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.
> 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.
Sure, but my (perhaps incorrect?) assumption is that most people are doing that with something. For me, music is one of those somethings. For others, it isn't.
I have no data to support it beyond my personal anecdotes, but I believe that the majority of people are still seeking out exposure to new experiences in at least some hobbies or interests past the early 30s number given in the article. I would hazard a guess that that time might be when people become particularly more selective in the sort of new things they want to experience.
Music has become more stratified. The 90s through the present have been an ongoing escalation of music being democratized more and more, from the rise of the DAW in the late 90s to iTunes and P2P sharing to YouTube and music streaming. So there is vastly more music now, and people have more opportunity to find things that suit their tastes.
People listen to a wider variety of music and the same Billboard notion of popularity doesn't really paint a useful picture anymore. What plays on the radio or in TV ads is the lowest common denominator corporate waffle, and is played heavily, but it doesn't represent what people listen to overall.
I have personal playlists of everything from House music and 90s Eurodance to all kinds of J-Pop to 19th century folk music to early 2000s rock to 80s synth pop to orchestral music. I couldn't name a single Taylor Swift song offhand, but apparently she's pretty big.
This seems like a really good take on the situation. I usually disagree that discoverability as a problem. Discoverability could be why my tastes have stagnated.
I enjoy music but its not a hobby or anything for me.
There's tons of music out there and I find the plethora of niche subgenres now fairly overwhelming and don't even know how to classify the stuff I enjoy listening to.
Recommendation engine feedback loops do not aid in discovery, just repetition.
Music is absolutely not getting worse unless you're only considering top charting music which is such a small fraction of what's out there. Even then it's highly subjective and behind almost every one of those songs or albums is a handful of brilliant writers, producers and session musicians you probably never heard of.
I'd say it's never been better. Music is more accessible which means more folks get exposed to it earlier and in more variety and in turn we get more musicians.
Of course, it's extremely subjective, but how about naming a few artists who have appeared in the last few years that you think make better music and are more talented musicians than those who came before?
There's a tremendous amount of talent in contemporary music. Comparing musician against musician is silly.
Some of these have been around longer than others.
Jacob Collier, Vulfpeck, Cool Sounds, Sylvie, Bobbing, Abigail Lapell, Big Theif, Tank and the Bangas, Richard Houghten, Kurt Vile, Thundercat, Little Simz, Nora Brown, Barrie, Dominique Dumont, Lusine, Cory Wong, Billy Strings, DoomCannon, Cory Henry, Mark Lettieri, Nate Smith, Yussef Dayes, Yumi Zouma, limperatrice, Slow Pulp, Vetiver, Bibio, Altin Gun, King Gizzard, Julian Lage.
I could go on.. give me an artist you like or a genre and I could likely find you new music.
Let me preface by saying I listen to a lot of genres, but that jazz & funk is not my "main expertise".
Of course there's no denying we have lots of creative and talented new musicians, but very seldom do I think they beat "the greats", or are even on par. Usually they feel more like knockoffs, and I find I'd rather go back and listen to the original instead.
I'm not familiar with these artists, but I had a listen to about 20 of them, and I will say that I can hear where a lot of them got their inspiration from, but they (not all of them) feel lightweight compared to artists from back in the day.
In these genres I'd much rather listen to the following artists than any of the ones you mentioned:
Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Townes Van Zandt, Earth, Wind & Fire, The Isley Brothers, Johnny Cash, Coltrane, Gillespie, Miles Davis.
"Nate Smith" in particular sounds so much like your stereotypical modern artist. Everything from the production, melodies, his voice and vocal chain sounds like at least 20 other artists. Very uninspired in my humble opinion. This is what we can expect AI to produce.
I think you may have found a different Nate Smith than the one goosejuice was referencing. They were likely referring to the drummer named Nate Smith (he's collaborated with at least one of the groups mentioned).
The guy has a lot of interesting work, but I think the thing that blew me away the most is the composition 'Warble'. If memory serves, that's the piece where he explored 64th note and dotted 32nd note displacements in order to mimic J Dilla's 'wonky' swing. I've tried capturing the Dilla swing; it's nearly impossible to do on the drums without sounding like you don't know how to play the instrument. Nate Smith, on the other hand, makes it sound fantastic.
