Why we listen to new music
pitchfork.com
pitchfork.com
There's so much good stuff out there, and it's so exciting to find an artist, genre or new combinations of sounds I've not heard before.
Bandcamp is great for this – better than Spotify or Apple Music. You can explore by artist, genre tag, label, and by people who have bought/wishlisted an album. Plus there's lots of interesting smaller artists who are not on the bigger platforms.
I really enjoy exploring different genres of music and finding new albums I've not heard before and devoted subreddits have been my main source of that. For me, r/progmetal is a group of devoted fans who enjoy recommending prog metal artists and albums. Nowadays a band doesn't have to be super famous and have to have a CD in a store in order for me to be able to listen to them. I read a recommendation, fire up spotify and start listening asap.
It's fun to pick an artist and listen to their entire catalogue, start to finish, over a couple of days.
It does. But it's hard to find new stuff that i like as much as the old stuff.
I used to hear new stuff on Radio 1, a generalist music channel, but don't listen to pop music radio any more - perhaps i should try that again.
Back in the day, i used to go through the racks and bins of second-hand CDs in Cash Converters and buy anything that had an interesting cover. It was only 50p or something, so i could afford to buy a lot of crap. I learned about Étienne de Crécy and the KLF that way, so it was money well spent.
I tried the New Releases page on LetsLoop, but the music was diabolical - all interchangeable moan-pop or mumble-rap. I routinely fire up Spotify automatically generated playlists, and there's a mix of stuff i already listen to, other stuff that is very similar (which is something!) but isn't very exciting, and weirdly incorrect selections.
I've had a couple of really good leads from the random channel in a programming Slack i frequent. Tracks i liked which have led me to whole new (to me) genres.
I've had some luck exploring through record labels - if i find a new band or genre i like, see if they're on an indie label, and then see who else is on that label. I won't like every band, but there's a chance i'll like some. Napalm Records has been pretty productive for me, although, infamously, they really will sign any old junk these days. I'm still digging through TimeSlaves's bins.
I've also tried going via other users on Bandcamp. Pick an album i like, look at the grid of supporters under the album art, click on a few people who look interesting, and see what else they like.
Oh, and i follow a Twitter account that posts bizarre or amusing reviews from a music reviews website. Sometimes i listen to the music they're reviewing.
Same here. I always get so damn happy when I find a new track that I really like.
I've added a weekly reminder to listen to my Spotify account's Discovery Weekly and Release Radar (based on the people you follow) lists, and I always find new tracks; the Your Daily Mix lists are quite awesome, too, in this regard.
Additionally, I have quite a few Spotify playlists for specific occasions, e.g. gym time; the nice thing about this is that as soon as you start adding tracks to those playlists, you can scroll down and it starts to recommend tracks that you might like based on the ones you just added.
Since I'm quite heavily into Eletronic Music (Deep House, Afro House, etc.), I also use BeatportCharts.com's Advanced Search [0] to find new music that is ranked quite high based on a specific parameter which you can specify, e.g. rank on the charts or number of user likes.
All in all I get so much excitement out of finding new music that it's basically a thing that I do on a daily basis. I'll add Bandcamp to my list of sources for finding new music :)
https://soundcloud.com/thekais/wir-waren-wie-dick-und-doof
Totally agree on mixes being great. If you have any specific suggestions in return please feel free to share. I'll check out Johnny M on YouTube.
MixCloud [0] is another source for finding a lot of new electronic music tracks; the absolutely nice thing about MixCloud is that the player shows the track ID at specific timestamps within a mix, so most of the times you don't even have to use Shazam to ID a track :)
My favorite Cercle sets are the following:
- Black Coffee's set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGqg_ZzThDU
- Adriatique's set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQZYzGO8QlM
- Christian Löffler's set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2OCXiubvr0&t=950s
- Solomun's set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHDRRxKlimY
There's also the Boiler Room sets [1] which are quite famous. One of my favorites is definitely the Boiler Room Palestine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9VYKrtziSg
Finally, RÜFÜS DU SOL played an amazing live set in the desert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy4KtD98S2c ; you might enjoy this one, too!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPKT_csvP72boVX0XrMtagQ
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPKT_csvP72boVX0XrMtagQ/vid...
Only if you listen to dull music. Perhaps pick higher quality stuff?
A good portion of my collection was originally written before 1750: Bach, Palestrina, Tallis, etc.† Some CDs I've had for >25 years and they are still as fresh as the first day I listened to them. And even a different take on the same composition can be illuminating: Glenn Gould vs Angela Hewitt, Tallis Scholars vs The Sixteen.
There's a reason why certain works regularly appear in those "Top 100" lists where they go out and ask experts: the order may sometimes be different, but the items in the top ten are often the same.
