I'm convinced it's not that we stagnate in our ability to like new things, it's just that we stop exposing ourselves to it, and it's reinforced by the algorithms focusing on stuff we do like when we rely on them for recommendations.
If you purposefully seek out exposure to new things, you'll find stuff you like, regardless of age. I have a friend that brings me along to all sorts of concerts that are well out of the wheelhouse of what I listened to as a kid, or even 5-10 years ago. I frequently get home and purchase their full discography the next day. There are subgenres of the broader genres I like that are quite different from what I am used to, and I keep an eye out for new ones - I've long been into various types of metal, but it was the Judas Priests, Iron Maidens, Megadeths, Slayers that dominated my teenage years. In my 20s it was power metal and then death metal and black metal. In my early 30s, it was prog metal. Now I'm listening to a ton of math-y stuff and djent. I have had many detours into jazz and blues, electronic music, and every now and then very mainstream pop artists make their way into my collection.
I don't think I'm wired in some special way that lets me keep liking new things, it's just that I seek them out when I know a lot of people my age just don't.
Music as an art form is simply not that important to a lot of people. It's more a mood drug. And you're right about the algorithms. In general, the algorithms are judged by the amount of listening that occurs because of them. It's a poor metric for user happiness, but it's what gets used. And in an A/B test, the one that plays familiar tunes is going to win over one that plays challenging tunes.
The more novel the thing is, the more likely it is that you won't like it. I can tell if I'm truly exposing myself to new music by how often I hear a song and say "Yeah, that's just not for me." It makes sense that by the time one is in their 30s they say "I have 1000 songs I know I like, why do I need to look for more songs, many of which I won't like"
Which is basically a long winded way of responding to:
> I don't think I'm wired in some special way that lets me keep liking new things, it's just that I seek them out when I know a lot of people my age just don't.
With:
There's a non-zero cost to seeking out new things, so the "special way you are wired" involves considering that cost to be worth it.
The useful metric with these sorts of things is to ask yourself, when was the last time you tried something that you didn't like?
For expensive experiences, say, going to the theatre, it's hard to see shows you don't think you are going to like, as the price pressure makes you choose 'safe bets' as the cost/reward is somewhat weighted in one direction.
For something like music, the above used to be the case, as typically we find our tribe in our early teens, and money is tight so again, you buy what you know you are going to like.
I imagine though that streaming may change this, since you can dive into just about anything. We really need music search which follows more interesting routes through content rather than just 'people who like this also like' or 'here's another album by someone you already listen to'.
I'm lucky, my musical taste has always been broad, and if anything, it's got broader as i've got older. I do find myself reaching for older stuff that i've not heard for a while rather than new music, so when I catch myself doing this too much, the 'i've not heard something I don't like' alarm goes off, and I track down something that a session player I like has played on that i've never heard before, and try and find something new.
I think it is the reverse. 20-30 years ago, you'd listen to radio or MTV a lot more. They would introduce you to music outside "your tribe" of virtue of having to play a little bit of every genre that's popular.
Back then, I'd say investing in a album was always safe, not because you went to the record store and asked for a new rock album, because you had heard 1 or 2 singles (unwillingly) and read a review (willingly)
Now, you can just ask the algorithm to play "something I like".
>We really need music search which follows more interesting routes through content rather than just 'people who like this also like' or 'here's another album by someone you already listen to'.
I wish we had something like /mu/ flowcharts[1] but in a more general way. So after playing a song you can get a question or a prompt of what you liked and get some suggestion based on the input.
But IMO, music recommendation peaked 10 years ago with Last.fm and it's only been downhill since then, which is a shame because we had a lot of cool music in the last years, but the exploration is getting harder. But who knows, maybe I'm just getting old and I don't hang around the hip places anymore.
I started with a very narrow taste as a teen: pretty much just metal, and mostly just black & death.
But it grew broader over time, so that's possible. Now I might dig pretty much any kind of music.
I feel like trying to understand new types of music has an effect beyond just getting familiar with them: brain adapts to process a broader range of stimuli, so that also helps to understand other unrelated genres in future.
I experienced biggest change with Autechre: it was rather difficult to listen to (and I specifically took it as a challenge), but after Autechre I can listen anything :)
And in teens I had to listen something at least 5 times to start enjoying it. Now I can dig it right away. So it feels like brain processes music differently now
>> We really need music search which follows more interesting routes through content rather than just 'people who like this also like' or 'here's another album by someone you already listen to'.
