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.
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.)
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.
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 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.
Perhaps there is, if you pardon the expression, a spectrum of receptiveness.
I'm thinking there's something to your speculation, though.
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.
-- the recommendation algorithm
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?
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.
Maybe. But then you get t-swizzle teenagers with turntables who rediscover the idea of sitting and listening to an album.
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.
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'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...
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.
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.
The guitarist for RHCP is making the best modern IDM.
The song Party Dozen by the band Party Dozen.
Follow rabbit hole from there.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
You could do this with almost any genre, I suspect.
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.