Edit: a quotation by Robert Bringhurst form The Elements of Typographic Style: With type as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.
† I have more modern stuff too: Led Zeppelin, Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, Pärt, Górecki, etc.
Not the OP but personally some of most innovative music can be found in the mainstream Italian scene of the late '60s - early '70s (including music film), you've got former "musique concrète" composers (or people interested in that type of music) like Piero Umiliani, Piero Piccioni, Armando Trovajoli or Ennio Morricone himself now composing music for the masses, I don't think anything similar has happened since then (I'd dare say that nowadays the "music for the masses" has nothing to do with avant-garde music). Add an extraordinary voice like Mina's to one of Morricone's compositions and you can get one of the best songs of all time, "Se telefonando" [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKHxp6VwwGY&list=PLiN-7mukU_...
And then I actually gave the classics a try.
Not all types of technology obsolete themselves like computer technology. The Beatles have yet to be beaten in pop music, and Bach has yet to be beaten in music in general.
But just in case I've got a blindspot, please post a few links to some of these tracks that use cutting-edge music production to produce such novel sounds (I assume you're talking about something besides autotune). I'd like to give them a listen.
At least according to the Bach and Beatles enthusiasts and people that game music to be a competition for money rather than a form of expression or storytelling.
If it has got to the point where 'bands' are manufactured because the music industry can kind of 'read' what the audience will buy, rather than what the audience needs, what actually _is_ 'pop music'?
Then again, to offset that, we have glitch music.
Things started to get really weird once we could apply room shapes to music and then play them in another room thanks to the wonders of modern technology.
They set a standard which was followed/copied for decades - self-contained music group writing/performing their own material. And they were really good at it.
The one thing that didn't get copied from them in most cases was multiple singers. They didn't really have a 'front man'. They had a lot of harmony singing. These are keys missing from most of the bands that copied them over the years.
The voices worked well together, but were distinct enough, and the songs were distinct enough, that one could enjoy 'George' Beatles music without caring much for 'Paul' Beatles music (for example).
If you don't like Bono's voice, you're going to struggle with liking U2. If you don't like Stipe's voice, you'll have a hard time being an REM fan. Don't like Mick Jagger's voice? Tough luck on digging the Stones too much.
There was also enough variety to allow almost everyone to be able to find some Beatles track they love (or at least like).
George Martin was a great composer in his own right, and Geoff Emerick/Alan Parsons could bend the antiquated technology to their will. Then you have Paul who is a really good producer and John who is a great abstract thinker. So there is no single voice coming from a Beatles record.
Compared to today, where everyone switches producers every album (or on the same album), staying mostly in the same place with the same group of support people for... 7 years is relatively remarkable, and, I suspect allowed them all to grow together in various ways.
Nowadays, there are a lot more distractions. Musicians are too busy working on their social media game to actually work on their music game. And with nightclubs using canned music or one-man DJs, there's a lot less opportunity to perform live even if you want to. This is technological change which harms new music, and it more than cancels out the improvements which technology brings to music.
But yeah, the whole business today is a much different world from the music scene of the 50s/60s. :)
The "8-10 hours per night in hamburg" were intense, but they only did a few stints of a few months at a time there. I think Lewisohn added up after their first trip in '61, they had something like... 800 hours of stage time under their belt. It's a lot, certainly, but not the 10000 hour sort of thing people sometimes think. BUT... what's interesting is that there basically weren't any other rock bands at all with that amount of "stage time as a unit" either. It was a relatively new thing altogether, certainly in the UK...
The 20th century has seen 3 true revolutions in music technology that have changed the nature of music itself (photography went through similar paradigm shifts)
1. Recorded music (straight to wax then vynil records) was the first one (before that there were only live performances) : it made music ubiquitous, created a new industry and business model.
2. Multitrack recording to tape was the second, as you could now edit, tweak, refine after recording. Skilled instrumentists still mattered, but less so. A crucial new artistic role was invented : music producer.
3. Digital music production is the 3rd and largest one : for the first time in history, music is not limited by a human's ability to play an instrument, or even by the law of physics governing the sounds a physical instrument is able to make.
Anything an algorithm or AI can output as series of 16/24bit values going through a digital/analog converter around 44100 times per second and ending up in speakers : that can now be music, or at least an instrument.
Electronic musicians can still record and assemble familiar sounds from physical (acoustic or electronic) instruments if they choose to, but they can now also be their own luthiers and introduce one or 100 of their own never-heard-before instruments in a single song.
They can still play music live, they can do so through new human-machine interfaces driving software, they can assemble sounds in a UI, or through code, and they can code the sounds themselves, or do a combination of all that.
There is now absolute freedom to produce anything the ear can hear, only limited by one's imagination and ability to procure (or code) software instruments and effects. Of course, this has had a massive impact on the art of music itself, much like CGI has enabled telling stories in movies that could never be told before.
