums, and then slowly we moved towards the world of albums being just random collections of tracks, with one or two good ones and the rest "filler." Now, do many modern musicians even bother to release albums anymore? Seems like it's just track after track now.
You might really like the new Cindy Lee double album[1]. The artist decided to only release it as one long video on Youtube instead of separating the songs so it can be played by streaming companies.
For people who want to purchase the album, they can purchase the entire album, or none of it.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LJi5na897Y
I mean depends on what you are listening to. PLENTY of albums are being made.
> but most "new music" is garbage by the standards set by about 50 years of music
How so? What are these standards?
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.
A peek at billboard 100 from 2004 might surprise you. Same themes, new style and production. That said the rise of trap, particulary the repetitve autotuned bars, certainly hasn't helped in the lyricism dept.
You'll of course find great talent in every generation. While I don't like the majority of the current top billboard there's some talent behind those tracks.
>A peek at billboard 100 from 2004 might surprise you. Same themes, new style and production.
That era is already after it has been going downhill.
Have you tried adapting to newer discovery methods like http://rateyourmusic.com/ or http://last.fm/ or subreddits like reddit.com/r/LetsTalkMusic , reddit.com/r/IndieHeads , reddit.com/r/HipHopHeads ?
Perhaps even "4chan /mu/ charts"?
I 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 was first east coast hip hop (KRS One, M.F. Doom) then psychedelia and classic rock adjacent music (by that time I was really sick and tired of overplayed classic rock, one time I was tripping on acid at 2 am and called up the local college station to complain about the Doobie Brothers song they played that is on a twice a day during drive time and the program manager picked up, I told him to play what he thought was good music and he put on Miles Davis.)
Since then I have had pulses of being interested in "new" (to me) music but it's usually been a bit old. The last round has been the Super Furry Animals (Mwng for the win!) and similar UK bands like The Charlatans. I just found out that I like some of Cyndi Lauper's later albums. Before that it was early Japanese electronica like Yellow Magic Orchestra and Isao Tomita. Before that Synthesizer by Information Society was a revelation.
Recently my son got into the big hits of Fleetwood Mac but I was amazed that they made a lot of music before they hit it big and some of it I like.
I don't listen to a lot of "new" music in the sense of "released in the last few years" and I'd be inclined to blame the prevalence of auto-tune for that. People I know in the music industry make all sorts of excuses ("Don't you like the vocoders on Daft Punk?", "... look I like the vocoders in Laurie Anderson's work and in Neil Young's *Trans&", "Isn't T-Pain talented?", "... I got no problem with T-Pain, I've got a problem with all the other rappers who sound like T-Pain") but if I hear something on the radio that is auto-tuned I'm pretty quick to change the channel.
My next project is to learn something about traditional and contemporary Chinese music.
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
Oh yeah. The last day they were on the air the VJs were all so bad because they were about to be replaced by the home shopping channel.
Listening to the music of one's childhood time from other countries is a way to find comfort-genre but new-to-you pieces.
Sometimes there are nice surprises: for instance, "My Way" (1969) and "Comme D'Habitude" (1967) share a tune but are very different songs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FEwW0W9AvA (did Sid influence this interpretation?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeTn56-lahg
When I lived in South Korea, one of the things that struck me was how much "flatter" the generations there were in terms of pop culture and music taste and awareness, compared to the US. I worked in an office with a bunch of suit-and-tie businessmen who were mostly in their 40s to 60s, and if you were to ask them about any current K-pop group, they all knew their hit songs.
That's sad. That means they had no diversity in their music.
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.
Pandora has introduced different tunings that help a bit with this. Not a continuous slider but provides some presets to indicate how wide a net to cast in different dimensions. Normal, Crowd Favorites, Deep Cuts, Discovery, Newly Release.
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.
I still mourn the loss of Rdio. It was far and away better than any other option. It's such a bummer it lost out to Spotify.
So true. I remember those days very fondly. There was a real community of listeners back then. Within that circle you shared albums and playlists, commented on and discussed them.
Plus, it had a persistant queue that could handle single songs as well as albums and playlists as individual items which could be moved freely. Everything I was interested in was added to the queue and I could be certain it'd still be there tomorrow. Sort of like a musical backlog.
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.
> This study identifies 33 as the tipping point for sonic stagnation, an age where artistic taste calcifies, increasingly deviating from contemporary works
In the time since I turned 33 I've experienced an almost-complete switchover in genre preference, from pop/rock/light metal to country. Almost all of it has been found through Spotify's Daily Mix N, where n >= 2.
Are spotify daily mixes ordered in some way?
As best I can figure #1 is your 'guaranteed hits' - songs that you have listened to the most. As you go higher it may be your most-loved music of a different genre or the 1st genre again but with more new-to-you music.
As a middle aged guy, I've used TikTok to find new music.
Spotify recommendations are kind of crap after a bit. It's a fundamental problem with similarity based recommendations and people getting stagnant. I don't want to listen to the greatest bands of the 90s and 00s. I want to listen to new bands that were influenced by those bands.
I have a similar issue with Spotify too. Everywhere on my page is stuff I am completely bored of listening to, but since its the only thing I can easily access, I end up listening to the same things and Spotify thinks I want more of it.
Instagram has the same issue. I watch a few horse videos and all of a sudden my feed is horses for months.
Whatever. I find new stuff all of the time. Anything but show tunes, most country, and recent pop music is fair game. Tidal has good shit whereas Spotify will randomly reach into your account to delete playlists or remove content without warning. Also, the Spotify app no longer controls volume across devices uniformly, doesn't work at all on Apple TV, and is generally getting buggier and crappier with popups and moving things around for no reason. I'm downloading elsewhere to use with PlexAmp and buying vinyl because you just can't get everything via streaming.
>the Spotify app no longer controls volume across devices uniformly
I actually really enjoy this feature myself - all my devices need to be at different audio levels to not blow out the speakers, so having per-device (or virtual device via Spotify Connect) control is great.
I'm saying it worked but now it doesn't work as well as it did. I don't use the Everywhere group. The Marantz app (or the iPhone app) is absolute shit because it starts at some random volume and goes up or down huge amounts. Instead, I'll use the Tidal app because that at least doesn't fuck with the volume or end up overdriving my mains and 5 kW sub.
>is generally getting buggier and crappier with popups and moving things around for no reason.
When you have teams of developers employed, you have to keep them busy doing stuff to justify their existence.
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."
I'm just 40 but it sounds like we are like minded in a lot of ways. Never stop being curious. There's always something new out there. The joy of discovering some obscure metal band with 7 followers on Spotify or bandcamp that you intensely resonate with is unmatched. It's one of my favorite experiences.
One of the things I've learned about myself over the past decade is I'm an outlier in terms of the listener profile. I crave albums over songs. That crafted experience an artist creates for the listener makes it all for me. Perhaps it's because I'm also a musician, but something about a group of songs becoming greater than the sum of it's parts has an endearing, emotional impact on that listening session. I think a lot of playlist driven listening loses out on that.
Cheers, thanks for sharing.
The unstated underlying assumption that only a commercially constructed popular zeitgeist qualifies as “new” for self-discovery purposes is corporate lickspittle fawning at its most conceited.
The author also appears to trip over the ecological fallacy in responding to population results as though they apply to themselves the individual. They do not. This is broad information of interest to anthropologists and marketing droids, it doesn’t define or describe a person.
Two 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.
I'm in my 40s and still vibing on a mix of novel and nostalgia. I don't know what my secret is but I've never been in a position where discovering new music was difficult. I don't listen to much radio, but when I do, it's a community station with people that care about music. I don't use any streaming services. I have a large, physical music collection that I still add to, both CD and vinyl, supplemented by a digital collection from places like Bandcamp. I explore a bit on Youtube and Discogs, I read music zines and local whats ons, I take recommendations from friends, I go to gigs: local pubs, concerts, festivals. Music seems to come easily if I put myself in front of it.
I went to a gig last night and saw a great band I found a few months ago with two other new (to me) bands and came home with a head full of tunes, strengthened friendships, and a CD from the merch stand.
It's just part of my life and I give it some time each day. :)
Most people stop making an effort to expand their taste in art at a young age because it's not useful for them. People can afford to have narrow tastes and still enjoy music. If parents made being exposed to different types of music as important to one's growth as being exposed to different types of vegetables, I doubt we would have this cultural phenomenon.
Theoretically, I should have given up trying to find new music years ago, but that hasn't happened. This is because music is the only artform that resonates with me on a spiritual level. Finding new music is important to me because it is a part of my identity. Contrast this with the fact I haven't been to a cinema since 2022. I don't broaden my taste in cinema because it has little impact on how much I enjoy films.
> as being exposed to different types of vegetables
I am told there was a time in ireland when every restaurant, no matter what the cuisine, offered a "meat and two veg" plate for the grandparents; somehow I doubt there was much variety in those vegetables.
