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Comment by mattkevan | Hacker News Reader

Listening to new music is one of my favourite activities. Don't understand how people are happy to listen to the same old stuff - it must get so dull.

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.

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> Don't understand how people are happy to listen to the same old stuff

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'.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

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 am exactly like this as well. Some days I am just in the mood to listen to 'old' music. Music I listened to growing up. Other days, I crave something new.

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 After a while, I still love and enjoy that dish/restaurant, but now the thrill has been replaced by a more comforting and familiar association with a fun night out.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.

>Don't understand how people are happy to listen to the same old stuff - it must get so 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 rarely 'fall out of love' with music I discover but I do have to take a break every once in a while. I spend most of my time listening to new indie releases or genres of the past that I haven't explored before, but then I'll get to urge to just listen to Sgt. Pepper's front to back or something. I find that when I take a break and come back to music I've listened to for years I get a bit of a nostalgia rush for the time when I first heard it. I also start to notice and appreciate parts that I may not have picked up on first listen when I can come back with a fresh mindset.

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.

>I've been listening to...since middle school

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.

But music is art! Any reason for liking it is perfectly valid.

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.

>How weird would it be to tell someone...they don't actually like it

where did I say anything about OP liking or not liking thing?

If all of their "forever" music dated back to middle school you might have a point but they say the list has grown over time.

> Don't understand how people are happy to listen to the same old stuff - it must get so dull.

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.

Nope, you are fully missing out on the advances of music production. The sounds producers can create nowdays were not available in 18th century, not even in the 80s. If you consider as music only what you can write down as sheet music you are missing out on so much. Thats why finding new artists, who can make unique sounds, not just melodies, is so rewarding.

> not even in the 80s

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=PXX4PdW7dLM

The Italians were also doing some amazing things in the 60's and 70's with electronic synthesizers and keyboards that made/make sounds that still can't be recreated.

This sounds like an interesting quarantine challenge. Do you have any examples of sounds that haven't been recreated? Giorgio Moroder or Kraftwerk come to mind...

Sensation's Fix comes to mind.

Or you could just listen to Depeche Mode [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKHxp6VwwGY&list=PLiN-7mukU_...

I used to think this way too. "How could the Beatles possibly still be relevant? There's been 50 years of progress since then! You wouldn't buy a PC from the 60s, why listen to music from the 60s?"

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.

"The Beatles have yet to be beaten in pop music"

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).

I think there's another difference too, which is the intense practice. Long before they became famous, the Beatles were working musicians, performing live many hours a day for years. (And "many hours" was further expanded through the use of performance-enhancing drugs which would be more strictly regulated nowadays.)

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.

it was certainly a lot, but... it wasn't quite as much as myth seems to have it built up to. Mark Lewisohn's "Tune In" does a great job of cataloging all the early year work/practice. There were sporadic months where they didn't play much at all.

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...

Totally agree- I also think that the Beatles did a great job of changing and staying the same. They would change their styles but still have the familiar great harmonies/melodies. To add to your point, each of them had at least somewhat of a producers ear and probably one of the best producers/engineers ever to help them realize their vision.

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.

Something else that seems relatively foreign from a lot of 'modern' music today (of most genres) is that the entire unit stayed together for... 90%+ of their career. Beatles/Martin @ Abbey Road comprises most of their output, with some engineer changes here and there, and a bit recorded at other studios.

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.

You do have a blind spot. It's not just about progress, "better pop" or "better music".

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.

Thanks for the interesting comment.

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.)

I just gotta bite. You don't have to listen to it. But: "risk of hearing junk music" ?. If you are smart enough to know the difference you can just skip the track. However it seems you absolutely rely on external validation.

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.

Thanks, I appreciate your well-thought-out response. Re "you can just skip the track", I've found that often a new kind of music will initially not sound good to me, but if I force myself to listen to it a bunch, eventually it'll "click" and I'll love it. I think if I just chose music based on what sounds good to me, I'd end up always listening to variations of the same basic kind of music.

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?

>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.

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.

I don't think that's what they are saying. Even if he is still the best, there is interest to be found in music past Bach. Otherwise, why did anyone bother continuing to make music?