For me almost all of the music I discover is through the personal recommendations or AMVs (are they still called AMVs if they aren't anime related?) or video memes.
Finding new music is easier if people aren't penalized for using it in their own artistic pursuit. [[placeholder for a rant about current implementations of copyright laws being stuffling for artists. There are a lot of those out there, so pick any rant you are comfortable with]]
All artistic works categories should intertwine more, imo. But that's hard when we have one site for music, another for art, and another for video. Social networks like facebook or twitter almost solved it (although, I prefer to think that blogging platforms like tumblr or myspace solved it better).
Common creatives is a very good license for this very reason (relatively easy artistic borrowing), and we should propagandize it more.
That's to say, many people have no good reason to engage with new anymore, having found the stuff that they like and other things they prefer doing.
Which is cosmic, in my opinion.
Not only they do what they like to do listening to the things they like, but also if everyone was always seeking out the newest thing, it would be a neck-breathing horse race between artists.
> We really need music search which follows more interesting routes through content rather than just 'people who like this also like' or 'here's another album by someone you already listen to'.
I agree with this so much. We've had about a decade of this kind of robo-curation in every single aspect of our media consumption. Read books like the ones you like, listen to bands like the ones you listen to, more videos like this one, etc. I'm so sick of it.
The way to branch out of your rut is other people. Some band I'd never have listened to, and if I accidentally had, would have skipped it 30 seconds in, have become my favorites simply because someone I had a connection with played it or recommended it. Movies I wouldn't have picked, but watched with someone else, are often better than anything I'd have picked based on my past preferences.
These days, more and more, I am realizing how rewarding it is to read a book or try a new restaurant based on nothing except that a friend with completely different taste likes it. If it turns out to be a dud, it's worth it for when I find something completely new that I do like.
> The useful metric with these sorts of things is to ask yourself, when was the last time you tried something that you didn't like?
100% the case. I keep telling my kids that, but they don't seem to get it.
> I imagine though that streaming may change this, since you can dive into just about anything. We really need music search which follows more interesting routes through content rather than just 'people who like this also like' or 'here's another album by someone you already listen to'.
So much so. Spotify became really popular when I was in my 30s and I tried it, listening to the "Discover weekly" for about 6 months. It was 10 weeks before I heard a track I had not heard before and the closest it came to playing an artist I hadn't heard before was a track from a 1-album super-group with two frontmen I was familiar with from their other groups.
Doing the math: I didn't play the list religiously so figure about 20 weeks worth of songs would be 600 songs. I had heard over 80% of the songs before. I had heard nearly all of the artists before. It played a single digit number of songs that I didn't like. If I'm liking 99% of what I'm hearing, something is wrong.
One problem I've run into with the music services is with older styles. For example, I'm specifically into black musicians from the 1930s-1950s who played swing style music. I have yet to find a service that actually will play more than 2-3 songs in that style before deciding that what I really want to hear is rat pack or swing by white musicians. No matter how much I thumbs down it, I get Glenn Miller/Frank Sinatra/Benny Goodman instead of Count Basie/Duke Ellington/Slim Gaillard. The services have that music (I can find the songs and seed stations from it) but for whatever reason all of the ones I've tried (Spotify/Apple/Amazon/Pandora, and I have a feeling I've tried others and forgotten) just don't want me to listen to the style I'm looking for.
The technical reason for this is just that the algorithm fails to distinguish between these two groups. Probably its just a hard problem to solve from a sample of what people listen to. I suspect a significant fraction of people that like black swing also like white swing and that results in the algorithm being unable to resolve that there are two features there and not one.
You really need a level of manual curation that a big data statistical model just can't provided at scale.
The other replies are interpreting this as the algorithm failing, but I have interpreted these sorts of things as intentional design choices, wherein they want the recommender to keep trying to diversify your interests so it's harder for you to just quit the service and move to another one which might not have the same variety (or where you'd have to try to "teach" the recommender again). They've determined that the potential benefit is much better than somewhat annoying you.
This interpretation of their behavior is why I've stuck to buying my music (fortunately that's still common for the genres I'm into).