I loved this article. I have about 4k songs saved in my "liked" playlist on Spotify, majority of them were from when I was 20 to 24, then it tapered off a lot. I turned 30 this year and I still like to discover new music but not as much as I did in my early 20s.
This is why folks in their 40s+ end up still listening to the same stuff. lol. The article was right about that.
Acts like Greta Fleet help bridge those gaps between old school sounds and new music. Electronica has never been easier to get into as well and there’s a nostalgia for those old school synthwave vibes.
Like all things, there’s an ebb and flow to music and musical taste over time. You’ll find as you understand music more, you’ll be listening to classical on a Thursday morning just as much as you’ll listen to pop, rock, or jazz.
By the time you reach 60, your musical tastes should be broad enough to appreciate all music, hopefully. Obviously some will reach that point faster than others. Musicians tend to be the fastest since they are students of music.
I still have a rock playlist I created in my late 20s on Spotify that I listen to this day. Mostly started as a digital version of my in-car CD collection.
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 meet someone and cycle again. lol.
My Spotify Remix in 2020 was pretty much all depression music.
> 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 end of John and Christine McVie's marriage, as well as Buckingham and Nicks's long-term romantic relationship. Fleetwood, meanwhile, was in the midst of divorce proceedings from his wife, Jenny, and had also begun an affair with Nicks. The pressure on Fleetwood Mac to release a successful follow-up album, combined with their new-found wealth, led to creative and personal tensions which were allegedly fuelled by high consumption of drugs and alcohol.
Nothing like a musical star to provide a good corn king/wicker man sacrifice on behalf of society...
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.
Agreed. I'm 27 and still save a lot of new music. But I've looked back at my older playlists from college and was probably saving 10x more songs back then. Full-time job definitely affected that
That Say Anything scene... originally was going to use a Fishbone song, because Cusack is apparently a big fan. It didn't really work for the scene though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say_Anything...#Cultural_influ...
Coincidentally, Fishbone was part of the wave of awesome music in the early 1990ies when I was finding new music because there was good music and before music started not being quite so good any more.
It's such an amazing coincidence that they made the good music right when I was young. I got lucky, I guess.
I remember reading a headline that Despacito had been displaced from the #1 position on Billboard after a 16 week run, while I had never heard the song. At that point I became a bit more intentional about trying to find new music.
you obviously weren't watching enough Sesame Street at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS6e3ZTuxC8
Lagniappe: Ländlercito https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSwQ1icECNg
I know what you mean but at that point I started blaming the system! I still don't know that song.
Very interesting to see these things observed in numbers. Impressive 80ies peak among us gen X!
My music taste brain was initially formatted by that 1990ies idea of MTV mainstream vs independent (which paradoxically, also defined itself through existing on MTV, just in different niches), and from there it had been a slippery slope towards ever nichyer niche. Stuff where the big hits now have accumulated total Spotify plays in four-digit range, if they do exist there. When eventually I realized that winning at niche one-upmanship is a lonely celebration, what followed was mostly silence.
I think my new music discovery slowed down because the music distribution system stopped propagating metadata. I discovered a lot of new music by looking at the back of the album cover or CD case and following the threads. Who else has this producer or session musician worked with? Who actually was the songwriter and what else have they done? What other albums are on this label? Now none of that is discoverable from streaming. It's just primary artist and song title--every track is just an isolated data unit apparently not even made by people.
For anyone who wants a good source of random music, radio Canada has a great French station with an excellent show “l’effet pogonat”.
You won’t understand the host if you don’t speak French but the station is mostly songs and I’ve found so many good ones there.
The Montreal Gazette had a good write up: https://montrealgazette.com/news/pop-goes-the-world-ici-musi...
This is fantastic, thank you so much. It reminds me of the Bernard Lenoir show on France Inter back in the days. Will be spending days digging this new treasure trove from Montreal :)
Glad to help! Fehmiu's show is also good. And I should add that once I loaded the song's into Apple Music and started favoriting + adding to playlist, Apple has been able to suggest many similar songs and artists for me. I'm sure Spotify etc can do the same.
The station really shook up my recommendations
There seems to be a focus on something about the brain "calcifying" or people getting stuck in their own pattern over time here.
That may be a component, but I think anothet thing that correlates heavily with the graphs presented in the article is simply: When you have enough spare time to prioritize music. (although you could explicitly prioritize it like some commenters mention)
I still find lots of new music, but it always comes in periods of my life when I have some leeway, and those are fewer and farther between now.
I don't believe music was better in my day but I do think the older you get the harder it is to find things that sound truly fresh (e.g. someone like black midi would probably blow me away if I was 16 now but instead they just keep reminding me of various acts I've heard before years ago)
Similarly I find myself being a lot more interested in competent but not especially ambitious late period albums by acts where their comfort with knowing what their sound is and how to play with it can be the main source of interest.
My old process (still the same) was going on RateYourMusic and looking at the user lists. If a list has a title that resonates with me I tend to find some really cool albums in there. I'll listen to a sample on YT and grab it on Soulseek, and if I really like the album I buy it on vinyl.
I used Spotify for 10 years or so and it never seemed good at recommending me music. Within the last two years I cancelled my subscription and have returned to the old ways.
The sad thing is, life is too short to hear all the amazing music out there!
There was a time when SXSW released one track from each featured artist on a massive torrent. That kept me going on new music for nearly the entire year. Repeat.
My 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.
Why's the writer listening to james blunt still, that your beautiful song sucked when it came out too lol
I used to be really into music, writing, releasing, curating everything. But yeah around my 30s idk, i lost interest i guess like any other hobby. I listen to podcasts now when I drive. In my 20s finding music was like hard work. I went through a lot music all the time.
One thing I think is interesting is older music seems to be sticking around more. Like maybe in the 60s and on more timeless music was written? like in 2000, Idk anyone that listened to 40s or really 50s music, music that would be 50-60 years old at the time. But in the 2020s, 1960s, 70s, 80s music is still around. I think still has a lot of cultural relevancy. Or maybe the kids today don't care about the beatles or jimi hendrix? I find that hard to believe though. In 20 more years are we going to say Queen and ACDC sucked and never listen to it again?
What do rebelious kids and angsty teens listen to now? Who are the red hot chili peppers, and weezers and blink182s right now.
This doesn’t match my personal experience at all. I hardly liked any of the music I heard on the radio as a teenager. (That would be the 90’s). Later on, I found that I liked the current music better- and there are still songs from my 20’s that I come back to. But each decade I discover new artists, I stay with those records for a while, then they start sounding dated and I move on. I do put deliberate effort into discovering new artists though. And, I’m a musician myself so maybe that’s part of it. I really listen to almost nothing from my teenage years though. There is such an incredible amount of new music coming out every day that it’s hard to keep up with it! Right now I’m listening to 100 gecs a lot, childish gambino, narrow head, ohtis, thee oh sees, fazerdaze, and wimps.
Anybody who really just gets stuck on music from their teens is missing out on so much I can’t even express it.
The author seems to be describing what happens when one's primary relationship with music is one of consumption. It is easy (for me at least) to find new music when you are looking for inspiration in your own practice of making music. Most people don't make music though so I'd imagine it's easy to get stuck in that rut.
I see what you're saying in terms of additional motivation to find new music.
But, is your average person's relationship with music "one of consumption" in such a way that causes stagnation? This comes off as gatekeepy. People may not make their own music, but I imagine many people listen to music as a form of inspiration.
Ya, I'm positive that familiarity with creating music skews listening preferences towards new music. Which is funny because then people that shit on modern, new music are statistically the ones not being able to create and not as deeply familiar with music.
I still don't get why after all this investment in AI Spotify can't just give me a seamless never ending stream of music. I need to keep selecting from playlists they generate which often repeat some songs extremely often. All I want from a Spotify interface is play/pause/skip/like/dislike. Then use those to continuously adapt the selection of the next song. If you want to be fancy add a warmup mode where you ask me some questions or show me some songs to like/dislike for that particular moment so that the initial selections start warmer. If I had that I could explore a lot more music. Because I don't I end up just listening to the greatest hits of things I remember and then that further pollutes the dataset to the point where my musical tastes must stagnate.
You’ve described Pandora.
It’s been a decade at least since I heavily used Pandora but I remember it being even worse than Spotify at this. The algorithm seemed to latch on to one or two tracks from any given artist and they’d continue popping up no matter how I trained it. Great as a discovery tool for artists I guess, but as endless radio Spotify does a way better job at least trying to reach into back catalogs and including more than one or two songs. There’s still a lot of room for improvement, and it does seem to get hung up in similar ways.
Maybe Pandora has improved since.
You can ban a particular song from appearing on a Pandora station. I've found this to be an effective way to get out of song ruts. The algorithm does have a tendency to replay certain songs more than is warranted, but if you get rid of them it recovers into a state with a decent amount of variety.