> Nope, you are fully missing out on the advances of music production.

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.

> Listening to new music is one of my favourite activities

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 :)

[0] https://beatportcharts.com/search/advanced/

A fellow house head! I must ask, are you a fan of any specific house mixes? I find that, while I do love standalone tracks, there's something absolutely ethereal about a well mixed house set, where the tracks are perfectly mixed and organically bleed into each other. On Youtube, I'm a fan of Johnny M's mixes for deep house. I've never heard of BeatportCharts, so I'll definitely check that out, thanks for the recommendation!

A few months ago a coworker introduced me to the Cercle channel on YouTube [0]. If you look through their top videos [1] I'm sure you'll find a lot of sets that you like!

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...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/user/brtvofficial

Not the person you responded to but this is a nice mix from The Kais on Soundcloud.

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.

Soundcloud's great for finding new music, too; I have currently 1842 tracks and mixes that I liked over there.

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 :)

[0] http://mixcloud.com

I agree with this. We're in a golden age of access to small and/or unsigned artists who don't need to be in the top 20s to get their name out there any more.

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.

> Don't understand how people are happy to listen to the same old stuff - it must get so dull.

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.

> Don't understand how people are happy to listen to the same old stuff

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...

[4]: https://dakhabrakha.bandcamp.com/album/the-road

I listen to the same music to invoke certain states.

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.

Even though we appreciate it, the suggestion systems indirectly create a self-similarity of tastes amongst users.

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.

It's funny how lots of people, including myself, get kinda stuck into a set of music. I do go out and try to find new music, but not nearly as much as other forms of media. I don't reread books that much, mostly watch films I haven't seen, play games I haven't played and largely watch new TV series.

I spend significant time looking for new music and exploring genres and regions new to me. I love doing that and sharing discoveries with friends.

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.

A lot of great music is in the back catalogue.Google music has a good catalogue for example include possibly all of the curated Grateful Dead recordings like the Dave's Picks, and Dick's Picks. Enough content for a lifetime. To find new music rather than seek out new artists, a more promising avenue might be to look into the past, there so much of great work which has fallen into obscurity.

That is a good thing about streaming platforms - their libraries have depth.

It's fun to pick an artist and listen to their entire catalogue, start to finish, over a couple of days.

I love new music but I'm also at the point where I'm overwhelmed by it. There's so much interesting music out there I could never keep up.

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.

It's the opposite for me! I hate listening old music. E.g. The Strokes (one of my favorite bands) released a new album last week. It was a pain to listen to it a few times, but I forced myself to do it since I knew after listening to >3 times I'll get hooked. Then, I listened to it every day this week!

> I hate listening old music.

I meant "new" music.

I do both, old stuff and new stuff depending on the mood. Lately I've been exploring some genres I didn't even know existed like medieval speed folk (Perkelt is a group I like) and Dungeon Synth (Fief is my favorite so far).

In a recent thread somebody mentioned the My Analog Journal YouTube channel called and I've found so many great things through there. I had no idea that Japanese funk was a thing until listening to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEXZSzPpZqo

There's definitely still a place for radio-style DJs even if radio is basically dead.

If you have Spotify check out JQBX (https://www.jqbx.fm) it's a great way to discover new music.

A Beethoven Sonata is always new music each time you listen carefully or play it for yourself. It depends on the quality and richness of music. Fastfood music wears off quite fast. It is made for the trash, so the industriy can sell more trash. Bach wrote music for god, as he wrote.

There’s plenty of pop and pop-adjacent music out there that has depth, complexity, and holds up well to repeat intense listening. Radiohead, Flaming Lips, most of El-P’s work.

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.

I get your point but maybe not the best example, as Radiohead has been covered and remixed innumerable times...

A sample: https://www.whosampled.com/Radiohead/ (135 samples, 336 covers, 36 remixes listed)

> Don't understand how people are happy to listen to the same old stuff - it must get so dull.

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.

I highly doubt you're actually "genuinely baffled" about why people re-listen to music they love. Why the hyperbole?

I am genuinely baffled because - from my perspective - any song becomes painful to hear after enough listens.

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.

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