I encounter similar behaviour as you in an entirely different genre - I've long since suspected that Spotify keeps redirecting me back to songs that are either less royalties for them to play, or located closer to me on the CDN to save serving costs.
You're probably wishing for a community playlist with people pitching in songs as they discover them ?
Would be great to have options to add stuff but keep it private while keeping in sync etc. Could be done with a meta layer on top of the Spotify player for instance ?
I’d guess it’s just because the algorithm is not smart enough and is just looking at the category as a whole and then playing the most played. So Glenn Miller and Count Basie are in the same category, but more Spotify people who listen to that category listen to Glenn Miller.
Maybe one day, they’ll get smaller clusters and lump you in with other listeners who favor black musicians within that category.
This is my problem with these services in that they are very generic and smooth out the outliers. So it’s good for pleasing the 80%, but people with specific tastes are out of luck. Big time regression to the mean.
On pandora I find every channel I make eventually slides into the nearest "standard" repetive theme (often abandoning the seed content entirely). I always assumed it was nudging me towards the content with the lowest licensing costs.
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.
I don't think you're completely alone, but you're probably statistically insignificant (don't worry, I'm right there with you).
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.)
I'm the bane of any recommendation algorithm. They just give me random crap because nobody, not even me, can figure out my taste. I like a little bit of virtually everything, with no rhyme or reason.
I find this very interesting, as my path is nearly identical, with the added note (like some other replies) that I just can not stand 60s-70s rock any longer... but I find my musical interests are much wider, and I am listening to more new music than ever before (trance, IDM, experimental, jazz, classical).
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?
> I can’t even stand any more due to the incredibly small playlists that most classic rock stations use.
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.
I too listen to different genres of music depending on mood, and I hate when they mix. I used to make mix tapes and later audio CDs like "Alt Rock #" and "EDM #" and I had dozens of those.
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.
I’m similarly weird. I grew up in the 90s and listened to a lot of grunge when I was 14 (the music age we seem to prefer according to the article). But I can barely listen to the music from that time anymore. It just sounds so dated, maybe because I listened to it too much? Something like Pearl Jam or Soundgarden just sounds so dreadful now.
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.
Me too, but it may be because as a teenager I listened to heavy metal. It was awesome, and I still like hearing those songs occasionally. But it's so loud and exhausting that I don't seek it out. Instead, I'm usually drawn back to Motown and R&B from the 60s and 70s, which is definitely before my time.
They use a set of researched tracks by Arbitron and others seeking to maximize AD revenue by demographic.
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.
Im much the same, but today I'm constantly in the search for anything new, anything in any genre that breaks the well-worn formulae and surprises me, but it's honestly hard to find, everything is derivative.
I listen to anything new I can get my hands on without a bunch of ads disrupting the vibe.. YouTube is my favorite music resource these days, as the videos are better in telling me more about whether an artist is genuine (non Ai, and non-industry-plant).
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.
I expect it'll never happen to me. My dad was still actively seeking out new music when I was a kid, streaming college radio via the Internet before Pandora, Last.fm, or Spotify were things. He's in his 60s today and he still listens to new music (in a range of genres) all the time.
If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you.
Outlier here (musician, spend hours per week trying to find new music) - some thoughts:
- The search space for music is really large and noisy. Most of the stuff out there isn’t very good, and the stuff that is good isn’t always discoverable with a single strategy
- The best strategies almost always exploit human connections
Some strategies I use:
- Spatial locality, who is performing with or near artists that I like?
- Publishing locality, who is on the same label as an artist that I like?
- Artist locality, what other projects has an artist I like contributed to?
- Fan locality, what other artists does a fan of an artist that I like enjoy?
——
Note that none of these strategies are as effective as “relinquish control”. For example, there is a freeform radio station near me that I listen to all day at work. I have a rule that I won’t turn the radio off in the middle of a DJs set, even if I don’t like a song. This has helped me “break through” to interesting artists I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
To the article’s question, I think the main factor here doesn’t have much to do with music. Cultural production has exploded, and it’s really hard to navigate any cultural space in a non-obsessive way.
I thought it was interesting that the effect of “generational preference for music released when teenaged” seemed to wane around Gen Z. I wonder if this is just exhaustion, perhaps with tendencies towards pastiche as a consequence.