Of course they were inspired by existing artists and by a greater set of them! This is central to my argument that music is only going to get better with greater exposure.
Those are all great artists you listed but to attempt to quantify that they are any more talented or creative than contemporaries is a silly exercise. It's art.
This is a small list of random artists that I've listened to over the past few years. Jacob Collier is a perfect example of exceptional generational talent who not only is technically mind blowing but also incredibly original. I bet every one of those artists you listed would say the same about him (if they haven't passed of course).
Nate Smith likewise would be welcomed as the drummer in any one of those bands. Did you listen to the right Nate Smith?
I don't know, maybe you're just not hearing what I'm hearing. Watch Cory Henry on Snarky's Lingus. Jacob Collier do his recent crowd work with the NSO. Cory Wong talk about Vulfpeck and their MSG show and never rehearsing. Hiromi and Tank and the Bangas on NPR's tiny desks. I'd say Abigail Lapell adds tremendously to the folk of the era you are referencing.
Watered down is just not how I'd describe any of the musicians I listed
Show me someone great who when you go to their inspiration you can't find they themselves very much creating watered down versions of their inspirations.
You seem hyper focused on comparing all that you hear to what you already know you like. If you really want to appreciate new music, cut it out. You're introducing bias at the outset. If you approach a new artist as if their work is isolated, and give it some time to settle in, I think you'll be surprised.
At the risk of just mouthing off my favorites, there are a lot of genres today are the best they've ever been. The post-punk revival out of the UK is great. The "chambery" Black Country, New Road and the "mathy" Black Midi are some of the best we've seen and there are other exceptional talents in that scene. Noisy-shoegazy-indie rock is also a great scene right now with artists like Jane Remover and Mitski releasing what will be important albums for ages to come.
Note, Mitski debuted in 2013 but most of the strongest records over the past few years, from hip-hop, pop to experimental rock to metal, seems to be by artists or individual who've been making music for around a decade-ish roughly. Maybe this disqualifies the whole lot and you're trying to highlight some weakness in the debuts of the past few years. If so, maybe you should wait a decade? If not, I can assert that some of the most talented artists of history are making music today. By any metric.
I could spend hours writing a response to this. I am mid 30 and my style of music changes with every season I am not within trends but most songs I enjoy most are not older than 3 or 4 years. Not all of them are well known.
Even something established like Punk reached new heights with more modern approaches (ex. Sleaford mods, Team Scheisse in German)
I think music is very subjective still but new music never stopped to impress me.
I just discovered Team Scheisse a week ago (they are from city!) and now I come across them on HN, what a coincidence (obviously this might be the Baader-Meinhof-Phenomenon at play but since they are a comparatively small band I would say the effect is rather small)!
FWIW most of the top charting music of the 90s, 80s and so on were also "worse" and have mostly been forgotten. Few songs remain popular or regain popularity. A lot of chart hits are really just springboarding off "you had to be there" cultural moments or experiences or simply a general "vibe" that are fleeting and trivial enough not to stick around even in nostalgia.
As an extreme example, I'd argue the popularity of David Hasselhoff's I've been looking for freedom in Germany is almost entirely a result of "retconning" (if not fabricating) its supposed popularity at the time of its original release. It would have probably been forgotten entirely if it hadn't been rediscovered "ironically" in the context of ridiculous claims about its influence on the fall of the Berlin Wall. Heck, I remember owning a casette of the album as a kid only because "it's the guy from Knight Rider". For adult women his claim to fame was co-starring alongside Pamela Anderson in Baywatch as one of the few men regularly appearing bare-chested on daytime television - I'd say his musical talents played a very small role in his original popularity and it's telling nobody remembers any other songs than the one he performed on a TV show. He was never considered good, he was just a familiar face (and body) and made a catchy tune.
> Music is absolutely not getting worse unless you're only considering top charting music which is such a small fraction of what's out there.
But there's a crucial difference between what's out there and what people are listening to. There's a lot of obscure stuff that not many people are listening to. Whereas the top charting music is what millions of people are listening to. It matters a lot what's getting marketed, what the majority of people are exposed to.
Unfortunately, very few repliers are addressing the first point that I made in my comment: "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music."