I don't necessarily want to ban a song, just have it not play it every tenth song.
2 of my favorite Pandora stations have turned into a mix of the artist’s discog and I suspect it only happened because I liked too many of their songs in the same day. The variety is better in terms of similar artists but I cant say I find much new music this way.
Is it available outside the US yet? It's only been a decade.
Spotify's song radio / artist radio does this. There's like/dislike buttons and it just plays you different related songs.
There's a great episode of the Ongoing History of New Music on this topic
What A Drag It Is Getting Old (Musically)
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/what-a-drag-it-is-gett...
Not being a user of Spotify nor other services, I can only say that I continue to find new music in each decade. And I like much of newer music better than the old classics (which is saying something because I started listening in the 1960s). Thus what Parris says doesn't speak to me.
I can't buy an argument about there being too many options. If there were a lot of options, and you liked a lot of them, you could just randomly sample new albums, or listen to whatever Spotify told you to listen to, and there would be no problem finding new music. I suspect the issue is there's a lot of music out there and none of it sounds like what you want.
Note that this isn't saying music today is bad, it's got nothing to do with that.
At a certain point, changing trends in music cause it to drift too far from your internal model (developed in youth) for what a song should be, and it becomes hard to take, decreasing returns with increasing effort, and you say "fuck it, I'll just listen to what I already like for the rest of my life".
This doesn’t resonate with me at all.
I’m always looking with my ears.
A current fascination is the unnamed genre of popular American music from the era when jazz and ragtime and vaudeville sort of intersected with jug bands and blues: https://www.youtube.com/live/GGxIeMxG5l8?si=RLaYnnWGqQkfMXk1
I also listen to a ton of music in languages I don’t understand, from Balkan dance music to Brazilian pop and psychedelia.
And there’s a certain DJ in New Orleans (Mark LaMaire) I listen to every week who has turned me onto a whole mountain of music I’d never heard of before.
Age 13-29, I mostly had oodles of free time to listen, explore music and a network of friends sharing their discoveries. Age 30-40, I got really busy and had more people involved in my professional and private life so it became harder to fit in music exploration (something I really enjoy). And less friends sharing their music.
I think streaming has a lot to do with this as my parents had a monthly record club they organized. A bunch of friends with their kids got together at someones home, made dinner, drank and listened to new music in the background.
my thought is that music is a hobby and people mislead themselves into themselves into thinking that it’s their hobby or that everyone has music has a hobby. I think music is just a phase for most people, as have been most things I’ve personally tried but wasn’t really into
but I’m in my 30s, am still into finding my music, and I can’t see that ever going away.
and I know people love listening to music from their formative years and don’t get me wrong, I too was obsessed into 2010’s indie rock and pop punk too, but I think it’s just people reliving the phase.
personally I will only pretty much listen to 2020’s indie rock and pop punk from new bands if I do. you will rarely catch me listening to music that I used to listen to. it was good then. now it’s tired and boring.
>it was good then. now it’s tired and boring.
It might be worth revisiting that music in a decade or two. My wife recently found an old Michael Jackson CD cleaning out an box of something in the garage. That sparked a let-me-listen to some more 70's and 80's music. Lot's of great "timeless" Michael Jackson songs. Not so much for Madonna for some reason. The Carpenter's and select ABBA gets a thumb's up from me as well.
I love listening to pop-ier 80s acts that were sampled by vaporwave artists and my GenX dad (huge grunge guy) is puzzled why I like the dreck.
I'm still finding new music (look at my account creation date if you want an indication what my real world age is).
Go crate digging or something, I don't know what the secret formula is.
Spotify's robot dj just plays the same stuff over and over without much of a discovery component to it.
My best Spotify discovery method is the channel for the style I enjoy - and it is always news songs.
I only listen to hard rock. All the songs are new & recently added with a fairly new artist mix.
For young people just starting in life, money may be a gating Factor or at least it was when you had to buy vinyl. but as you get older, the resource you most worry about is time. Watching a 2-hour movie that you don't like is 2 hours gone from the rest of your life, which is a greater percentage than it is for young people.
In my early years I was obsessed with music and listen to all different kinds to try to expand my sphere of Appreciation. but now, I worry that I might spend a lot of time and then find that I don't really enjoy that artist, and the investment of time was not worth it.
You people can not be guaranteed that they will reach the 'get older' stage so technically they are risking a larger percentage of their total life to watch a 2 hour movie.
The real answer is obvious though. As an old man cool music doesn't make me cooler. In fact, for an old man listening to 'cool' music might actually make me less cool, and being old I have less time left to recover my coolness quotient. I can't afford to risk listening to new music.
For those interested in finding new music, let me strongly recommend some good radio station youtube channels. KEXP and KCRW both come time mind. In that vein, sometimes you can find good new music through labels. For example, 4AD. I'm not sure why, but YouTube often suggests good stuff seemingly at random, especially in the electronica genre. Radio stations have music only streams on their websites, too. I've often found artists I like going to local shows and paying attention to who they like. YMMV
It also helps to pay attention to the bands you like and where they end up. For example, the band Marriages split up and Emma Ruth Rundle went solo and the guitarist started Drab Majesty.
When I was in my teens, I really had nothing to do. Not that I was a loner - I was in a sports club and I had a pretty active social life. But the thing is - compared to having a job, the time I spent at school each day left me with so much more spare time than today [1], you gotta do something with that. And my knowledge of music was still pretty limited, so of course exploring new styles of music and new bands was exciting! Plus, everyone of my friends was doing the same, and at that age, doing what the peer group does was very important...
[1] By which I mean, having a day job, commuting back and forth, oh, and having a family with little kids, which basically means zero spare time.
The conclusions of this study - that musical open-mindedness drops off in the late twenties - is consistent with the fact that (pop) music creators also peak in their twenties, with a rapid decline into creative insignificance afterwards.
There's a lot of comforting analysis here on social and cultural development reasons why that might be, but the likely ugly truth is the same faced by creatives in some other areas - a clear cognitive decline, it's just too universal within those fields to be anything else than a physical cause.
With very rare exceptions old people don't make good pop music, there's no reason to expect listeners to not mirror the decline.
What are those other areas which display age-based creative decline? Other creative fields I can think of off the top of my head - scientific research, animation, fiction writing, architecture - are overwhelmingly dominated by older people.
Even in pop music, I'd argue that artists are doing very little of the actual heavy lifting compared to the producers and the writers. Pop singers have a much shorter shelf life than producer/writers due to the importance of image in appealing to younger fans. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin for an example.
Eg. Maths, physics, poetry. All dominated by the young, as pop music.
Note that I'm talking about creative brilliance - ie the outlier contributors that define or excel in the forms - not workmanlike producers of commercial trustworthiness as in your example (though I would assume that generally the same trend holds).
I said "some" because I'm aware that some fields (eg literature) do not follow the clear example in those.
Pop songs are typically written by songwriters who are much older than the performer. I'm estimating, but that's probably true of most pop songs in the top 100 history. Maybe someone has the stats on that.
I think there is developmental biological factor, but how quickly you’ve leapt to cognitive decline betrays an underlying ageism. First, cognitive abilities don’t drop suddenly at the age of 30, and crystallized intelligence continues to grow for at least couple of decades past 30. Second, you need to square your conclusions with the fact that the average age for the best work by classical composers was 40 rather than 30, and this was in a period where health outcomes were much poorer. Further, writers, working in perhaps the most creatively demanding field of all, have their best work often in their 40s, 50s, and beyond. Need I mention the great painters of the last 500 years too?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10400419.2016.11...
how quickly you’ve leapt to cognitive decline betrays an underlying ageism
This is a belief I've developed over years, I used to believe the same as everybody else - that social etc factors like raising kids got in the way.
But its too universal within pop music (and I think some other fields mentioned in another comment) to be explained as anything but age-related cognitive decline - which by definition will be "ageist" if you want to resort to that sort of language.
If you sincerely believe people undergo a steep cognitive decline starting at the age of 30, at least you will have the comfort of a soft landing.
No, it starts earlier in outputs-manifestation when it comes to the outliers in some creative pursuits like those mentioned.
Most people won't experience it in effect (in the end products of their creative output) as most people aren't outliers producing brilliant work.
> (pop) music creators also peak in their twenties, with a rapid decline into creative insignificance afterwards.
Die Toten Hosen and Leningrad would like to have a word.
If you're reliant on the machine, then of course you'll suffer "creative insignificance" once the machine ceases to have a use for you.
compare "New Kid in Town" (1976)
Like I also said, there are very rare exceptions.
I suspect that it’s not cognitive decline, but that everyone is just too tired to make music.
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.
I’m 38, and I don’t think my exposure to and discovery of music has ever been so high.
