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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

This is part of why I hate TikTok so much.

I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music.

A lot of time when I do the autoplay of YouTube Music, if I don't like the song in the first 15-20 seconds, I skip it to something else. I eventually realized that a lot of songs that I end up really liking require you listening to the entire song to come together. The inability to skip to the next song on SiriusXM forces me to listen to the song, and I've found a ton of songs that I likely would have otherwise skipped with anything else.

I feel like with TikTok, we're effectively training ourselves to ignore things that don't immediately grab our attention.

Maybe this is just my "Old Man Yells At Cloud" moment though.

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Check out KEXP and SomaFM. KEXP in particular is a great way to discover new music that you might not normally listen to.

https://www.kexp.org/

https://somafm.com/

I'd say streaming radio in general is low profile in how it lets you discover new things. I use the search/directory built into foobar2000 or apps like radiodroid, but there are sites like https://www.radio-browser.info/ for the web. It's an interesting and low cost way to find things you wouldn't otherwise be exposed to and likely curated by whoever is running the station. What really stood out to me is how different countries or regions have their own tastes, or at least are likely to be playing something different to local broadcasts.

The problem I have with streaming radio is that it seems to be caught rehashing rather than discovering.

For example, I like SOMA's Underground 80s, but I also want to hear new artists in the same vein. I haven't found any streaming stations that are actively good at curating like this.

Where are the streaming stations that play Smiths and Smithereens but also play Blossoms and Johnny Marr's new stuff, for example?

Yeah, that's why I specifically called out KEXP for this, as they do lots of live shows, themed segments, etc, that really do enable discovery.

Unfortunately you're quite right about Soma (and probably other streaming radio) - but I imagine licensing new music can be difficult/expensive.

Also adding Radio Paradise, apparently one of the first online radios (https://radioparadise.com/). That said, it does have a skip (and pause) mechanism, so if you really don't like something you can skip to the next one.

I went back to CDs because the friction of having to stand up, walk to the player and change the disc is enough to stop me from skipping songs every few seconds.

For discovering new music, I go to the flea market every so often and buy some random discs. Some are unlistenable, but a lot are alright. I found New Mind[1] this way and really loved it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Sharp#New_Mind

This is part of why I like vinyl, you can't even really choose a track, you just listen. (the other part is that my vinyl collection is about 80% from my parents, and its just cool personally to have the same physical copy of the media that they did)

Also, many libraries still have CD collections. In the pre-iphone days I used to max out my library account getting CDs, rip/copy the ones I liked, and repeat.

> This is part of why I like vinyl, you can't even really choose a track, you just listen.

It is a tad harder on a player without a [working] soft-lower mechanism, but still 100% doable as track boundaries are clearly visible on the surface of the vinyl.

Yes, there are workarounds, but very few people are going to queue up a specific track instead of just listening to the entire side.

> I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music.

No, I think you're right.

I'm old enough to have swapped pirated cassettes of whatever was doing the rounds in high school. I remain convinced that Appetite for Destruction can only be listened to the way it was intended to be heard, if it's been copied onto a ratty old TDK D90 that's been getting bashed around in your schoolbag for months by your mate's big brother who has the CD and a decent stereo.

There's a lot of stuff I listened to that I probably wouldn't have if I'd had the selection that's available on streaming services. When you got a new tape, that was Your New Tape, and you listened to it over and over because you hadn't heard it a thousand times yet. Don't like it? Meh, play it anyway, because you haven't heard it a thousand times yet.

I got into so much music that's remained important to me because of a chance tape swap.

Maybe Spotify et al needs instead of unskippable adverts, unskippable tunes that are way outside your usual range of tastes. "Here have some 10,000 Maniacs before you go back to that R'n'B playlist!"

Yeah, similar for me; when I was a teenager I would buy a CD specifically I liked a single on the radio and put it in my car. I would be too lazy to take it out and listen to something else, so I'd listen to that CD dozens and dozens of times, and I would grow to appreciate the non-single songs a lot, very often more than the song I even bought the CD for.

The non-singles are generally a lot less "radio-friendly", almost by definition, so a lot of artists were more willing to try stuff that is a little less immediately-appealing, and there are a bunch of albums I have basically memorized now because of that.

With Spotify and YouTube Music, there's an infinite number of songs to choose from and as a result you never have the same excuse to listen to the same songs over and over again. I'm not necessarily saying it's "worse", just that I miss the way it used to be.

Now there’s an idea. You could get artists to pay for ads just like other advertisers, and instead of hearing an ad for a product that takes you completely out of music mode, you have to listen to a whole song (or the first minute, or whatever) that’s maybe a little outside your usual mix.

Everything old is new again. This is called Payola and it's illegal in the radio industry.

> less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music

For the same reason (plus curiosity of what people are listening to in weird places) I recently switched to Radio Garden [0], highly recommend it (not affiliated)

[0] https://radio.garden

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