Musicians are more discoverable than ever. Unlike in the past it doesn't matter nearly as much what's getting marketing/ gets air play at the top of the charts, because if you have a desire to find music that you like you just have to try and it's all there for free with an Internet connection.
If one can't find new music to ones taste it's not because of what's being produced.
> it's all there for free with an Internet connection
The "Internet" is just hand waving. The internet is massive. Almost everything is available on the internet, but that's a problem, not a solution. Sometimes it's like finding a needle in a haystack.
> If one can't find new music to ones taste it's not because of what's being produced.
So what is the explanation for "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music", which again, you haven't addressed.
You shared a single infographic without a source, but taking it as fact I would take a guess that it's easier to discover old music now and there's more music to listen to thus flattening the curve.
I'm sorry that it's difficult for you to find what you like. My tastes are very broad and I find new artists every week just listening to Spotify, Bandcamp, YouTube while working. My wife and I and our friends share music that we like with each other. We see live music and get exposed to openers we've never heard of.
> Unfortunately, very few repliers are addressing the first point that I made in my comment: "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music."
Seems very hard to accurately measure, could be that people don't know what was released in their decade but the stuff from the 80s is easy to pinpoint.
If you consider the top charting music and the typical fart noises uploaded to soundcloud which have 3 listens, yes it is worse.
If you're only considering your 25 favorite new songs out of tens of millions then sure, it's better. But also there is recency/novelty bias which counteracts and may overcome any past/nostalgia bias
In conclusion, if all you're doing is listening to music alone in your apartment then it's never been better. Until you step out into the real world and realize that, best-case scenario, everyone hates your music and everything that it represents. More likely they will be completely bored and indifferent.
The world's been hating my music tastes and telling me to turn stuff off since the 1980s. And then, ten years later they love it, and 10 years after that my ex-is bragging how she used to listen to it decades ago.
And definitely don't like things based on the real world, the real world is shit.
Plenty of people live in the woods. If we all lived in the woods everything would be fine! I'm sure our GDP wouldn't fall and no one would starve to death at all. Nope; Not a bit.
Why don't we all just wear VR headsets all day?
LOL enjoy your atomized Balkanized tower of Babel existence. If it has to be explained then you're consitutionally incapable of understanding it anyway.
I think you're thinking way to hard about this my friend. What part of seeing a local band at a bar or listening to family members make music leads you to bring up GDP and VR? Either you're completely misunderstanding this discussion or you're extremely out of touch.
What gave you the idea that I'm not interested in community and shared culture? That's precisely what I'm promoting. My point was that it doesn't matter what's popular in the mainstream.
This is no place for personal insults, so I'll call it here as this clearly isn't a genuine exchange.
>If you enjoy it and the musicians are making it what else is there?
LOL.
Also, a kiwi, a german, and an uzbek in a discord channel does not a community make. I'm talking about people playing banjo on their porch because that is what people do in their community and their region
The problem is they aren't blockbusters, so you don't remember them. From the same link:
> While the number of movies based on original screenplays has been increasing since the late 2000s, their box office share has continued to fall. In 1984, 73% of the box office were original screenplays, whereas forty years later in 2023, that figure was just 30.6%. And that’s despite their production share being similar (i.e. 60.4% vs 55.9%).
And from a separate post:
> Sequels were twice as frequent in the late 1980s than in the 2010s, if we use production figures as our measure
I wonder who's producing those movies though. My comment did specify Hollywood. The indie film scene, most of which consists of original screenplays, is very active, and now it's easier than ever both to shoot a film—on a smartphone!—and to distribute a film—over the internet. (Likewise, it's easier than ever to record and distribute a music album.) However, those films aren't getting mass marketed, getting seen by the majority of people, or making a ton of money. Unfortunately, the linked articles didn't specify the producers, or even the absolute number of movies produced each year, which is also relevant. Whatever the cause, the public's appetite for sequels, as reflected in box office proceeds, has indisputably increased. Those are the movies getting seen the most. Is that a "natural" desire of consumers? Is it a result of marketing? Something else?
> 39% of top movies released 2005-14 were truly original, i.e. not an adaptation, sequel, spin-off, remake, or other such derivative work.