Virtually all "interesting" new music being released (i.e. not country music, not rock :) ) takes advantage of this new normal.
Yes, digital music exists, but you haven't convinced me why I should listen to it. I'm sure some of it is awesome, and most of it is junk, just like all music has been through the ages. The difference is that with old music, I can rely on the "test of time" to weed out the junk.
One can spend one's whole life exploring music which has stood the test of time and is pretty much guaranteed to be awesome. By sticking to critically-acclaimed classics, one pretty much eliminates all risk of hearing junk music. One also loses the opportunity to hear new great music in its infancy, but so what?
The classics also have "canonicity". By exposing myself to them, I better understand references to them in novels; I recognize them in movies; I have something to talk about at dinner parties; etc. None of this applies to some bandcamp page with ~1000 all-time listeners, no matter how good the technology.
You talk about this new music being so great, but is it qualitatively anywhere near as good as the classics? Again, as I said in my first comment, can you post some examples? If some new band is conquering the world because they've discovered the long-hidden Fundamental Theorem of Music, then I want to know about it!!! (But I doubt it, because if anyone had done so, it would usher in a new "mania" like Beatlemania, and I would have heard about it already.)
As new ideas emerge they often are raw and intense. As they get adopted by commercial music producers, these ideas become tamed and soft. Would you like to hear an original idea or a version adapted for average taste? Thats what you are constantly missing out on.
I guess your main problem is you think you can qualitatively compare art. Nope, stop dreaming that some theorem or critic will prove that music is good. Its all subjective, don't be afraid to explore your own taste.
As long as you keep listening to curated top 1000 lists, it shows that you have personally no actual opinion on the matter.
Can you post an example of some of this "raw and intense" music? I'm asking sincerely, and I'm baffled why so many people in this subthread seem so resistant to post even one single example. Are you guarding your musical finds close, like they'll run out if someone else listens to them?
Meh.
I have music from Beethoven, Shostakovich , Dvořák, Orff, and many others in my collection (including the previously mentioned Gorecki and Part--also, Zeppelin).
I prefer Early Music.
To give an example: most of my all-nighters during college started with listening to Six O'Clock by Dream Theater (lyrics very relatable to such situations BTW).
To this day that starting drum solo immediately puts me into focus.
What I think is completely missing in today’s music is the prevalence of covers. If you want, you can spend a lifetime listening to Bach sonatas, by any amount of different performers, but if there’s a specific Radiohead song you like, there’s only one and that’s all you get.
A sample: https://www.whosampled.com/Radiohead/ (135 samples, 336 covers, 36 remixes listed)
But I also think, whether music gets dull, has more to do with ones consumption behavior than whether it is fresh or not. Do you have headphones on every waking hour, constantly being exposed to music no matter what you are doing, or do you deliberately take time out of the day to sit down and listen to a musical work and not do anything else.
Personally I do both to a degree. But while it is easy to find "good enough" music for the former listening mode, I find it extremely rare to find music, no matter the genre, new or old, able to fully capture my attention and emotions for extended periods of time. That are the works I value most highly and that never get dull.
I've learned over time that music I actually like I like forever. Music I'm infatuated with I eventually forget about and don't go back to listen after a while. I've been listening to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and a few others since middle school. Over time bands have been added to that list and always enjoy listening to. For example The Clash, Sex Pistols, Bright Eyes, Nas, Biggie, etc.
There is a lot of music I like for a while and is exciting, but doesn't make it onto my forever list. Others get added to that last.
Everyone is different though, enjoy music the way you enjoy. Live your own life.
I also listen to music for 8 hours a day so it's easy to burn out on things but I always come back to things I loved before eventually. Today feels like it's going to be a Built To Spill day.
This feels like an appeal to tradition or nostalgia. I'd argue you're attempting to create the mentality you had in middle school, not that you like it more or less than other music.
How weird would it be to tell someone who enjoys drinking chocolate milk that they don't actually like it because it reminds them of their school lunches.
where did I say anything about OP liking or not liking thing?
When I find something I really like, I most likely will enjoy it long after. I'll listen to it a lot when it is fresh, and then come back at it every now and then.
Just yesterday I had a listen to some of my trance/club CDs from around the 2000s[1][2]. Back then that was the kind of music I listened to all day err day, but these days not so much. But a few times a year I come back to enjoy it again.
> Bandcamp is great for this
Yeah love Bandcamp, their discover mixes are also quite nice. The variety, everything from heavy riffs[3] to otherwordly things like this[4]. And the artist actually gets most of the money, unlike with CDs or Spotify.
