Music

I'm always looking out for new music, but there's so much always coming out that it's hard to separate what I want to listen to from all the stuff I don't.

I try to find new music, and have found some cool new groups. And some old favourites have fallen out of favour. I feel like my tastes evolve and change, so I'll try to find new music that speaks to me at this current point in my life.

A year from now I could be into a totaöly new style of music.

I still discover new music, there is plenty of good music nowadays, i like fontaines dc, wet leg, squid, mac Demarco, Altin gün, the chats, la femme, parquet courts, lcd soundsystem.

Which are all active today.

I've always been the type to look for music. In highschool I was torrenting music constantly, then in the last couple years I subscribed to Spotify. I get so much dopamine from finding new music that I listen to new things probably every week/month. I do still listen to what I listened to 10-20 years ago, it's just all a mix of my favourites at the time.

I was guilty of this until very recently (my phone is still loaded with all my 90s/00s favourites). But I got back into playing music and then started to want to listen to more folk music as inspiration. Now I hardly want to listen to anything else, and I was largely into metal before. Sometimes you just need to try something new.

Every so often I'll put on some of the old jams. But man, I'm just not angry enough anymore to listen to the old hardcore punk stuff I used to be into. Every so often I'll put on a few albums though and think about those old times. Lately though I've gone down some crazy rabbit holes from jazz, ambient new age stuff, lots of lo-fi and lo-fi adjacent stuff. I recently discovered Macroblank and Monodrone, those two artists have taken up a lot of my time lately. I went through a pretty heavy vaporwave and futurefunk phase a few years back when I was trying to find more eletronic/funk style music like Breakbot. So all the stuff I listen to now is a far cry from the punk and metal I used to listen to back in the day!

For me it's both, and it depends on what I'm doing. I have a lot of tolerance for returning to the bands and songs I love and relistening to the same albums over and over again. I'm the type of person that will listen to a song 10x on repeat if I love it. But in those situations, the music is the primary activity. I might be driving or something but most of my mental processes are focused on the music.

I love discovering new music, though, and I find that it's better for me to listen to new music while I'm focused on something else, the opposite of my "old" favorites.

It seems counterintuitive, but every night I play video games for a couple of hours before bed and that's when I put an album I've never listened to on. Maybe I'll hear something that will pull my attention away form the game and I will repeat that song a few times (this happened recently with 'That's all for everyone' from Tusk), or I will be humming it the next day, and that will kind of form the neural pathway in my brain to cause me to seek that album/song out for more active listening.

It's been a great way for me to discover new (to me) music.

But there is nothing like the comfort of a well-known and well-loved song at the right moment.

Is it just me or is the process of finding new music also succumbing to the forces of enshitification? Like for me the sources went like this:

1. Old forum-style/niche internet sources (userbase died out)
2. Internet radio (ate by Pandora)
3. Pandora (ate by other music streaming sites, enshitification of algorithm)
4. Spotify (enshitification of algorithm, bad treatment of music industry creators)
5. Google music (rip... But tbh wasn't ever really good at finding new music)
6. Music publications?? (Pitchfork is the best I guess??? Npr maaaybe? That's sad, and also all of these are prone to enshitification)
7. Local underground music scenes (lots died with covid, hope they come back, but now I live in a more rural place)

Like... How do we find new music now? If it's up to an algorithm, it's enshitified. If it's up to people's suggestions, idk where a userbase would even exist.

I literally used to run charting for a radio station and I STILL don't know where to find new tunes. I'm still a baby, too, so some of you that think it's harder just because you're older... I have bad news lol

I’ve always listened to new music. I still keep up with bands I’ve always liked and occasionally listen to my old favorites, but there’s SO MUCH GREAT MUSIC coming out all the time I suffer from major FOMO. So I’m always trying to check out new stuff.

I'm more focused on new releases by bands I've listened to for a long time. Mostly rock, folk, and pop from the 80s/90s.

But I also got into EDM a little while ago and added a lot of new and old stuff to my frequent plays.

I don't want to be the old grumpy guy, but the current pop music is very rarely pleasant for me... Queue the struggle for control when I'm in the car with the kids: We found that Yacht Rock is safe territory for all :p

I used to be that way, but recently I've been only listening to bands I'd never heard of before. I've had Spotify for about 10 years and only recently started using the Discovery Weekly playlist. It was only ok at first, but now I heart about 50% of the songs each week.

Its a mix. Finding new music is difficult and time consuming. But sometimes I actively try to find "new" stuff. But being in my late 40s that means basically anything less then 10 years old.

Back in "the olden days" the sieve of radio made me listen to a lot of stuff and I could pick what I liked. Post listening to the radio (because these days they are all either just playing the same stuff or gone).

But with a little effort I've found stuff.

I've recently found Bury Tomorrow and I'm liking a lot of their stuff.

On another genre side I've found Hugo Kant and really dig his stuff a lot as well.

I also found a throw back sort of trip hop band called Mirrors for Princes that I like though they don't have many songs.

More varied taste for me, plus I make more of an effort to seek new music outside of algorithms. Hello Mary, Spiral Drive, and Chat Pile are three new-ish bands I love

I still browse Rateyourmusic for new releases that seem interesting, but less and less seems interesting to me nowadays. Maybe that's the first sign of me getting old...