I don't know, I watch most of my movies at home (I have a nice setup) and watch as many old movies as new. I never feel like I have any trouble finding an original film. The blockbusters may soak up all the ticket sales, but there's just no shortage of original films to me.
> The blockbusters may soak up all the ticket sales, but there's just no shortage of original films to me.
But my comment was not about you. ;-) My original point was "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music." And if you "watch as many old movies as new", that's certainly not a ringing endorsement of new movies.
I'm GenX and a movie buff, but not much of a music listener, so I replied to the Hollywood part of your comment. There's always going to be more old movies than new and I watch enough movies that I run out of the new ones.
That is indeed right. People confuse their own perception of their surroundings with actual changes in the world. We're human beings, with a rich inner world, which always evolves as we age and there is a lot going on in there, both on a chemical / biological level, and spiritually. We are not really built to be objective observers.
I certainly have plenty of biased but late 70s early 80s seems like a really good era. Especially because it was so diverse and not dominated by a single sound.
I am not sure about the whole thing. When I was a teenager (so roughly the decade from 2000 to 2009) I hated my guts of any contemporary music, most of what I liked was from the 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s etc.
Nowadays I have quite some things in my record collection from my teenage decade, some of which I discovered only a few years ago, some of which I knew and liked back then, but it wasn't popular music back then.
I always liked to think of this as some kind of survivor bias. There is trash music in everybtime period, but the good music will be listend to more often and thus shape the collective musical memory of a decade. The time we're in hasn't had the chance for that to happen yet, so it seems arbitrary and random as it happens and more defined in hindsight.
It also matters where you look. The 80s have a very recognizable pop music, but it also has Punk and multiple other things.
In my case, I'm from 1987 and pop music from the early 90's was as bad as the one from 2000's, because I remember it well from my parents (and, well, by age 9-10 I was more than aware of the Spice Girls, as every girl in my Elementary school was into dances).
Later, in 2000's, with P2P and streaming radios, I was astounded by some music genres. And, a bit further, with Jamendo and Magnatune, I found incredible gems not found anywhere.
As someone constantly seeking out new music (recently for example, I've been working backwards through the 1001 albums you must listen to book), I inherited some of my family's old vinyl collections including stuff that was like 60 years old.
So so much of it is awful. It's interesting granted, but people ignore that the charts were filled with bland covers of other popular songs even in the 60's.
Hip Hop is a great showing of survivor bias. Sure, Tupac, Biggie, Beastie Boys etc are classic but people are rarely listening to the bland safe music from that era. So so many songs where the rapper couldn't think of anything more inventive than "oh you're having FUN well wait till I go and get my GUN I'll shoot you dead and you'll be DONE"
In 30 years, people will hear Kendrick's discography and think "god no one makes meaningful hip hop anymore" while forgetting about the "pop music but instead of a guitar solo, it's a bad rap verse" or the vast amount of emo/trap/SoundCloud stuff where the good stuff is rare.
The exciting thing about living now is the ease that someone can send a link to me. Constantly my friends and I are finding recently released or decade old music that we can simply message the other and say "you'll love the production on this" - whereas for years, you saved up your pocket money and bought one album and that's all you had until you could afford another.
People who say modern music is rubbish rarely make any effort to actually find any. You've kids now talking about bands like Arctic Monkeys but they don't realise the indie landfill of shite guitar bands that all had the same look, same twangy sound, same trajectory. For every Panda Bear/Animal Collective - there was 100 bland animal based bands all copying the same formula in the hope of being as big as Pigeon Detectives lmao
Be aware that grouping things by the respondents "generation" is actually meaningless[1] and likely to make you combine several real processes into random "effects".
Trying to explain these arbitrary aggregations with a single story is obviously fruitless and mostly a good way to make up nonsense arguments.
The return of the 80s is, or rather was, just a current trend. Next up will be the 90s/00s, which can already be seen in make up and fashion, and I'm sure media will follow soon as well.
Wrt/ Hollywood: I think they are not the monopoly they used to be, because the powers are shifting by streaming, and short video services. Similar to how AAA games are more stagnant than the indie gaming scene.
