Comment by oarabbus_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oarabbus_ | Hacker News Reader

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I completely agree with your poignant "getting to know an album" statement, but I fundamentally disagree with your general point of your issues with streaming; I think it's a boon to have such a wide selection of music at your fingertips. An asymptotically infinite, for practical purposes, amount of music.

That being said, I really appreciate your perspective, and everything you said about physical media, the radio, torrent services, and ultimately limitations to music selection, is all absolutely true and completely resonates, even if I prefer the modern "more music than you could care about" availability.

It somewhat saddens me that anyone under the age of 25 (this is arbitrary, maybe a few years younger) never experienced the sensation of really getting to know every song of an album by an artist who's album you purchased, _even the songs you didn't like_. This really can't be emphasized enough. The younger generation has no concept of listening to a song you "don't like" 50 times, simply because you listened to the album you purchased 100 times.

It's like actually getting to know a friend extremely well that you've spent countless days with, vs. an acquaintance whom you always have a blast with but only meet at parties once every couple months.

> The younger generation has no concept of listening to a song you "don't like" 50 times, simply because you listened to the album you purchased 100 times.

I'm not below the age of 25 but this seems like a really archaic statement. This is basically equivalent to "Kids these days have no idea what it means to have to watch commercials and shows you didn't want to watch to get to that show you were really looking forward to."

The statement is not archaic. It is an inevitable consequence of technological progression. Your comparison between advertising commercials and songs of a favorite band is a very poor comparison and doesn't make any sense. It makes as much sense as comparing your favorite beer to having to split a bill at a restaurant i.e. a completely invalid comparison.

It would be more like saying "kids these days have no idea about waiting for a dial-up modem" which would be true.

Or the prior generation saying "kids these days have no idea about the excitement of having a pen pal and waiting weeks for a response" which would also be true.

Or saying kids these days don't know the sense of accomplishment of being adept at reading a map. Also true.

Or kids these days don't appreciate having to memorize a friend's number and having to speak to their friend's mom first. Also true.

Or kids don't appreciate how when you used to travel to a foreign country for vacation, you were 100% gone and unreachable from your contacts back home. Also true.

Every generation feels this way. I don't see why anyone should get upset at this truth.

There was a comment here a few months ago about a person bringing their young child to visit somebody in the hospital.

The patient had a TV in their room, so they handed the child the TV remote, and the child asked how can they fast-forward the current show.

But what's the harm in this? Before DVRs there were plenty of times when I was interested in watching TV but nothing interesting was on. This wasn't some well of untapped discovery to be cherished. It was just 2pm and all that was on was soap operas.

A remote. How high tech. And I assume the TV was in color too. Kids these days are so spoiled. :-)

I didn't read it as a criticism so much as an observation. Maybe a medium is the message sort of thing. And going back pre-CD it would often be the case that you'd get very familiar with one side of a record because there was nothing on the other side you especially cared for.

I do think the act of buying (or taping) albums is a fundamentally different experience than using streaming services for the most part. I infrequently listen to entire albums these days. I'm much more likely to listen to some mix of either my own library or an Apple playlist.

> This really can't be emphasized enough. The younger generation has no concept of listening to a song you "don't like" 50 times, simply because you listened to the album you purchased 100 times.

Not necessarily true. When Spotify reaches the end of one of my playlists, it automatically starts playing a radio of "recommended songs" based on the playlist. However, these recommended songs are usually the same, with only minor changes over time.

As a consequence, I can think of several songs that I don't like that I have listened to more than 50 times, simply because they tend to be the among the first recommended songs to play when I've finished one of my regular playlists.

You can turn this off in the settings, it's called Autoplay.

I know, but I don't dislike the feature in general - I've discovered several songs this way.

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