For people in their mid-30s and beyond I think a big factor in them commonly perceiving that today's popular music sucks compared to the popular music of their teens and twenties is that when they listen to music from their younger days now it is a small subset of what they were actually listening to back then.
For example my teens and twenties were in the '70s and '80s. If I decide I want to listen to music from those times now I would probably mostly listen to Cat Stevens, Neil Young, The Who, The Ramones, The Dickies, The B-52s, Devo, Queen, The Urban Verbs, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, The Moody Blues, Kansas, The Clash, The Dead Kennedys, Kate Bush, Synergy, Jean-Michel Jarre, Talking Heads, and a few I'm forgetting.
If I decide I want to listen to some current popular music I might listen to something the the Billboard Hot 100 playlist on Spotify.
Of course I'm going to find that nearly everything on there is not nearly as good as the music from artists listed above.
But I'd find the same thing if instead of today's Billboard Hot 100 I listened to a playlist of a Billboard Hot 100 list from the '70s or '80s, or listened to a recording of a random day's broadcast of a '70s or '80s popular music radio station.
And I'm sure that in 2040 if I ask someone who is 37 to make me a playlist of music from 2024 (when they were 21) that playlist is going to sound a lot better to me than the 2024 music I hear now when I decide to check out current music.
Just like my list above is the '70-80s artists that I'm still listening to 50 years later, that 37 year old's playlist will be the 2024 music that he's still listening to 16 years later.
I’m not convinced that we stop finding new music, we just become less zealous or outward about it as we get older. When I was young, I was all about talking music, having the right DJ list for roadtrips, etc, etc and now? I just hit play and don’t think too much about it. Probably because it’s harder to attend shows, less relevant to my social life, etc. I’ve also found as I’ve gotten older that I just care less about the specifics of what the song or artist is. I’ll anchor to a song I really like and then let Apple’s infinite play loop take it from there.
I listened to a lot of Apple Music recommendations while getting my three kids to sleep over the years. I would say that in my 40s I’m discovering more new music, and music I genuinely love, than I did in all my teens. I don’t get to go to a lot of gigs, but I go to one big festival a year and it’s the bands in a tiny font that I get excited about. Yeah most stuff is shit, but there’s just so much of everything.
“But 'American Idiot' wasn't a true act of revolution. In fact, the album was produced and promoted by a multinational conglomerate with the intent of packaging seemingly transgressive pop-punk acts for my exact demographic.”
This is sort of beside the point of the article, but I was just reading an interview[1] with Billie Joe Armstrong about this album and it doesn’t sound like their process was anywhere as cynical as this take.
On another note, I find Elton John’s Rocket Hour on Apple Music to be refreshing in terms of how earnestly he approaches new music and new artists. If you haven’t heard it, it’s nothing like what you might expect based on the title. It’s not “Elton plays songs from his back catalog and talks about them,” but rather “Elton plays new songs you haven’t heard by artists you haven’t heard of yet, and interviews them as his peers.”
I've been building systems to find new music for 18 years or so. This latest one I've been using since early 2020.
It's really for just me so sorry if the documentation is a little scattered. I'm certainly doing some minor ToS violations all over the place with this thing so I don't want it to get too popular but I'll be happy to clean up the documentation if there's interest
It doesn't seem like the article makes much of a distinction between newly released music and music that you haven't listened to yet. Personally, as I get older I've lost the ability to listen to the same Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd etc albums for the 100th time. I cringe every time I hear the opening of Don't Stop Believing. So I've kept trying to get deeper into prog and other genres lately as I'm just burnt out on the old (good) stuff.
Possible confounding factor: they only studied Spotify and Deezer users. This is like studying Kindle users for insights on readers at large. I would not be surprised if there were a correlation between using streaming services (or not) and openness to new music. Study, say, Bandcamp users, and I bet you get a different picture.
Well I'm in my 50s, and I mostly stopped finding new music when record labels, streaming, and social media destroyed the prospects for people who would otherwise make that new music for me to find.
New stuff still arrives (you're not going to predict that me-at-15-loving-Megadeth will much later also love Billie Eilish or Gin Wigmore or Mirel Wagner or ...) but most "new music" is garbage by the standards set by about 50 years of music (much of that before I was alive and thus well before my "peak influence").