"Music" is too broad to "get worse". There are trends in music that can be considered bad, such as the lessening dynamic range of the recordings - the Loudness War[0]. But there is more music than ever, computerized or not, so if you find that some source of music is bad, you just need to look elsewhere. Music production is easier than ever, so even very niche sounds are kept alive, like the lofi sound of post-punk decades ago[1].
> The return of the 80s is, or rather was, just a current trend. Next up will be the 90s/00s, which can already be seen in make up and fashion, and I'm sure media will follow soon as well.
Is it a "return of the 80s", or is it a rejection of newer music? Again, "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music." This is a difference from previous generations, which tend to hold on stronger to the music of their times. The current trends of current pop culture have always had a much stronger influence on young people than any "nostalgic" trends. When I was young, nostalgia from earlier decades had almost no influence on myself or my peers.
I believe that music's role changed a lot first with the wide spread of the internet and then smartphones and streaming. The internet gave rise to a global culture, and a new channel where culture can form, and then streaming completely changed how people consume music.
I see rejection, disappointment and disillusion as a general theme that's going on in culture, but I can't say that these weren't present in the past cultures as well - going back some decades, the popularity of punk and its offshoots show just how much these feelings resonated with the audience back then.
I think that with the widespread access and nonexistent barrier to entry to past cultures via streaming, attention just spread over the existing cultural palette, resulting in lower average consumption of the new and current. It's not that the new and current is rejected - it's rather that long tail is longer and taller.
The return of the 90s is not next up, it's right now.
For the past 2 years, mainstream chart-toppers like David Guetta or Calvin Harris have been (respectively) covering 90s eurodance songs or making new ones in the same style.
Music was always like this. It used to be even more like this 100 years ago. How many twelve bar blues songs use the exact same chord progression? Maybe thousands if you managed to catalog them all. Maybe hundreds with the same lick between verses. As music started being recorded you had people writing dozens and dozens of songs a day to be owned by a label. They’d find some starlet with a voice and give her a book of these songs from the basement to record on the album and market her for a few years. If anything we are reverting to this model more today, as bands are no longer in vogue as much as individual artists whose material they perform has probably 20 writers credited.
I was born in 1980, so it would be before my musical "peak" so to speak, but I dislike pretty much anything from the 80s popular enough to have been on the radio in the 80s. Right now the 80s style is so popular, I find myself even disliking a lot of modern music that has that "80s retro feel"
I was in the car with an older Gen-Z'er last year and they expressed jealousy at me having grown up in the 80s because they "like the music so much" and were shocked to find out I didn't.
I think it's the opposite of corporatization and consolidation.
Computerization? Yes, of course, but it gave everyone the possibility to make music at a very affordable cost. A $100 MIDI controller comes with a license for a full blown music production software and literally anyone can record, mix, master and release an album. I know several people who are not professional musicians, not even formally trained - just happen to like making sounds - who have their albums on Spotify and/or Soundcloud.
It's the opposite - we're way less centralized now. No one cares about what's on the radio or MTV anymore. We have infinite access to every song ever* for $11 a month, and the recommendation algorithms will happily show you music outside the mainstream and outside the current decade if that's what keeps you listening.
> No one cares about what's on the radio or MTV anymore.
Why not?
> if that's what keeps you listening.
That's the key, though. Kids are generally biased toward new music. This phenomenon is perfectly natural and consistent over the generations, as shown in the article. In the 1980s, it wasn't particularly hard to "discover" 70s or 60s music, and indeed parents might want their kids to listen to their music, but that's not necessarily what the kids want to listen to, because it's not cool. Parents are uncool. Kids want their own music.
What's interesting, though, is that GenZ and Millennials appear to be less biased toward the new music and less biased against the old. The fact that every song ever is available for streaming doesn't mean that people want to listen to every song ever. My understanding is the streaming plays are very top-heavy toward the top artists, and smaller artists are struggling mightily under the streaming payout system.
Nirvana and early Linkin Park seem to be much more popular among GenZ and Millenials than their own music, and lasting, not just trending or being a fad.
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".
The selection in these channels was the tribe back then. They were the "bottleneck" of pop culture.
From around 2000 with broadband etc, "payola" (broadcasters being coerced by record companies to play their flagship songs "in heavy rotation") is less and less effective.