I joined a metal discord last year (though my favorite album of the year so far is actually chamber folk / Americana from a recommendation there):
* general recommendations
* seeing what other people listen to
* "themed history months" (Screamarch for Screamo, Finlapril for Finnish metal etc.),
* sampling of any new release that seems slightly interesting (usually about 20 releases per week that I spend a few seconds to minutes with to gauge my enjoyment)
All those expose me to a constant stream of new and old music that I usually never even heard of before.
But then, not using streaming services probably makes me a statistical outlier anyway.
There’s something biological going here I would think. 30 is about the age where fluid intelligence peaks but crystallized intelligence continues to grow for a few more decades. Also, 30 is about the age where a lot of us come into our own as the person we will more or less be for the rest of our lives. I know for myself that in my teens and twenties, music was part of the process of defining myself. By my early thirties, I had grown out of that phase and mine or someone else’s taste in music was irrelevant to how we viewed each other. Interestingly, like many men, I have not touched a video game since the age of thirty even though I’ve had the time.
Buy a Nintendo switch, and breath of the wild
Come back in 9 months after you start that.
I'm curious about your experience with older men not playing video games? I'm in my mid-thirties and I would say that the overwhelming majority of my male friends and co-workers play video games recreationally. Video games are more popular and accessible than ever, so I guess I'm confused about why someone would age-out of the hobby?
Perhaps it’s just been my personal experience or maybe a Gen X thing? I tried getting back into playing video games a few years ago. I gave up after a weekend. It was dead boring. I’d much rather read the paper.
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.
I discussed this with a friend pretty recently. I wondered whether I was getting "older" because I couldn't find anything I liked about the current rappy-pop or soft, high-pitched chic-pop that you hear over loudspeakers at the grocery store, gym, etc. It's grating to listen to, majority of the stuff I can't even determine what the melody is supposed to be.
Then I realized that I'm listening to new alt/indie stuff that I didn't know about three years ago, and that it's probably not me. It's probably just that this mass-music for the masses is indeed awful.
And at the same time, publishing music has never been easier. There is so much good stuff out there but you aren't going to find it if your process for finding new music is letting the same guys that made top 40 with payola jam their same lowest common denominator shit down your through with algorithmically generated playlists.
Interesting thing I found the other day:
> In 2006 Slichter said that payola was how his band Semisonic turned their song "Closing Time" into a hit. Slichter stated: "It cost something close to $700,000 to $800,000 to get 'Closing Time' on the air."[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Slichter
Damn near a mil to push that song up the charts, in the 1990s, and it wasn't even a crap song. I think of that track as iconic of the late-90s, I was surprised they had to run payola at all.
Age has affected my taste in music, but I continue to discover new music as I reach my mid 40s. As a teenager, I wanted to listen to grunge, punk, and metal. In my 20s, I had a strong preference for indie music. In my 30s, I got into blues and American folk music. Now, I’m in a jazz phase and appreciating classic guitarists from the 1950s and 1960s. I have always loved classical music, and I still appreciate a lot of the music from my past decades of development, but I hear a lot of it filtered through nostalgia and historical experiences more than from an angle of objective enjoyment.
> Age has affected my taste in music, but I continue to discover new music
Same here... And I became really into the ganre World Music
I also like World Music a lot, and West African blues. Check out Bombino if you haven’t already heard him.
Thanks for the recommendation! Reminds me of Amadou & Mariam.
I'm often saddened by how hard it is as a Westerner to discover modern African music.
As a teenager it really bothered me that adults seemed to have lost the ability to appreciate good music simply because it was new- I vowed to make a point of regularly trying new music with an open mind as I grew older, and not to grow up like that. My own parents who loved good music when they were younger, and whose music tastes I could appreciate well, literally heard my music as basically random noise, and couldn't even process it... stuff that was deeply inspiring and meaningful to me. It seemed like such a loss and a shame that they were incapable of enjoying it.
Overall, in my late 30s, I would say it's worked pretty well. I try to spend a decent amount of time sampling new music, and my music tastes have evolved a lot over time. In just the last two years I came to appreciate two entire new genre of music I had never really paid attention to, and listen to them a lot. Although, I will admit that most of my overall favorite music is still the same stuff I liked as a teenager.
I think a lot of it is simply taking the time to sample new music, and to develop the mental pathways to process new music styles. Old people can do it just as well as young people, but generally, older people have less time and interest in doing so. Kids generally don't understand what its like to be a parent with a job, and how little free time adults have, and how precious it is to them.
Also- regarding the author's comments on "American Idiot." I've always found it amusing how American capitalism loves to unironically sell people whatever they are willing to buy, especially including rebellious and anti-capitalist products and services, which are a big business overall. Reddit is currently worth 7 billion, and caters largely to people that like to complain to one another about how evil they feel capitalism is, and especially how evil Reddit in particular is.
I think the same. And tbh, if music variations are finite, I'm quite sure it's big enough to fill my entire life with new song, sounds, arrangement, voices, lyrics...Also music is not only sound, but also performances.
Completely agree on performances... I've had a renewed appreciation for a lot of music after seeing it performed live (even on video), and/or hearing live album versions.
I'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.
On the other hand, I'm listening to a new album at least three times a week. Using tools like last.fm and some private trackers helps to keep things fresh. Never give up on finding that next tune!
And the feeling when you find something...
The trend towards flatting the curve with the preferred decade of music for each generation is cool to see. I had assumed this was happening anecdotally, but it looks like a pretty large effect here.
Music just plays with the signals in our brains, just like drugs, food, feelings and pretty much all input does.
One day, an AI invented a new song, one that could never be heard, for it was outside the range of human hearing. But all who heard it wept with anger, sadness and finally joy; for the song pulled levers and pressed buttons inside our brains, and made us want to buy Coca Cola.
Interesting article. I expect today's streaming tech will drive some change in these patterns, between easy access to a massive library and recommendation features.
Much of my music discovery is aided by Spotify - some automated (radio, "Made For You"), some more manual ("Fans also like" related artists). However, as I continue to use Spotify, some of these features seem less effective. It's like I'm filling in interconnected regions of Spotify's graph of music and there are less edges to unvisited nodes.
I'm mostly into punk/hardcore myself but music is probably one of my numerous passions that never seems to fade and nowadays I love to listen to radio to be exposed to music I wouldn't be exposed thru algorythms. Sometimes I don't like it and it's ok, but I often encounter great discoveries. https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip is perfect for it. Give it a try !
I’m almost 40 now and still actively seeking out new music, bands, albums.
Is it something to do with genres? I have been listening to punk, metal, hardcore, rap music, alt since I was in grade school.
the biggest reason I pay for Spotify is to enjoy each Monday my "discover weekly" playlist :)
Same, but with Apple Music which does a personalised New Music Mix on Fridays.
agree with this
I really love to dig new old music. Still discovering artists from 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, 50s, 20s. I like that the list grows naturally. Been on the train from 90s.
I really enjoy music but realized after trying to follow several hundred artists—and failing that it is merely a question of bandwidth. For example the Doobie Brothers have released new albums post-2020, while at the same time I'm trying to be up on the latest from B. Eillish for a nearby young person. Just can't keep up.
Haven't even mentioned my weirder tastes. At some point something has got to give if you have a job, family, or another interest or two.
You stop when you want to stop. I picked up an affinity for K-pop in my 30s. Currently exploring a few other genres and also enjoying music that my kids are finding.
Me, but I found K-pop in my 50s. Add to that Doom Metal & EBM. I also discovered Nu Metal 20 years after the fact. You stop when you want to stop.
Between SomaFM, radiooooo.com, and the occasional recommendation from the record store I have no problem finding the occasional new thing.
I have discovered better music in my 30s and 40s and sort of regret my musical decisions in my teens and 20s.
Music to me is linked to my emotional state and like I’ve matured I’d like to think my music tastes have too…
but then I remember I’ve stopped listening to silly music of Fugazi and replaced it with the artistic stylings of Taylor Swift and I’m right back in my pit of despair knowing my musical sophistication is still out of reach.
Just happened to listen to Steady Diet of Nothing the other day. Maybe the first time in almost 30 years. That music is as good as ever. And could Reclamation be a more relevant song in 2024?
Yeah but none of this music slaps as hard as it did in my 20s. Don't get me wrong I appreciate it the same I'm sure, there's just such a thing as youth and emotion and I wouldn't trade that exploratory musical phase for anything.
I was looking forward to my kids introducing me to new music as I've stagnated. Their favourites?
- Nirvana - Weezer - Blink 182 - Jimmy Eat World
:-/
(although my new favourite band is The Beaches)
The article hints at, but doesn't really nail the strong associations between music and our past that develop as we age. The older we get, the more listening to old music takes on the role of time machine, teleporting us to an earlier time where we can forget all the bad parts, leaving just the good.
Strangely enough, the same thing can be said about cars, and even software.