I suspect the "findings" of the article suffer from environmental effects that weren't considered/controlled.
I think the main thing that reduces music discovery as a parent is sheer exhaustion, you just don’t have as many hours anymore. It’s not just that you’re listening to less new music, you’re listening to less, period.
Meanwhile, having a kid getting into music is fabulous. I’ve been forced to listen to every Taylor Swift album. I know who Olivia Rodrigo is. I managed to discover Wet Leg all on my own. Steve Lacy, Mitski, Zutomayo, sohodolls…
And then there’s The Crane Wives. Honestly one of the best things I have heard in a very long time. Try “Keep You Safe”, if you don’t like it the rest is probably not going to be your thing. If you do, there’s a lot more like it.
I listened to the radio and watched music videos (Boston had an OTA channel that was like MTV) as a teen, and was the public relations officer and then engineer at the KTEK college radio station, which exposed me to more music.
In my 20s though I was in grad school and monomaniacally focused on my work and I avoided mass culture almost completely. Around the time I turned 30 I got interested in new music again and it was first east coast hip hop (KRS One, M.F. Doom) then psychedelia and classic rock adjacent music (by that time I was really sick and tired of overplayed classic rock, one time I was tripping on acid at 2 am and called up the local college station to complain about the Doobie Brothers song they played that is on a twice a day during drive time and the program manager picked up, I told him to play what he thought was good music and he put on Miles Davis.)
Since then I have had pulses of being interested in "new" (to me) music but it's usually been a bit old. The last round has been the Super Furry Animals (Mwng for the win!) and similar UK bands like The Charlatans. I just found out that I like some of Cyndi Lauper's later albums. Before that it was early Japanese electronica like Yellow Magic Orchestra and Isao Tomita. Before that Synthesizer by Information Society was a revelation.
Recently my son got into the big hits of Fleetwood Mac but I was amazed that they made a lot of music before they hit it big and some of it I like.
I don't listen to a lot of "new" music in the sense of "released in the last few years" and I'd be inclined to blame the prevalence of auto-tune for that. People I know in the music industry make all sorts of excuses ("Don't you like the vocoders on Daft Punk?", "... look I like the vocoders in Laurie Anderson's work and in Neil Young's *Trans&", "Isn't T-Pain talented?", "... I got no problem with T-Pain, I've got a problem with all the other rappers who sound like T-Pain") but if I hear something on the radio that is auto-tuned I'm pretty quick to change the channel.
My next project is to learn something about traditional and contemporary Chinese music.
When I lived in South Korea, one of the things that struck me was how much "flatter" the generations there were in terms of pop culture and music taste and awareness, compared to the US. I worked in an office with a bunch of suit-and-tie businessmen who were mostly in their 40s to 60s, and if you were to ask them about any current K-pop group, they all knew their hit songs.
Very difficult with streaming. Rdio used to have a slider to recommend more unusual music. No other service has this that I’ve found. They keep playing the same songs and artist forever.
[+] [-] cthalupa|1 year ago|reply
If you purposefully seek out exposure to new things, you'll find stuff you like, regardless of age. I have a friend that brings me along to all sorts of concerts that are well out of the wheelhouse of what I listened to as a kid, or even 5-10 years ago. I frequently get home and purchase their full discography the next day. There are subgenres of the broader genres I like that are quite different from what I am used to, and I keep an eye out for new ones - I've long been into various types of metal, but it was the Judas Priests, Iron Maidens, Megadeths, Slayers that dominated my teenage years. In my 20s it was power metal and then death metal and black metal. In my early 30s, it was prog metal. Now I'm listening to a ton of math-y stuff and djent. I have had many detours into jazz and blues, electronic music, and every now and then very mainstream pop artists make their way into my collection.
I don't think I'm wired in some special way that lets me keep liking new things, it's just that I seek them out when I know a lot of people my age just don't.
[+] [-] madmountaingoat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] aidenn0|1 year ago|reply
Which is basically a long winded way of responding to:
> I don't think I'm wired in some special way that lets me keep liking new things, it's just that I seek them out when I know a lot of people my age just don't.
With:
There's a non-zero cost to seeking out new things, so the "special way you are wired" involves considering that cost to be worth it.
[+] [-] lapcat|1 year ago|reply
The 1980s are still doing quite well among all but the oldest generation.