[1]: DJ Tiësto & DJ Montana - Space Age 2.0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED9yN7lkWpw
[2]: DJ Stein H - Connected Vol. 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsVLPQGqWZA
[3]: https://firebreatherdoom.bandcamp.com/album/under-a-blood-mo...
I hate to say it but the fact that great music is not that unique, and that we can easily consume it, makes it seem less meaningful. Maybe it's overconsumption and not breadth of music that does it.
I meant "new" music.
I have a lot of emotional/memory attachments to certain music - it ties in with a lot of specific events in life. Listening to those 'same old stuff' albums/songs can take me back to places when I want to reminisce. I can get some of the same feelings, even smells and tastes sometimes, with the 'same old stuff'.
Not all of those are 'old' like decades ago - I've got some stuff that I started digging in to just a few years ago which is now in my 'heavy rotation'.
Music can take you back to points in your life in a way that few things can.
People should always listen to new and old music, like books or movies/shows, sometimes repeated listens, viewings, or reads, can open up new aspects of the music, something you didn't see or hear before.
I find the same thing with foods as well. When I discover a new dish/restaurant I love, I will have it several times and relish in the new flavors/atmosphere. After a while, I still love and enjoy that dish/restaurant, but now the thrill has been replaced by a more comforting and familiar association with a fun night out.
Another example, growing up, I was only allowed to drink Coke when we ate out or went on picnics, or attended sporting events. As a result, as an adult, my brain made an association between drinking coke and having a good time.
This can happen at varying levels though, where all the unique 'we are all individuals' congregate and realise they're a subculture.
It completely distorts value / signal vs. noise over time and creates herd following behaviour.
Even youtube/google/alphabet realised this and eventually stopped recommending the same videos to everyone.
How many of us got exposed to PewDePie and the like because of the supposed wisdom/democracy/lowest common denominator etc. of the crowds?
We should cherish the moments we have when things like Bandcamp allow us high quality exposure to different things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEXZSzPpZqo
There's definitely still a place for radio-style DJs even if radio is basically dead.
This is my perspective. For me it's like watching people enjoy chewing glass. I am genuinely baffled that the experience isn't horribly painful for them.
This includes artists I loved beyond measure - the same artists that I can no longer stand because I've since heard them so. many. damn. times. (once they got added to every playlist in creation).
I believe it's reasonable to be repulsed by overplayed music. I'm somewhat puzzled why this would be controversial.
People have the tendency to outright deny than to try new things but if you think about it, it's just picking up patterns and how they make us feel.
And he was right (although I’m not totally over with that journey as I like listening to classic music, but I’m not completely into it)
Music is technical and cultural. You can always be true to your roots and stick with the heavy metal.
My favorite piano trio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e52IMaE-3As
As a fan of dissonance, I’m more listening to Stravinsky, but I also like some Dvorak (not sure to spell the name right). But I still think I’m not ready yet (despite being nearly 50)
Thanks for the link anyway !
Dvorak is a favorite of mine as well. I'm a fan of Dumky. I haven't listened to Stravinsky while knowing it was him, so I'll have a look!
Edit: listening to the soldiers tale of Stravinsky. It sounds like video game music that could almost be in a Zelda game.
It was ALL new to me. It was the early 90s at the time so that was all new to me, and all of the 80s music was relatively new to me. Everything before that was new to me. I had entire days to listen to all of it all the time: While I was on the train to / from school, while I was on lunch break at school, while I was on my paper route or eventually whatever other mindless teenage job I was doing, while I was failing miserably at understanding BASIC, while I was in my room drawing, writing, doing home work, or literally just sitting and listening to music - as a full-on activity.
And then the internet was just starting to get popular. Sure, it took an hour to download a wav file via modem, but it wasn't unheard of to download a few songs overnight (pre-mp3) from various sources. And then the next day we would talk about the new music, and I'd play it for my friends and they'd play what they found recently, and we'd talk some more, and then we'd head to the record store to find the best of it and more, and talk to people at the record store about it, and then pass it on to others and play the music at parties and so on.
I don't have anywhere near that much time on my hands now. I don't have that many people to talk about music with, nor do I have the time or inclination to talk about it with them.
I'm very fortunate to be working full-time right now, but I sure would love to take a couple months off to catch up on the last 10 years worth of music. It's pretty damn easy to be open to new music when you have the time to listen to everything and build a nuanced opinion.
On a completely related note, if I were a musician, I would do everything I can to release music far and wide right now. A lot of the world suddenly has nothing but time to consume music.
Gnoosic is a band recommender - a quick & dirty way to get a few new bands to check out (Google & DDG point right to it).
James Taylor Quarter just dropped a new album which is getting a lot of repeat plays here. Also the most recent (2019) album by Incognito is great too.
The Raven That Refused To Sing by Steven Wilson somehow merges jazz with prog rock quite effectively. An unusual pairing and not to everyone’s taste though.