Most of the music I enjoyed was made before I was born. I don't listen to music anymore. I stopped when I went fully remote a decade ago and didn't need anything to drown out the office noise anymore. I'll play music on an instrument, but that's about it.
I actually bought a nice stereo system with bose 901 speakers to set up in my house, but it's still sitting in storage 9 years later.
This is how I've solved this problem for myself: by using monthly playlists as a forcing function to motivate myself to find new music every month, where the whole ends up being greater than the sum of it's parts: https://transitivebullsh.it/my-10-year-music-diary
I've found two somewhat surprising effective ways for new music discovery:
1. Spotify Weekly Discover (personalized) ~ Still can't work their silly UX, but their recomms are good. Is it time yet for "Bring Your Own Client" to their API ??
2. Online Communities: Many a twitch streamer has music bots or accept music request while streaming. Has been a great source for new discovery.
I'm 53 and love Spotify and Reddit's 80s subreddits for music discovery.
I love finding new stuff (IDLES, Shame, and High Vis are recent faves) and finding old stuff that's new to me (I flew across the country to see The Cult playing in LA as their old band name -- Death Cult -- and never knew there was a live album version of Dreamtime that's terrific from back in the day).
I wish there was a music service that actually provided recommendations based on features of the track itself, like similar chords, tempo, rhythmic composition, emotional tone, etc.
Instead it all seems to be variations on "people who liked this also like", which--while obviously easier to code--is rather disappointing compared to what I thought we'd have by now.
I only have one criteria and it is “high production values”. After that I have no century or genre constraints. So far there is no recommendation algorithm up to the task.
Instead of slowing down my discovery of music at 30, i started releasing my own! Check it out if you are interested: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0gzvd38Qse9LCxpmJUWLaN?si=MC...
I would guess there's a strong correlation with trait openness to someones ability to integrate new music into their collection. IDK if its a lot, but I listened to 90 genres in 2023. I do find myself frequently liking music that is about 10 years old, but I think that's a function of discovering it, not of a willingness to try new sounds on for taste.
I've only been listening to the BBC Essential Mix since ~2005. Pretty much nothing else, it's always about the latest music and trends (especially if it's something from the UK like dubstep, grim etc.). 2x2 hour episodes are absolutely perfect for a week (there's a Classic show where they play the old ones again)
I know the article is mostly true, but I'm apparently the contradiction that proves the rule. I've listened to music from the current decade for decades, but also discovered old stuff that was new to me along the way.
Life is too short to listen to the same music over and over.
Thanks to Shazam, I find new music all the time. Often times in hip places like hotel lobbies and restaurants.
I've been using http://somafm.com and it's really the only thing that got me back into listening to music. ( https://radio.garden is also interesting )
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.
I am 45+ and constantly and exclusively seek out new music, rarely listening to anything more than a year old. However... I think this may have as much to do with a life-long novelty seeking manifestation of ADHD than anything entirely neurotypical. But I'm okay with that!
I deleted/tossed my entire music collection, subscriptions/accounts about two years ago. I decided it was kind of keeping me in a mental rut and reinforcing old patterns rather than supporting new ones im modifying my life with.
I think it helps. Kinda like being 16 again.
I listen to a lot of music, and thanks to Spotify, regularly find new material across a decent range of genres.
But at the back of mind, I hear the echoes of Steven Pinker's words: "music is auditory cheesecake". Capable only of conveying emotions, unless lyrics are involved.
Related, though not so much to the question in the article which more applies to individuals but societally:
Melancholy Elephants: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
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.
My musical tastes have changed a lot, I've found new bands and artists pretty much every year of my life. I listen to music from my teenage years now & then, but more often than not I'm listening to completely new music.
I feel like the more I listen to it, the less new patterns I find. In addition to auditory sensory stimulation, spiritual identification is also increasingly important, and the latter is not easy to be constantly fond of the new and dislike the old.
I find this argument interesting though I have found that the same Jungle music I listened to in the 90s is now cutting edge again similar to around 2007 when 80s Italo House was considered the most stylish and hippest thing to listen to.
Whenever I sit in a venue that has background music, I realize that I know all the songs that are being played.
I think the problem is that new music isn't as played (except of course for the corporate pop that is imposed on us).
I must be an outlier - I'm in my 40s and haven't listened to former favorites like Radiohead forever.
Darkwave, Phonk, Witchhouse, Glitch Hop, KPop, and a lot of electronic music that crosses genres are what I listen to now.
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.
Since song have no time limit, and notes can be combined in numerous ways to form chords, there is no limit to the number of melodies. And that's before you consider musical temperaments.
A story especially for you:
http://spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
or even "ancient" lyrics on old melodies? Μα Τον Δια: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fA6dTnyrE
(come to think of it, putting new lyrics to old melodies is much of what cabaret is about)
I wonder... that was about the age when I found out:
"twinkle twinkle little star" = "abc song"
Overall, music plays its own specific role for each person. For some, music is a significant part of life, almost like a whole life, while for others, it's simply meant to be in the background.
I think that it really depends on your relationship with music. I’m no longer in my 30s and still find new music all the time.
I wonder why parents consistently listening to older music than their childless peers
From the perspective of this parent - toddlers are loud. They make so much noise, continuously, either by playing or talking or, more often, both at the same time, that when I get a moment of silence I don't want to ruin it by playing music. I just want to hear nothing for a while, or chat with my partner in peace.
Only in the last few months, with the youngest being almost 5, do I feel the urge to listen to the music again - and I have a 10 year gap to catch up with.
...And you are listening to music for them. Although "C is for Conifers" (by They Might Be Giants) is pretty good by toddler-music-genre standards.
I know my kid can't stop dancing when John Ryan's Polka (Bluey episode Fairies) is on! :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/bluey/comments/ph5sot/whats_your_fa...
It's weird that a kid's show can make the entire crave Rossini, but so is life, just roll with it! :)
Wonder if this has gotten worse as music listening has become more of a private thing (solitary ipod/iphone listening). prior to that, i think many parents (myself included) found themselves exposed to lots of new music simply because it was hard to avoid not hearing whatever their children/spouses were listening to at home or in the car.
For me it's the lack of time or headspace to keep up, and the lack of time to go to concerts. Pre kids we did a lot more of that.
That makes sense!
New-new music, or just new acts in the same genres that you liked in your early 20s?
This rapidly becomes an exercise in classifying music which I always felt a bit silly. Try to put God Is an Astronaut in a genre, I wish you good fortune in the wars to come. https://youtu.be/ZmWYCIZhBgk at one time Wikipedia had them as "Post-rock, electronica, ambient, Space rock" then just gave up and labelled them as post-rock.
My brother and I, less than two years apart in age, when we were 18 years old listened to the same music, power metal, mostly. By now, some three decades later he have veered off in a direction of high BPM while I am deep in folk metal land sometimes leaving metal behind. Where does folk metal end and where does (neo)folk rock start? I do not know and I couldn't care less if I tried. I simply enjoy https://youtu.be/mQWmryiIcxY a lot without trying to label it.
Maybe I missed this in the article but I agree this is a major consideration. I find a lot of people might like "new" music but it's very much a slight riff on stuff they liked a long time ago. As a 30yo, good luck introducing anyone in the 25+ category to new albums that actually experiment into novel sounds and become the music of the current 20yo generation.
It's a little sad too because the internet unlocked so much "bedroom producer" potential from the entire world where before you had to be musically trained or get a lot more lucky. There's actually a talent explosion right now.
>good luck introducing anyone in the 25+ category to new albums that actually experiment into novel sounds and become the music of the current 20yo generation
Both here and in the article there's a conflation of "new music" with "contemporary mainstream popular" which seems invalid. Is the Billboard Hot 100 any more or less innovative in 2024 than it was in 2004, or 1974? I think that most "mainstream" music is precisely "a slight riff on stuff [written] a long time ago." You have to go outside of the mainstream to find music and artists that are experimenting with novel sounds, just like you did in decades past.
As you say, there's been an explosion of independent creativity, thanks to the Internet. There's no reason for anyone who is interested in music to listen to the same old mainstream dreck.
>Is the Billboard Hot 100 any more or less innovative in 2024 than it was in 2004, or 1974?
Yes, amazingly less so. Less innovative and less diverse music styles.
I'm in my 30s and still pretty open minded with music, and don't listen to all that much of my teenage years stuff.
I think I just sacrificed my ability to enjoy new video games instead.
Other than the opportunity for a misplaced pun on the term “spiral”, why would you take an otherwise linear-in-time graph and make it radial? Why would age 0 to 50 be somehow cyclical?
When our soul begins to die. Never stop searching ;)
i'm a huge spotify user and my goal much of the time i'm listening is to find new music... last.fm tells me that 27% of the artists i listened to this week are ones i'd never listened to before (the yearly report says 55% of the 1,512 artists i listened to last year were new to me). i also like the "yearly rewind" and "recent rewind" playlists because it automates putting those newly discovered artists of tracks into my rotation.