Is it possible that music may actually be getting worse? Corporatized, consolidated, computerized.
Look at Hollywood now too: everything is a sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, or adaptation. There’s hardly anything original anymore.
[+] [-] cesaref|1 year ago|reply
For expensive experiences, say, going to the theatre, it's hard to see shows you don't think you are going to like, as the price pressure makes you choose 'safe bets' as the cost/reward is somewhat weighted in one direction.
For something like music, the above used to be the case, as typically we find our tribe in our early teens, and money is tight so again, you buy what you know you are going to like.
I imagine though that streaming may change this, since you can dive into just about anything. We really need music search which follows more interesting routes through content rather than just 'people who like this also like' or 'here's another album by someone you already listen to'.
I'm lucky, my musical taste has always been broad, and if anything, it's got broader as i've got older. I do find myself reaching for older stuff that i've not heard for a while rather than new music, so when I catch myself doing this too much, the 'i've not heard something I don't like' alarm goes off, and I track down something that a session player I like has played on that i've never heard before, and try and find something new.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|1 year ago|reply
Back then, I'd say investing in a album was always safe, not because you went to the record store and asked for a new rock album, because you had heard 1 or 2 singles (unwillingly) and read a review (willingly)
Now, you can just ask the algorithm to play "something I like".
[+] [-] licebmi__at__|1 year ago|reply
I wish we had something like /mu/ flowcharts[1] but in a more general way. So after playing a song you can get a question or a prompt of what you liked and get some suggestion based on the input.
But IMO, music recommendation peaked 10 years ago with Last.fm and it's only been downhill since then, which is a shame because we had a lot of cool music in the last years, but the exploration is getting harder. But who knows, maybe I'm just getting old and I don't hang around the hip places anymore.
1: https://4chanmusic.fandom.com/wiki/Flowcharts
[+] [-] killerstorm|1 year ago|reply
But it grew broader over time, so that's possible. Now I might dig pretty much any kind of music.
I feel like trying to understand new types of music has an effect beyond just getting familiar with them: brain adapts to process a broader range of stimuli, so that also helps to understand other unrelated genres in future.
I experienced biggest change with Autechre: it was rather difficult to listen to (and I specifically took it as a challenge), but after Autechre I can listen anything :)
And in teens I had to listen something at least 5 times to start enjoying it. Now I can dig it right away. So it feels like brain processes music differently now
[+] [-] lesostep|1 year ago|reply
For me almost all of the music I discover is through the personal recommendations or AMVs (are they still called AMVs if they aren't anime related?) or video memes.
Finding new music is easier if people aren't penalized for using it in their own artistic pursuit. [[placeholder for a rant about current implementations of copyright laws being stuffling for artists. There are a lot of those out there, so pick any rant you are comfortable with]]
All artistic works categories should intertwine more, imo. But that's hard when we have one site for music, another for art, and another for video. Social networks like facebook or twitter almost solved it (although, I prefer to think that blogging platforms like tumblr or myspace solved it better). Common creatives is a very good license for this very reason (relatively easy artistic borrowing), and we should propagandize it more.
That's to say, many people have no good reason to engage with new anymore, having found the stuff that they like and other things they prefer doing. Which is cosmic, in my opinion. Not only they do what they like to do listening to the things they like, but also if everyone was always seeking out the newest thing, it would be a neck-breathing horse race between artists.
[+] [-] eloisius|1 year ago|reply
I agree with this so much. We've had about a decade of this kind of robo-curation in every single aspect of our media consumption. Read books like the ones you like, listen to bands like the ones you listen to, more videos like this one, etc. I'm so sick of it.
The way to branch out of your rut is other people. Some band I'd never have listened to, and if I accidentally had, would have skipped it 30 seconds in, have become my favorites simply because someone I had a connection with played it or recommended it. Movies I wouldn't have picked, but watched with someone else, are often better than anything I'd have picked based on my past preferences.
These days, more and more, I am realizing how rewarding it is to read a book or try a new restaurant based on nothing except that a friend with completely different taste likes it. If it turns out to be a dud, it's worth it for when I find something completely new that I do like.
[+] [-] aidenn0|1 year ago|reply
100% the case. I keep telling my kids that, but they don't seem to get it.