As for vocal jazz, I’m a big fan of the relatively obscure Beady Belle. Latest album is good, personal favourites are Belvedere and debut album Home.
Well, as we age there tends to be an accumulation of experience, so it's also to be expected that it becomes more rare to come across a genuinely new experience in everyday life.
For me it has been the exact opposite, at least so far. When I was in my teens, electronic music was all I cared about, and stuff like Guns N' Roses, Nirvana and whatnot that the other kids were listening to was just crap.
As time went on I discovered I've shed my prejudice, and will listen to most things with an open mind. As such my collection now spans a lot of genres.
To get an idea, here are my most recent purchases off Bandcamp:
http://xirecords.bandcamp.com/album/celestial-fires
http://dakhabrakha.bandcamp.com/album/the-road
http://delvonlamarrorgantrio.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-kexp
http://okkotomusic.bandcamp.com/album/fear-the-veil-not-the-...
http://monolord.bandcamp.com/album/no-comfort
New music - as I age, most of the "new" music falls into a handful of categories: 1) Sounds like band/song from the past - in fact I get driven crazy by my brain's pattern recognition trying to remember where that melody is originally from. Or older favorite band/musician singing the same old thing. 2) Just another male emo voice. 3) Autotuned. It's like unrealistic movies with too much CGI. Nothing there once you take it away. 4) Instrumental/jazz/weird, will let it play through but very rare to add it to a playlist
But ultimately, it's 98% boring out there. I want to be wrong, but I don't think there is ever going to be another year like 1969 or 1991 where any one of 10 albums would have been album of the year any other year.
It was really refreshing when Guitar Hero came out and that generation fell in love with older music. I didn't have to yell get-off-my-lawn for a few of years.
Putting in a few unpopular artists that I like came up with a lot of related bands that I already know and like, plus double that number that I now need to add to my ever-growing music to-do list.
This seems to be powered by http://www.gnoosic.com/, is this the only source of data?
;)
I'm starting to feel that depending on users to provide explicit lists misses a lot of interesting data, unfortunately.
HypeMachine tracks the music being written about across thousands of blogs and still works for me as a great discovery / serendipity engine.
Tracks link to artists on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Spotify, the write-up that got them picked up by HypeM, and any work from the artist previously covered.
I usually listen by genre and pick those per the kind of work I’m doing. There are many genres. 98% of what I hear is new to me. I favorite and skip tracks and open especially tasty ones in new tabs for deeper-dives.
It’s always a pleasure to go back to my feed of favorites every few weeks. I revisit tracks i took time to explicitly like and have long uninterrupted sets to enjoy. This is usually when I do deeper dives and buy stuff on SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Looking at the map for Quiet Company yields a list of names that are mostly foreign to me that I'll be plowing through as I work.
Surprisingly, Youtube Music has pretty decent music discovery in the form of it's radio feature, sort of like Grooveshark.
I wish they would combine Google Music's functionality and organization with Youtube Music's discover-ability and expanded library.
[1] https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/tiktok-report-benees-supalone...
Tik Tok is an absolutely massive recent source of new music growth [0], Taylor Swift and Beiber are absolutely massive artists with almost unparalleled influence across multiple genres, their riding of new vibes throws off tsunami wave effects.
They’re doing their job, and doing it well, the effects of giving their first 10 in a decade to Fiona Apple’s new album for example, you’re just not the target.
0 - https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/tiktok-vid...
Don’t let that imply Drake isn’t even more influential though, man almost single handedly brought the sound of West Africa -> London onto American radio.
I mean... musical taste has its variations and I am cool with that but this is objectively an exaggeration.
This is all in terms of listeners and quantity, not taste and quality, in line with Pitchfork’s target moving.
And it’s definitely exaggerated, but mostly because Taylor Swift and Beiber were the slightly dated examples given. Nicely emblematic though.
Massive like Rick Astley? Hootie and the Blowfish? Your argument attributes artistic quality with an artist and their machine's size and reach. I'm sorry, but this doesn't justify critical notice or attention.
As for their influence - I'm at a loss for what you mean here. What genres are these two artists influencing - other than pop? Maaaybe hip-hop with their use of the millenial whoop [1] - but even that is a stretch.
> their riding of new vibes throws off tsunami wave effects.
This is what Madonna, MJ and basically every mainstream artist has done for eons - co-opting genres and trends to remain relevant (Kenny Rogers even did disco).
> you’re just not the target.
Thanks for the patronizing tone. As a DJ, signed artist and music nerd of more than 20 years, I think I understand a little about the nuances of this stuff. I actually used Aphex as I thought it may be relatable to a tech crowd, but I could have said a number of artists (new or old) from many different genres to make the point.