I find the soundtrack for EA Sports FC (the video game) exposes me to a lot of different types of music that I otherwise wouldn't be exposed to.
Streaming Radio is often narrow-casting and an excellent if overlooked genre-based means of new music discovery. e.g Prog-Radio
I find soundcloud's autoplay to consistently give me fresh new music that i enjoy and many times in a style never heard before.
I am wondering when Suno.ai or similar are replacing licensed background music like radio with AI generated hyper-optimized streams?
For those looking to expand their musical pallet try bbc radio 6, consistently delivers various genres of quality music.
I hate this article. Can’t we do some philosophical introspection instead of just this data driven drivel? There is even a clue in the empty nesters vs parents section but no discussion. Is the author just afraid of saying something offensive? Age being causative is just taken as fact.
I’d suggest that music discovery is centered on having the desire to do so. As people get older they often stop caring about being cool[+] (take a look at the author) and only listening to the same old music is lame. “We stop being interested in new music at $AGE” is just unimaginative, lazy, and counter to the facts.
Being “with it” is a choice.
[+] And, btw, nobody gets to decide what “cool” is(and your mom definitely doesn’t), but it is by nature always changing.
Finding "new" music is a concept that the music industry has marketed to you like being skinny or that cola is a lifestyle. In times past people were happy with one genre or slight variations of that genre for millennia. Now we are spoiled for choice but are yet still made to feel ashamed if we are not consuming the newest and discarding the oldest. As if there is sickness to be found in enjoying something old and well worn.
i feel like a majority of people don't seek out "new" music, so i see how you apply that to the music industry as a marketing concept. with whatever app, if you get people listening to more new stuff, you can get them engaged longer etc.
however, i've sought new music since i was young. its something i share with my father who would purposely grab new records or cassette based on trivial things (title, art, price..) and then listen to the album several times. i love exploring different cultures and music is a great reflection of that. at the same time, i often go back to the old and well worn music i grew up with, and even that my parents or their parents grew up with. i think there's a lot of beauty out there and it's a shame to shun something new because you feel it falls within an industries agenda.
> Now we are spoiled for choice but are yet still made to feel ashamed if we are not consuming the newest and discarding the oldest. As
Actually I've found Gen-z's to have surprisingly wide listening patterns. As a few datapoints I was surprised that my friend's teenager could actually name several Nirvana songs, knew who the Smashing pumpkins were, and also the Talking Heads. (all rose and fell from fame before her birth)
My friend (who's the same age as me) has a 14 year old son who's learning guitar and he asked me for a lesson. The first thing he wanted me to show him was some riffs from AC/DC songs that came out before I was born.
Yeah, I agree.
I think it's easy to sit and judge someone as being "uncultured" because they listen to music that was popular when they were a teenager, but fundamentally it's not like they're hurting anyone. I listen to mostly late-90's-early-2000's punk rock even still, and I don't think it's a moral failing that I don't listen to the latest stuff all the time, just like I don't think it's a moral failing for my mom to mostly listen to The Beegees.
Music is, first and foremost, a means of entertainment, and it's not like it really buys you anything to be up to date in music for most careers. If your job is, I don't know, marketing director of a company, then sure, maybe you should keep up to date with the latest trends all the time, but most of us have pretty utilitarian jobs where it doesn't really matter what we like.
I think where it gets harmful is acting like "the stuff I listened to as a teenager is objectively better than what the kids listen to now", which I will admit is a mentality that I sometimes have to actively fight against. I think it can sometimes be a proxy for shitting on the next generation of humans, and I am very actively against needlessly divisive and reductive stuff like that.
> and I don't think it's a moral failing that I don't listen to the latest stuff all the time
I’ve personally enjoyed going the other way and exploring earlier and earlier singers and genres.
Quite fun.
For those interested, there’s also "Excavated Shellac"[0]. I can’t say I’ve liked or even enjoyed most of it, but it’s been an intriguing and interesting discovery nonetheless.
[0]: https://excavatedshellac.com/2020/12/13/excavated-shellac-an...
Yeah, I've done something like the theme of Excavated Shellac with old CDs a couple times. I will buy a bundle of 100 random CDs on eBay and go through and rip anything that seems remotely interesting. Occasionally I've found stuff from obscure artists that I end up liking, and even stuff that never made it to Spotify.
It's time consuming and I probably won't do it again but it was fun to do a few times.
> I think it's easy to sit and judge someone as being "uncultured" because they listen to music that was popular when they were a teenager, but fundamentally it's not like they're hurting anyone.
I think the antagonism usually goes in the other way. Most people get crystallized music tastes pretty soon into their life and the second the new generation comes up with something different, it's all "music is crap these days, silly kids, back in my day the 90s had the best music." There are several examples in this thread without a hint of the irony of this article.
Old foreign language books had translations for phrases along the lines of "the lobster makes a good salad" and "my husband is unwell, can you call a doctor?"
If I were to use YouTube for a corpus, I could probably write contemporary translation books for many languages, as long as the phrases were along the lines of "still listening in ${YEAR}" and "new ${GENRE} isn't this good"
I don't even blame them, clearly the article shows there's a biological or cultural phenomenon to it. It's just unfortunate when you're the 2% outlier that thinks music is progressing, as you can't share with others the appreciation that sounds are actually getting better.
> a biological or cultural phenomenom to it
Puberty?
(much folk music has ambiguous lyrics; I wonder if starting to blush at all the traditional village songs used to be a social milestone?)
>I think it's easy to sit and judge someone as being "uncultured" because they listen to music that was popular when they were a teenager
Pretty funny, especially since I just attended a sold-out performance of Mozart's Requiem last month. Back when I was younger, I think the dominant perception was that classical music was "cultured" and popular / current music was lacking in refinement
I think it kind of goes both ways?
Maybe the word "uncultured" isn't right, but I feel like when I say "I don't really listen to much that was written in the last fifteen years", people kind of act like I'm some kind of luddite. I also think a lot of people feel like the smartest people go way back and listen to the classical stuff. Personally, I've never really been able to get into classical music outside of movie soundtracks, and for awhile I was kind of embarrassed by that fact, but I'm not really anymore. As I said, music is about entertainment, and you like what you like.
Kind of related, when I was a teenager, I liked to read a lot, but I didn't have any money. I discovered Project Gutenberg and started reading a lot of public domain stuff (a lot of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Dickens, etc), purely out of cheapness. Teachers would think I'm smarter than I actually was because I knew obscure literary references from old books in my essays and when I would answer questions in class, despite the fact that it doesn't really require a 10,000 IQ to download a PDF file from the internet and read it.
> I also think a lot of people feel like the smartest people go way back and listen to the classical stuff. […] and for awhile I was kind of embarrassed by that fact
That says a lot more about those who think that it does about than those who do or do not listen to "classical" music.
> Personally, I've never really been able to get into classical music outside of movie soundtracks,
Not implying it will or should be the same for you, or even that you should try it, but in my limited experience headphones and speakers have hardly ever done any justice to "classical" music.
It also seems some of it needs the listeners to have lived a little, so it can resonate with them. As an example, I couldn’t care less for operas as a teenager. Fifteen years later, two live operas are among the few pieces that have so far managed to make me cry.
But in any case, to each their own.
I don’t disagree with anything you said.
I did however try seeing some Beethoven performance a few years ago and I didn’t really enjoy it. I can respect and appreciate the talent of the musicians, and I didn’t hate it or anything, but I still didn’t really have that much fun.
I’m just diehard I guess, serious evolutions in my preferences and new artists I love almost weekly. Huh!
Never! It gets just gets harder with time to find what you like, as your taste ossifies, and music evolves.
I am so happy that this is not the case for me. What I listened to back then was awful.
My music tastes were pretty much static since highschool until I started using Spotify 5 years ago
Intersting question is when does humanity stop finding new music. Or when did it stop.
Maybe there's "Dunbar number" for things we can keep liking
I’m in the the unique (and at times, unenviable) position of spending the last 4-5 years building out a music app (getradiant.app for the curious) and I agree with what others are saying here, it’s about exposure.
My music taste has expanded and shifted a lot in the past half decade, which also happens to coincide with the first half of my 30s, mainly because I’m exposed to new stuff constantly through my consistent testing of my app.
Your 30s is typically when people start noticing the growth of the circle representing their radius of musical interest start to slow. Mainly because it collides with having less time for choice (life gets busy, responsibilities increase) coupled with a decreased capacity for new experience.
I’ve also noticed TikTok has exposed me to a ton of new stuff.
So the TLDR; is, the time you have to discover on your own will become ever more limited. Your best bet to keep the party going is to find one or two low-effort, lean back discovery services and stick with them.