> I imagine though that streaming may change this, since you can dive into just about anything. We really need music search which follows more interesting routes through content rather than just 'people who like this also like' or 'here's another album by someone you already listen to'.
So much so. Spotify became really popular when I was in my 30s and I tried it, listening to the "Discover weekly" for about 6 months. It was 10 weeks before I heard a track I had not heard before and the closest it came to playing an artist I hadn't heard before was a track from a 1-album super-group with two frontmen I was familiar with from their other groups.
Doing the math: I didn't play the list religiously so figure about 20 weeks worth of songs would be 600 songs. I had heard over 80% of the songs before. I had heard nearly all of the artists before. It played a single digit number of songs that I didn't like. If I'm liking 99% of what I'm hearing, something is wrong.
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|1 year ago|reply
my theory is maintaining a single complete playlist as the best way to not get stuck with only the safe and boring.
https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-complete-playlist-e8eb3...
[+] [-] Thegn|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ImaCake|1 year ago|reply
You really need a level of manual curation that a big data statistical model just can't provided at scale.
[+] [-] dotnet00|1 year ago|reply
This interpretation of their behavior is why I've stuck to buying my music (fortunately that's still common for the genres I'm into).
[+] [-] Galxeagle|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] makeitdouble|1 year ago|reply
Would be great to have options to add stuff but keep it private while keeping in sync etc. Could be done with a meta layer on top of the Spotify player for instance ?
[+] [-] prepend|1 year ago|reply
Maybe one day, they’ll get smaller clusters and lump you in with other listeners who favor black musicians within that category.
This is my problem with these services in that they are very generic and smooth out the outliers. So it’s good for pleasing the 80%, but people with specific tastes are out of luck. Big time regression to the mean.
[+] [-] anukin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] c22|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] amanaplanacanal|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Zancarius|1 year ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] stavros|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] readingnews|1 year ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] bsder|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gregmac|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] microtonal|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bigthymer|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wbl|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ta2112|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] anthk|1 year ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] ddingus|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] downWidOutaFite|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] inopinatus|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] winternett|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pxc|1 year ago|reply
If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you.
[+] [-] r1b|1 year ago|reply
- The search space for music is really large and noisy. Most of the stuff out there isn’t very good, and the stuff that is good isn’t always discoverable with a single strategy - The best strategies almost always exploit human connections
Some strategies I use:
- Spatial locality, who is performing with or near artists that I like? - Publishing locality, who is on the same label as an artist that I like? - Artist locality, what other projects has an artist I like contributed to? - Fan locality, what other artists does a fan of an artist that I like enjoy?
——
Note that none of these strategies are as effective as “relinquish control”. For example, there is a freeform radio station near me that I listen to all day at work. I have a rule that I won’t turn the radio off in the middle of a DJs set, even if I don’t like a song. This has helped me “break through” to interesting artists I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
To the article’s question, I think the main factor here doesn’t have much to do with music. Cultural production has exploded, and it’s really hard to navigate any cultural space in a non-obsessive way.
I thought it was interesting that the effect of “generational preference for music released when teenaged” seemed to wane around Gen Z. I wonder if this is just exhaustion, perhaps with tendencies towards pastiche as a consequence.
[+] [-] tzs|1 year ago|reply
For example my teens and twenties were in the '70s and '80s. If I decide I want to listen to music from those times now I would probably mostly listen to Cat Stevens, Neil Young, The Who, The Ramones, The Dickies, The B-52s, Devo, Queen, The Urban Verbs, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, The Moody Blues, Kansas, The Clash, The Dead Kennedys, Kate Bush, Synergy, Jean-Michel Jarre, Talking Heads, and a few I'm forgetting.
If I decide I want to listen to some current popular music I might listen to something the the Billboard Hot 100 playlist on Spotify.
Of course I'm going to find that nearly everything on there is not nearly as good as the music from artists listed above.
But I'd find the same thing if instead of today's Billboard Hot 100 I listened to a playlist of a Billboard Hot 100 list from the '70s or '80s, or listened to a recording of a random day's broadcast of a '70s or '80s popular music radio station.
And I'm sure that in 2040 if I ask someone who is 37 to make me a playlist of music from 2024 (when they were 21) that playlist is going to sound a lot better to me than the 2024 music I hear now when I decide to check out current music.