I didn’t mention or consider artistic quality in my comment, and didn’t mean to suggest popularity is quality.
This from the website that built an empire on discovering and promoting new music...
Is what I originally replied to, if “new music” implied quality music, than this is a miscommunication.
Maybe, fifty years from now, we'll look back on that first Taylor Swift album as world-changing. But I doubt it. Talented? Yes, remarkably so. But I don't hear a "Heroin" or "Venus in Furs" level change in the very nature of music there.
Same thing happened with Kanye by the way. In the 00s I (mostly) wouldn’t touch it, but it’s now clear it was highly influential, important music and I’ve begun to revisit it.
You're living in today, and there's music being released that touches on the common struggles we're all going through as human beings in today's world. If you wait 10 or 20 years to listen to modern music, you're purposely removing yourself from this conversation.
If music is just nice sounds to you, then that's totally fine, but for a lot us it's much, much more than that.
But even if I want to watch a tv show or read a book, I similarly want it to be something that is more important than just “well it came out yesterday so must be relevant”. If something can still be relevant a decade after it came out, that’s when you know it’s really good.
And for the record I love music. I’m a multi-instrumentalist, I’ve played professionally in weddings, bars, played buckets in a street performing band, and continue to study music, actively taking classical piano lessons, composing songs. I play every day.
> And for the record I love music. I’m a multi-instrumentalist, I’ve played professionally in weddings, bars, played buckets in a street performing band, and continue to study music, actively taking classical piano lessons, composing songs. I play every day.
This comment makes your perspective particularly strange. Do you only play covers? Have you ever tried writing your own music? If so, does that mean that you wouldn't listen to your own music until a decade after you wrote it? Because it's a bit hypocritical to only listen to music that is more than a decade old, and still expect people to give your new music a chance considering it hasn't stood the test of time.
Do you think Elvis would have ever had a chance to make a living off of his music if everyone was like you?
> anyone who prefers older music
You're not just saying you prefer older music though, you're saying you're not even giving new music a chance:
> It’s hard for me to justify giving modern music a chance when I haven’t even given the established greats a chance.
That's pretty absurd in my opinion.
I followed sites like pitchfork but today I'm just not interested. I started noticing that music on my hard drive would get bigger and bigger and I had no time to listen to all of the stuff I wanted.
I do have some moments where the spark lights up again. There was a recent live 12 CD The Rolling Thunder Revue that I gobbled up and learned a lot of lyrics automatically. Or the new Arctic Monkeys album, or Kendrick Lamar's butterfly.
What my conclusion from this is, I'll just let the Lindy effect filter all the good stuff and I'll come back to the music from decades ago when the time is right. A bunch of new music and new movies are just forgettable, even the critically acclaimed.
I guess I'll miss out on a lot of present culture but I really don't go around circles where present cultural references are mentioned regularily.
When edm and dubstep blew up I was always out at shows, festivals, random dj nights. Tried writing a lot of my own music, even had small release
Then idk I got my first job out of college around 24 and stopped searching or even listening. I only have music on in my car and like stuff from high school, concerts I go to are just bands from high school
I think part of it is there is no scene for music any more? Or I'm so out of touch. But bands used to be big on the radio, but there's so many release sources. there's no filter anymore. Everyone used to listen to the radio. Now everyone's Spotify is custom and completely different
I think it's just how our brains change. When we're in our late teens, striking out into the world everything is new and full of possibilities. We hoover up new experiences and crave novelty as we find our place in the world. But later on in life that's no longer necessary - we enter stable survival mode instead.
I think evolutionary biology can explain a lot of this (the same happened to me too btw).
E.g.: https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/is-14-a-magic-... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opinion/sunday/favorite-s...
I think the book "This Is Your Brain on Music" also talks about it, but I haven't read it yet. https://www.amazon.com/This-Your-Brain-Music-Obsession/dp/04...
I have never dug deeper on it, but it rings very true for my own case and friends I talked with about it. To the music that awed me when I was a teenager, most intensely so Scandinavian melodic death metal, I still to this day have a stronger emotional reaction than anything I listen to before or after that period of my life. Even tough I don't listen to those songs anymore that often and there are plenty of modern songs in similar styles that I do think are better in many aspects, that just don't have the same goosebumps effect anymore.
And I think the main difference here is me, not the music that has changed, that has gotten better or worse.
There are plenty of music scenes, but I do think they are not as big and influential on overall youth culture anymore.
What subcultures revolve around changes over time and we might have had an oddity in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s were the subject was primarily the music genres that evolved during that time? When I was a teenager, pretty much everyone that was in a scene, associated themselves strongly to one music genre with basically no overlap. You were either into Techno, Metal, Hip Hop, Goth or Punk and the life/fashion styles that come with it.