When we quit seeking.
It helps a lot to be among other people seeking new music.
Without that, many of us stop mid life.
I love to explore new music. It's like a hobby for me
All my fav songs is music I discovered in my 30s
In my mid-30s and I can’t imagine not being interested in new music.
> When do we stop finding new music?
for me never. The older I get I find more interesting new music. Maybe because I play an instrument and live in a very diverse and rich physical cultural context, not in a playlist or AI generated content.
It's like junk food next to you in versus in a cupboard upstairs. One you eat now impulsively the other you won't eat due to the effort needed as minimal as it is it still slows you down.
If you put in a cassette tape and let it run you would usually always listen to it in order. To some extent a CD too but it and vinyl were easier to jump song to song.
Radio was even more uncontrollable it made you wait for your favourite song while it played other songs. Sometimes a day or two waiting for that new song to appear. Radio mercilessly teased you too. Even Top 40 radio shows you had to wait not knowing was your song now higher up making you excited but it meant you had to wait, excitement grows. Or was it lower down and it played sooner (a dreadful feeling) or you missed it completely!
I've noticed this over the years that more and more I rarely listen to anything new just what I know from years past.
My #1 source for finding new music: teen-aged daughter
Art isn't "found" it is created
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.
FOllow Professor Skye's Music rewview.
I have to wonder how much of this is societal expectations as you age? or "Being an adult".
The idea that once you reach a certain age, you settle down, get into a routine, doing less new things, etc.
While yeah, a music streaming service could introduce you to new music. Maybe you will just find yourself in less situations where you will experience new music?
Listening to a new song on your phone is a drastically different experience to overhearing it while traveling, with friends, whatever.
I know I have a number of songs that bring up an emotional response due to certain events tied to them. And some of them are genres I would not have normally found myself listening too.
most likely never is the answer.
A 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.
I find as I get older the period that the music I listen to extends in both directions.
While most of the popular music released these days is crap, that was the case when I was young also. The things fondly remembered is the good stuff.
It's quite fun to look at old top 10 lists to see masterpieces sitting alongside fluff.
Recent discoveries. Klaus Nomi, Kirin J. Callinan.
Now I want a tool that analyzes my last.fm history and tells me how many new artists (= artists I never scrobbled before) I scrobble every year.
Spotify 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, and have a wide array of music offered (within the theme of the station).
Spotify now has the ability to engage in a legal version of "digital" payola, so their handcrafted group of artists by major labels are peppered into their hundreds of in-house playlists, disguising this business practice as a wide array of music selection.
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.
So you're discovering new music, but none of it is memorable, because listening to music in 2024 (for a lot of people) is often a wall of slightly groovy background noise, with the occasional standout track that you probably toss into your own personal playlist.
How I fixed this:
1. Disable the 'autoplay' feature
2. Don't use playlists and listen to albums (except for when I'm in a pinch or hosting a party)
3. Intentionally discover a new genre every few months and go down a rabbit hole. My current new genre is South African Amapiano. Excellent stuff.
4. Discover music across different genres and time periods using RateYourMusic.
> 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 artists at a time.
I look at the discover weekly / release radar. If I like a song, I’ll listen to the album. If it I like the album, I’ll listen to the discography.
Most music is not great, but it’s easy to sample and dive deeper.
>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.
Albums aren’t what Spotify recommends. Path of least resistance. See my comment above.
Albums are literally one tap away - you tap on the song title and the album opens.
> See my comment above.
Please either reply to my comment with new words, or not at all.
Listening to albums is a bad way of discovering albums you like. That’s my point.
> so DJs had to break new songs, styles, and have a wide array of music offered (within the theme of the station).
I'm an older Zoomer and this was never the case for radio in my lifetime [1]. I heard "college radio stations" being a bastion of this but I've never listened to one myself.
One of the earliest internet services I remember loving was Pandora because it recommended me artists I never heard on the radio and was the start of my love of music.
[1] I'm guessing it was related to all radio stations being owned by the same companies.
Late Gen-X/Early Millennial here; there was a time before the consolidation of radio stations and invasion of iHeartMedia (at the time named Clear Channel) where DJs had the final word in what got played and most were quite good at introducing new music. Here's my experience form the outside of the industry: once consolidation started there was a push to use canned (pre-recorded) intros, outros, and interstitial announcements to reduce costs. Stations often kept some talk shows, but few kept real DJs. This let stations use a small number of voice actors for a large number of stations. Combined with centrally controlled playlists they were able to push the costs down and increase profits to the point that older style stations with bespoke DJs couldn't compete financially and either adopted the same model or they sold out.
EDIT: I may be misremembering, but there used to be a limit on how many stations a company could own in a given market.
You are correct. There used to be a limit. Radio was deregulated in the 90s and by the early 2000s local DJ selected music was essentially gone.
Yep. I recall this happening. Let's all praise DEREGULATION and the dollars it brought us.
I recently switched off Amazon Music and went back to Pandora (must have started using it in like 2010 and then gone on a 13 or so year long diversion into the on-demand streaming services).
I guess it isn’t surprising because it is their core value proposition, but the Pandora discovery algorithm seems so much better than the competition, at least to my ears.
I miss the ability to hyper-focus and play an album over and over, but on the other hand, it is probably better not to burn out on an album, and anyway, if I really want to, I can buy the album I guess.
Pandora + Bandcamp reminds me of what the internet looked like it could be. Sad that Amazon and their ilk have to silo everything.
Last.fm was pretty good too. I wonder how they are holding up…
Pandora was my go-to circa 2007-2009 and I haven't thought about it in years. Looking back, I discovered a disproportionate amount of the music I like in that timeframe... I'm honestly kind of surprised they're still around (and, if I'm reading your comment correctly, haven't morphed into something entirely unrecognizable in the meantime?)
I don’t know much about their business model under the hood, but from my point of view they seem pretty similar to back then.
It was funny to log in and see all my old stations from a decade plus ago, still working.
I use Pandora and subscribe to Premium which allows me to listen to albums on demand. When I started out as a free user after I gave up on Youtube in the background apps, I didn't like Spotify because it kept forcing me to listen to awful songs that it pushes on everybody instead of what I actually wanted to listen to. Pandora was a much better experience as a free user because their "radio" plays music similar to what you've already told it you like.
How does Spotify "force" you to listen to stuff? I have a very different experience. Pandora (many years ago when I tried it) did not let you choose what you wanted to play (e.g. am album) and Spotify did (and still does). I have hundreds of my own playlists on Spotify, and my listening time is split between those, Spotify's "daily mix" playlists (generated from your personal music tastes) and occasionally "discover weekly" (one way I discover new music). I like choosing what music I listen to.
Dude... THANK YOU. I just logged back into Pandora and the recommendations are just as excellent as I remember. I also remember discovering some of my absolute favorite songs/albums via Pandora.
One thing that Pandora has is GENRE based stations. I don't know of any other service that can do that. This will be a game changer for when I dive into new genres.
Correct - this sort of thing was basically over-and-done by the mid 90s.
Since I'm not seeing anybody mention it yet but it's one of my favorite ways to find new genres, I'd highly recommend everyone check out everynoise.com because they seem to have scraped Spotify's genres (you'll need Spotify to listen to more than 30 second samples, but probably still useful even if you don't use Spotify). The number of genres they have listed in the THOUSANDS, and I guarantee they will have something you've never heard of, but it's a great rabbit hole to go down when looking for new music. If you like a genre, they'll already have multiple playlists for it, and if you like a particular artist, they'll have those too. I am not affiliated with the website, but try to turn everyone I know onto it because there's just so much out there to discover that I wouldn't have otherwise.
(everynoise.com developer, if you're reading this, I love you <3)
I'll add one more
5. Once you find a band you like, pull their tour dates. See who they're opening for or who their openers are.
6. Go to whosampled.com and figure out the originals. Whom do they cover, whom do they sample.
Younger artists cover older artists all the time; when older artists cover younger ones, that's probably a recommendation.
Examples: Dolly Parton covering Joan Jett; Alla Pugacheva and Sofia Rotaru covering t.A.T.u.
mindlessly
Or mindfully.
You have no idea why people choose what they listen to, and suggesting they're doing it without thinking is just your snobbery showing.
Read my comment again. If you're listening to a playlist, you're not mindfully choosing each song. There's nothing wrong with playlists, but my point was to describe how listening to music from Spotify's playlists often isn't a mindful experience (excluding when your attention is grabbed the occasional standout track).
A GOOD playlist can keep your attention, and those are often handcrafted by other users. Just look at some of the other responses in this thread. Plenty of people have the same experience.
I also said that music from playlists is often (not always) groovy background noise - This isn't a mindful experience - And that's okay.
>My current new genre is South African Amapiano.
How did you discover Amapiano? I ask because Tyla has become massively popular in the last year and I'm wondering if the discovery was truly coincidental or undercover marketing?