Just like my list above is the '70-80s artists that I'm still listening to 50 years later, that 37 year old's playlist will be the 2024 music that he's still listening to 16 years later.
[+] [-] bigirondba|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] thom|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] TheTon|1 year ago|reply
“But 'American Idiot' wasn't a true act of revolution. In fact, the album was produced and promoted by a multinational conglomerate with the intent of packaging seemingly transgressive pop-punk acts for my exact demographic.”
This is sort of beside the point of the article, but I was just reading an interview[1] with Billie Joe Armstrong about this album and it doesn’t sound like their process was anywhere as cynical as this take.
On another note, I find Elton John’s Rocket Hour on Apple Music to be refreshing in terms of how earnestly he approaches new music and new artists. If you haven’t heard it, it’s nothing like what you might expect based on the title. It’s not “Elton plays songs from his back catalog and talks about them,” but rather “Elton plays new songs you haven’t heard by artists you haven’t heard of yet, and interviews them as his peers.”
[1] https://www.billboard.com/music/rock/green-day-billie-joe-ar...
[+] [-] kristopolous|1 year ago|reply
I've been building systems to find new music for 18 years or so. This latest one I've been using since early 2020.
It's really for just me so sorry if the documentation is a little scattered. I'm certainly doing some minor ToS violations all over the place with this thing so I don't want it to get too popular but I'll be happy to clean up the documentation if there's interest
[+] [-] havblue|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] greyface-|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ergonaught|1 year ago|reply
New stuff still arrives (you're not going to predict that me-at-15-loving-Megadeth will much later also love Billie Eilish or Gin Wigmore or Mirel Wagner or ...) but most "new music" is garbage by the standards set by about 50 years of music (much of that before I was alive and thus well before my "peak influence").
I suspect the "findings" of the article suffer from environmental effects that weren't considered/controlled.
[+] [-] moomin|1 year ago|reply
Meanwhile, having a kid getting into music is fabulous. I’ve been forced to listen to every Taylor Swift album. I know who Olivia Rodrigo is. I managed to discover Wet Leg all on my own. Steve Lacy, Mitski, Zutomayo, sohodolls…
And then there’s The Crane Wives. Honestly one of the best things I have heard in a very long time. Try “Keep You Safe”, if you don’t like it the rest is probably not going to be your thing. If you do, there’s a lot more like it.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|1 year ago|reply
In my 20s though I was in grad school and monomaniacally focused on my work and I avoided mass culture almost completely. Around the time I turned 30 I got interested in new music again and it was first east coast hip hop (KRS One, M.F. Doom) then psychedelia and classic rock adjacent music (by that time I was really sick and tired of overplayed classic rock, one time I was tripping on acid at 2 am and called up the local college station to complain about the Doobie Brothers song they played that is on a twice a day during drive time and the program manager picked up, I told him to play what he thought was good music and he put on Miles Davis.)
Since then I have had pulses of being interested in "new" (to me) music but it's usually been a bit old. The last round has been the Super Furry Animals (Mwng for the win!) and similar UK bands like The Charlatans. I just found out that I like some of Cyndi Lauper's later albums. Before that it was early Japanese electronica like Yellow Magic Orchestra and Isao Tomita. Before that Synthesizer by Information Society was a revelation.
Recently my son got into the big hits of Fleetwood Mac but I was amazed that they made a lot of music before they hit it big and some of it I like.
I don't listen to a lot of "new" music in the sense of "released in the last few years" and I'd be inclined to blame the prevalence of auto-tune for that. People I know in the music industry make all sorts of excuses ("Don't you like the vocoders on Daft Punk?", "... look I like the vocoders in Laurie Anderson's work and in Neil Young's *Trans&", "Isn't T-Pain talented?", "... I got no problem with T-Pain, I've got a problem with all the other rappers who sound like T-Pain") but if I hear something on the radio that is auto-tuned I'm pretty quick to change the channel.
My next project is to learn something about traditional and contemporary Chinese music.
[+] [-] 082349872349872|1 year ago|reply
Sometimes there are nice surprises: for instance, "My Way" (1969) and "Comme D'Habitude" (1967) share a tune but are very different songs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FEwW0W9AvA (did Sid influence this interpretation?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeTn56-lahg
[+] [-] kyllo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fancymcpoopoo|1 year ago|reply