But when I asked my mother, who was a teenager partying hard in the 60s/70s when bands definitely were big on the radio, what the subcultures revolved around, from her perspective it wasn't music, but political and socio-economical stances. For example hippies: Music definitively played a big role in that scene and many iconic songs came from it, but it was not the main thing the scene was about.
And I think it could be the same thing these days. Music is still important to people and evokes a lot of emotions, but it is not the main thing the youth cultures are build around.
> There are plenty of music scenes, but I do think they are not as big and influential on overall youth culture anymore.
I think what changed is that gate-keeper, hyper-promoted acts don't hook as much of the youth as they once did.
We have this one local music festival that's made up of hundreds of acts playing in dozens of small venues. The audience is huge but it's dispersed over 10 city blocks so you don't really get that crushing mob feel.
I find production and sound design are a good space to innovate in, while letting recognizable melodies, scales and rhythms keep everything digestible.
There's no real need to always seek new music, obsessively, unless you particularly enjoy to (or you have business reasons). You're not a bad person, or more shallow, or lesser art lover, for not doing so (in fact many very deep creators of art had a very limited set of artists and works they liked).
Having a set of songs, artists etc that speak to you, and you have grown into -- what most people do --, can be even deeper than endless "crate digging" and collection/consumption approach to music...
If you like something, there's nothing wrong with enjoying it again. It doesn't mean you should limit yourself to the things you know. Once in a while you find something that's better than anything you've encountered before.
Yeah, you can find something new you like, but that doesn't mean that you necessarily have to be looking for it, especially not obsessively.
I strongly disagree, although I would say it is completely a matter of personal preference, so I'm really only disagreeing for myself. I'll admit I'm somewhere in the middle between the 2 ends of the spectrum you describe, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the endless crate diggers as "less deep" as other listeners. Sounds like a personal bias to me.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with repeatedly returning to old stuff you like. But I don't see how people can be satisfied doing nothing but that. Fantastic new art is being created all the time, and the amount of people creating art is also increasing all the time.
The point of endless digging is to try to find other stuff that you may end up liking as much as, or perhaps even more than, the older stuff. It's not simply to consume for its own sake: it's to discover things you otherwise might be missing out on and would be thankful you found. How can you even know if that'll happen or not if you aren't exposed to lots of new things?
Also, what does it even mean to "endlessly collect" music in the modern day? You just listen to stuff you haven't heard and turn it off if you don't like it and save it to a playlist/favorites list if you do like it. There's no cost to trying albums you haven't heard before, like there was in the past. If you do really want a physical copy for whatever reason, it's easy to listen online first and decide whether or not you should get the physical copy.
This seems akin to lamenting that people are "endlessly collecting" new shows, films, and documentaries by browsing Netflix.
Indeed, why?
Sure, the same argument applies, but that seems to be a feature rather than a bug. There's no need to obsessively seek out new movies or TV shows, unless you particularly enjoy doing that.
I like discovering new music. Very few people in my circle of friends like the music I choose to listen to. I think I have a specific pathway to how I got here:
I wasn't into Faith No More, I didn't like Epic at the time it was a hit, until I heard Midlife Crisis. That song blew my young teenaged mind. Cue the Angel Dust album and the weird, beautiful, jagged aural landscape it created. I researched Faith No More for their history, found The Real Thing, the song in particular but also the album are both highlights. Where my journey forks way off the known track is where my research came across Mike Patton's previous / parallel band: Mr. Bungle.
I found their first full-length album (self-titled, Mr. Bungle) on tape, and bought it. Holy fucking shit it was a chaotic mess of who-the-fuck-knows, what even is this? It's musical instruments, but they're being, I don't know, just bashed at incomprehensibly. I paid a hard-earned $25 for that tape though, so I was determined to get my moneys worth out of it, so I listened and listened and kept listening (I didn't have a huge catalogue of other music) and I eventually "got it". In the end you'll find patterns in the chaos because it is, after all, music; composed, designed, written, planned. It's up to the listener to put in the effort.
Mr. Bungle was the gateway drug that opened my mind to the joys to be found in complex, difficult, and original music, and part of my personality, how people know who I am, is defined by my obscure tastes and knowledge of music that's forever hidden only just under the surface of mainstream popularity (I'm by no means very deeply knowledgeable).
I get great joy finding new music that I like, and I'm always surprised when I find something new to me, but not new to the world, and wonder how I'd missed it all these years when it's exactly the kind of thing I would like.
My source of new music is pretty much exclusively ThreeD radio[0] a local independent, volunteer-run and listener-funded station in little ol' Adelaide, South Australia. There's a lot of gravel, but there are diamonds hidden amongst it.
[0]: https://www.threedradio.com/
Edited to add: I've only listened to Trout Mask Replica twice, so I'm a good five listen-throughs away from any semblance of understanding of that musical masterpiece.