Uncle Waffles @ Coachella 2023
I see this in https://everynoise.com/#updates
> 2024-01-05 status update: With my layoff from Spotify on 2023-12-04, I lost the internal data-access required for ongoing updates to many parts of this site. Most of this, as a result, is now a static snapshot of what, for now, will be the final state from the site's 10-year history and evolution, hosted on my own server. Some pieces may get disabled and reenabled over time, and some that only made sense with current data may never return. But we'll see.
> This is because labels pay Spotify to put certain songs on large playlists
Source? This is what Spotify says about it themselves:
"We want to make something crystal clear: no one can pay to be added to one of Spotify’s editorial playlists."
https://community.spotify.com/t5/FAQs/How-to-get-your-music-...
Sure, they could be lying but then all the labels and their employees would need to be in on the lie as well.
This is the same defense used in radio. Note the wording ... "no one can pay". Favors and indirect payment are used excessively in the music industry. Note that I also said that payola was the act of "direct payment".
An example of indirect payment in radio would be the record label gifting a set of expensive tickets to the station.
Remember those contests in the 2000s where the radio station would play a collection of songs over the course of a few hours, and if you could call in and be caller number 15 and name all the songs, you could win free concert tickets?
The record label didn't pay the radio station with money - The tickets were gifted to the station for free. But as a result, the radio station played [insert band name]'s songs for 2 hours straight (and possibly other artists on the same label).
This is a win-win, because a ton of people talk about this contest with their family and friends, so the station gets free promo, and the artist gets exposure.
I don't know how Spotify is doing this in the digital era, but ask anyone connected to the music industry. This 100% happens.
For a lot of casual listeners, Spotify editorial playlists are the new radio station.
So in other words: you're just speculating and have no basis for the claim.
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.
I used it for like 5 minutes before paying for it, it's obviously great, and the "pro" upgrade has the funniest best feature ever (exclude ratings by the age of the rater).
Haha yep, and I also exclude an entire genre and all of its sub-genres.
Also - just don't use Spotify. It has a UX that is just consistently opposed to album-centric listening. Or any sort of focused listening, really.
There are alternatives. Apple music is fine. Tidal + Roon is also pretty good.
For discovering music, Roon provides a much more album-centric way to browse and learn about different albums and genres. I use that combined with subreddits for particular genres and good old fashioned album reviews and artist interviews.
I’ve wondered for a while if Spotify skews playlists in favor of cheaper songs. I have no evidence of this, but it’d make business sense to use the equivalent of store brand music (even if that just means outsourced to a cheap agency) for generic study music playlists and such.
> it’d make business sense to use the equivalent of store brand music
They've been accused of almost exactly this: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-is-creating-i...
Spotify denies doing this but you can google to find a lot of controversy over fake artists on Spotify.
A more recent variation on the theme: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/19/swedish-comp...
I noticed Google Play do this with Soundcloud Rap.
Their amorality has caused me to enjoy SoundCloud Rap at a formidable age, now I cannot shake it. My kids listen to it, swear amorally, and the cycle continues.
All because Google Play didn't want to shell out an extra 60 cents per year for paid Rappers.
What???
I think they tend to play what is cached locally, to save on streaming costs.
That’s certainly possible, but I’d expect licensing costs to dwarf bandwidth costs.
You have no idea how little artists make from selling music on platforms. The money is in the live performances and merchandise.
Strongly disagree with your take on albums. I'm a music lover, spotify wrapped always puts me in the top 5% for most artists. I never search by album, always song, and if it's great I'll click in to check to see if the album is to my taste.
I have discovered so much music on spotify. I'm not going to listen to a whole album to see if I like a new artist, lol.
>> labels pay Spotify to put certain songs on large playlists
What are you talking about. IM going to need you to back this one up with some proof.
1. The labels have a giant back catalog that remains popular. It does not need promotion. Huge long tail profits there.
2. The labels dont have a lot to sell any more. The big artists tend to get out of the system (and make money on tours) and small artists get nothing. And lots of artists have bought back their catalogs, again long tail.
The album, as a vehicle is mostly dead. Hell songs are mostly dead, if you cant hook someone in the time of a ticktock video your going to have a lot of trouble getting them. And there you need to be "background music" with a groove.
Anecdotal, but I was close friends with someone who managed a niche (but popular) artist’s social media and streaming service presence. We discussed this fact and this person mentioned it could be $10k+ to be on some playlists 1st song spot for just a few days. I doubt it’s only Spotify official playlists.
Or, you know, Spotify lists suck because they dont want you consuming.
The optimal state for Netflix, Spotify, any other bandwidth intensive fixed price service is for you to PAY for it and NOT USE IT.
These services are optimized for maintaining subscription numbers, not your enjoyment.
I'm listening to some Amapiano now... and loving it.
Care to share some of the other genres you've tried before this one?
My previous genres were dozens of Techno subgenres. Check out the 2023 Coachella lineup. That year had a strong focus on 'World Music'. I went last year and that's how I discovered Amapiano.
If you like Amapiano, check out a song titled 'Ungowami' by Sha Sha
Check out 'Big Flexa' by Costa Titch. Awesome music video too. Huge dance culture in South Africa.
Also check out 'Abo Mvelo' by Daliwonga (this song gets me hype during workouts)
And check out Uncle Waffles' Boiler Room mix. Truly awesome performance.
> So you're discovering new music, but none of it is memorable, because listening to music in 2024 (for a lot of people) is often a wall of slightly groovy background noise, with the occasional standout track that you probably toss into your own personal playlist.
Yea, I tried streaming for a while, and found exactly that. When I play some genre-specific stream with a goal of discovering new music, I find it's basically full of unremarkable, generic musak, punctuated by maybe 0.1% memorable, great tracks that I'm motivated to bookmark for later. Are these few needles worth slogging through hours of haystack? After a few years I have sadly concluded "no."
Not sure why this is. Has it always been this way (0.1% great stuff in a sea of mediocre?) or are "content creators" of today just more focused on churning out quantity than artists of the past?
You’ve discovered the Pareto Principle. It’s true about literally everything.
So now I was on the German and the English Wikipedia entry of the Principle and noticed a noteworthy difference:
English: While it is common to refer to pareto as "80/20" rule, under the assumption that, in all situations, 20% of causes determine 80% of problems, this ratio is merely a convenient rule of thumb and is not, nor should it be considered, an immutable law of nature.
German: The 80-20 distribution in the Pareto principle often leads to the false assumption that a sum of 100 is mandatory. In fact, however, any other distribution is possible, in which, for example, 50 % of the efforts lead to 90 % of the effect, and again 50 % of the efforts lead to the remaining 10 % of the effect. This is easy to see in the trivial case that 100% of the efforts are the cause of 100% of the success. [0]
It's interesting how this explanatory information is lacking in the English version. Should be a cool project for an LLM to transfer information between the different language versions of a Wikipedia entry.
[0] Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
It's "true", yes, for almost everything, but there is a lot to gain from recognizing the difference between 80/20 and 90/10 or even 99/1, etc. Just like 99%, 99.9% and 99.99% uptime are VERY different promises to meet, while looking virtually identical to a layman.
The old school way still works too:
5. Listen to the radio.
Nah, most people only have consolidated radio stations, they play national playlists of soup.
If you still have independent stations which pay actual radio DJs empowered to craft their sets, cherish them.
Three D Radio, local independent radio station in Adelaide, South Australia is the source of most of my discovery.
They play a lot of styles, and there's a lot I don't like, but there's a very high chance you haven't heard it before - and that counts for something.
https://www.threedradio.com
I haven't read the article, but I know the answer pretty definitively for me: the second I stopped listening to the radio, which happened in 2008 (when I was 17), because my favorite radio station in Orlando that used to carry a lot of punk rock music got rebranded to music for the 50+ demographic. I'm not even going to pretend that I know the reasons why they did that, but it was the only station I was listening to regularly, and pretty much my only source for new music as a result.
Gradually I stopped seeking out new music, instead just focusing on buying CDs for bands I already knew until I got Spotify in 2012, and that just kind of became an echo chamber.
I have a SiriusXM account now, and I do try and seek out new music that way occasionally via their phone app, but it's been a bit difficult since I don't drive since I moved to NYC. My car was probably 80+% of my music-listening time and now I don't really have that anymore. I can't really listen to music with lyrics while working (way too distracting for me), so the only music I listen to during most of the day is video game music from the 90's: stuff that's meant to be pleasant to listen to, but also easy to tune out by design.
I also have that problem with lyrics in music while I'm working. That pushed me toward more electronic music during the workday. Got into various forms of house that way.
lyrics in a language you don't speak are much less distracting
(every now and then I get tempted to translate whatever word I think I keep hearing in every song; it often turns out to be either "love" or "heart")
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