As a consequence, I think the "current fashion" of music seems less defined.
I believe this is the origin of the '90s kids' meme. Not too long ago there was one culture. Then the internet came along and there was a gathering place for fans of every obscure anime and political system.
I don't miss the restrictiveness of a single culture and the expectation to fit into it, but with the benefit of hindsight I can't say it was a terrible culture, given all it had to do.
There have always been multiple cultures. This is such a weird statement I don't even really know how to argue against it since to me it seems so self evident, but I suppose I'll try. Since the subject is music, I suppose we can start there.
The sort of people you found at, say, a metal show in the 80s and the sort of people you found at a dance club playing the early era of house music were wildly different. Even if you keep it within rock, the overlap of the audience seeing The Cure would be wildly different from those seeing Judas Priest.
Anime? Even before the internet became what it is today, you could go to a comic book store and hang out. There was significant overlap between the comic book/dungeons & dragons/anime crowds.
There have been social spaces and places to meet people within specific cultures for forever.
There was never one culture, but the fragmentation was far more coarse.
I was into D&D, so I was exposed to anime, comics, Monty Python, Mel Brooks, and Tom Lehrer, because those were a certain subculture.
I was never a comic-book nerd, but I could probably name a dozen different series from image comics in the 90s because I was surrounded by people who read them.
I flat out dislike watching Mel Brooks movies, but I can quote about 90% of Spaceballs or Blazing Saddles because that was a part of the vocabulary of that group.
Before the internet, there has always been a gathering place already for each culture. In my teens, it was the weekend punk hardcore matinees. Before internet, kids passed out fliers to their upcoming shows. Kids invite fellow kids because there isn’t much going on during weekends.
I think putting Britney Spears, Rage Against the Machine, Moby, Ol'Dirty Bastard and Santana (all had top hits in 1999 with rotation on MTV) into the same "tribe" is painting strokes as broad as the ocean.
It's a mixed bag; on the one side I agree that during that era, people were exposed to a somewhat broad range of musical styles if they watched TV or listened to radio - early to mid teen me would be exposed to the likes of Madonna, Rammstein, Eminem and Slipknot all in one day. But as someone else pointed out, it was all within the "bubble" of what was popular at that time, and the options to break out of there were limited because there were only so many music television and radio channels, and they would have a limited playlist of <1000 songs at a time, probably even less than that.
Nowadays if you have a streaming subscription or even Youtube, you have instant access to millions of songs and a multitude of curators creating playlists to fit any mood. Granted, Spotify and co will curate some popular playlists, and discovering curators outside of that bubble takes some more effort. But it's there.
We live in interesting times where on the one side we can be overwhelmed by choice, while at the same time delighted with new discoveries. Where budding artists can create from their proverbial basement and self-publish to a potential audience of billions.
>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 really enjoyed 8tracks back in its prime: it was a social network for user-created playlists, and it made finding cool new music really easy. The playlists were often very well thought out; nothing like the playlists you'll find on Spotify.
There is rateyourmusic.com, which is positioned as sort of a Letterboxd for music, but I haven't used it much.
Music discoverability is a big problem I'd like to solve, especially now that I'm in my 30s and don't really have the sort of social circle these days that would expose me to cool new music.
I've toyed with the idea of making an 8tracks-like service, where tastemakers can create playlists to share, and the streaming happens via the API of whatever streaming services you're subscribed to (Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, whatever).
If anyone is interested in a project like this, feel free to reach out.
last.fm is still around, although I don't use it for recommendations.
I've recently enjoyed using RYM to find music. Start with an artist/album I like, click on the genre, and try out the top-rated artists/albums.
It's a manual version of the flowchart, you're right that it'd be neat to automate that. I haven't even tried using RYM tags, but they'd probably be useful input, too.
Yeah, when I mentioned last.fm I meant last.fm radio, a short lived service that if I remember right, it was only supposed to be available on the UK, although with the easily bypassed checks of that time.
The description you make about rym sounds similar, so maybe i’ll take a look.
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.
I suspect it's the notion of a "feed" that's at fault, but then again I'm an old codger who likes to rummage in the cupboard and actively search for my content instead of being stuck in the high chair and passively waiting for somebody else's algorithm to feed it to me.