But after like a few months when our brains come back to “normal” stage again, the music seems to get back to usual
I’ve also found that I enjoy digging into older music And genres I would have never considered when I was younger. Robert Johnson is about as primitive as can be but it truely is fantastic blues, a genre I never much cared for. Or finding different folk music from way back, or genres like Bluegrass and their fast picking guitar legends like Norman Blake.
So yeah it’s not new music but it’s new to me. But what I wouldn’t give to hear what Kurt Cobain would be making today if he were still alive.
Hearing Robert Johnson singing about squeezing his lemon and quipping (yeah that’s what I’m talking about) is pretty funny. Or Hank Williams just reminiscing about going out, getting loaded with his girl, grabbing some after bar food, and causing a ruckus everywhere they go.
These are popular themes in pop music of today.
That said, there really should be a recommendation service focused on small but active artists. I hate that spotify etc is turning music into an on-demand commodity rather than a socioculture art form. For the interested, music journo Liz Pelly has a lot of good pieces on this topic.
Listening to the music you know and love is like carbohydrates, discovering new stuff is the protein(the meat).
That doesn't change that you and Henry are absolutely correct, tho.
Oooh here we go. What music have you listened to? Popular music or the very long tail of new artists and bands that are now able to produce and release good music from their home without the big publishers (although spotify, soundcloud, apple music etc are now the big publishers).
Because I personally disagree. I'm more into metal myself and I dig a lot of the stuff that came out after 2000. New genres and subgenres have popped up or come into their strength (folk, djent, synthwave, etc). I'm listening to a varied playlist right now of skillful musicianship, most of which from after 2010: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2h4EoZIoRbUAJnHlHE1eHM?si=...
Anyway I object to a statement "this is utter crap"; you're presenting your personal opinion as a hard fact which is a big part of everything that is wrong today.
That is how you interpret my personal opinion, I never said if things are wrong today, I just stated that today's new music is utter crap in my opinion. There is a lot of good music played by nowadays musicians.
I have no problem with you disagreeing with my personal opinion, but I do have a problem with you telling that I imply other things than I am telling.
>"this is utter crap", I never said that, there is a difference between "I think" and "This is", Don't twist my words, you are being dishonest in this conversation for doing that.
This statement is easy to react to and argue against. I almost did. But it’s true. The same is true for music from 1900-1920, or any era.
The difference is we have a record of all that “utter crap” now, and it’s ever present. If you want to find some old music that is crap, go to a consignment store and pick out some random $0.50 records. You can’t find baroque “utter crap” because who would bother to hand-copy the music notation for music of that quality?
Also, time will filter out the great works.
Digging for new music can help keep stuff alive that deserves to stand the test of time. It just takes more work than some people want to do, which is fine. Keep digging up cool computer science topics, so I can go to hacker news rather than sift through all the “utter crap” out there.
They still listen to the radio more and then complain about the adverts.
I'm a dad to 5 & this is what I always expected from my generation. I never understood it either, not now or then.
I've found most of a hundred new artists in just the last year. There's unimaginably more music available, than when I was young. It's practically a golden age.
Is this just how old people become boring or caricatures of themselves?
Perhaps this is my own personal experience but it’s hard to adapt to something new when the rush of nostalgia when listening to old jams is so satisfying. You “fall in love” with the same albums and songs all over.
It's harder if getting familiar with a piece of music also makes it boring to you for a while.
I enjoy threads like [1], [2] about strategies for discovering new music.
I was just discussing this with my sister, my lack of nostalgia for old favorites.
What I feel is more like the opposite, it's repulsion to overplayed music. As in - I sometimes leave a store when I can't handle Clear Channel music playing overhead. The 5 bazillionth hearing of "Tears in Heaven" or of any artist beginning with 'Sir' triggers a fight or flight response.
I'm not overstating my case when I claim that (for me), listening to overplayed music is indistinguishable from abuse. Even the artists that I adored in my teens/20 are becoming unlistenable. David Bowie was the most recent to go. Pink Floyd is close behind.
If music is medicine, it's all Fentanyl by the time Clear Channel gets done with it.
It makes me continually grateful for all the access we have to new artists.
- - - - -
PS: The Beatles catalog is just a preschool songbook now. Fight me.
Obviously not all Beatles songs are like that and the musical difference between McCartney and Lennon was one of the biggest contributors to their breakup, but yeah... a lot of their music today is treated as inoffensive background noise for grocery stores and elevators.
It feels like being force-fed doughnuts.
* films
* jokes
* stories
* news
* documentaries
Music is unusual in how much we _don't_ seek out new items.
I opine that any song can be weaponized thru overplaying.
This may be an unpopular opinion.