(in another domain, at some restaurants it's possible to order dishes which don't appear on their menu)
> in another domain, at some restaurants it's possible to order dishes which don't appear on their menu
I've experienced this in Italy. Our host took us to a restaurant where he knew the manager and looked at the menu. He then asked 'but what have you really got?'. After a long very Italian debate (which I didn't understand) with a lot of gesticulation etc we were brought a multi-course meal that was absolutely delicious and involved various things that had just come into season, things that the manager kept back for friends, etc.
I think feeds are practical, it's just that pretty much all mainstream non-RSS feeds are designed to take control away from you and stand in your way, rather than let you be free to explore and discover.
the joy of discovery is lost. its discovered for you and fed to you. where did the journey go? :D
if you have more content, but someone filters it for you to 'your taste', you will end up with less content, and no more exciting discoveries. you'll learn what to expect from the feed quickly and everything becomes boring. hence the required upward spiral in ridiculousness, to counter the natural encroaching boredom.
the last maybe a little grim take, but i dont think invalid.
I'd skip less if I could trust that the algorithmic playlists followed "reasonable" paths. But all to often the transitions are really jarring.
(Also, big pet peeve: they need to take into account time of day and factors like weather to do well, as well as habit; I will not respond the same way to a track on a rainy grey winter evening as on a sunny summers day)
you touch an important thing. music is a common thing between people that's shared, and a way to express, which is usually also meant for sharing (you can make music to express to yourself too.). hence i think most people develop their taste in these things mostly through social interactions which algorithms cannot provide. additionally as a result, the memories/experiences attached, influence heavily how it tastes, exactly as you say.
these numbers presented seem a bit from a narrow dataset. all the people likely from one culture or even sub-culture, with one sort of social pattern that impacts this kind of stuff. - i live in a northen country, and find often in the south people are more actively outside and socializing at later ages. sharing more music and food, and likely the peak ages would thus be later too, or less of a peak.
> 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.
What I find curious about it though is that it's obviously recognizing the style - it plays 1-2 musicians from the "black" group, then circles into only playing Miller/Goodman/Rat pack and never comes back around to playing the music that I originally was trying to play. If it was behaving the way you are thinking, I'd expect it to mix the two styles.
I think the problem is that the algorithms are based on statistical probabilities from other users. I.e users who listen to X also like to listen to Y. So we’ll add Y to the queue. Then Y becomes the new reference point. I mean that is a gross simplification but essentially if your musical taste is outside of 2 standard deviations of the norm all the algorithms are gonna suck. For me they do.
I’ve definitely trained tidal that I prefer some pretty whacky sub genres (this Northern European country, but only metal with strong brass sections, or contemporary accordion, hurdy gurdy, and a dozen other clusters like that).
I’d guess if you created a profile and loaded it up with just black swing bands from the 30-50’s, it’d do OK.
If not, and I understand their algorithm correctly, it would not only be because no current listeners make that distinction (as discussed up thread).
It would also be because the metadata doesn’t give any signal for it. They seem to use information such as record labels, song writers, producers, guest musicians, etc.
If that metadata has no signal, then my guess is that you’re trying to get it to racially segregate music that was produced before the big interracial marriage scare.
People were worried that if their kids listened to the same musicians, then whites and blacks (or worse!) might marry, so they created white radio stations and black radio stations.
Before that, I imagine there was a lot more interracial collaboration, and the metadata wouldn’t find clean clusters along race boundaries.
It could also be that the old metadata was never digitized.
I wonder if this is the case, or if the model just has year as a heavily weighted factor, because bluntly, Ella and Louis were vastly superior musicians to Frank and Tony. I honestly can’t hear the similarity. It’s like thinking “Oh. You liked The Killers, here’s some One Direction”
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).
In this instance - and others in my experience listening to the recommendations on this and similar services - "diversify" is used when "dilute" would be more appropriate.
It’s not really though - if it was known in advance that you did not like a track then there would be no reason to recommend it. It’s the classic precision vs recall trade off: I can create a recommendation algorithm that only recommends your favourite song, forever, and that will have perfect precision but miserable recall. To increase recall we have to accept a drop in precision.
I’ve found that most algorithms tend to reinforce a taste by trying to provide more of the same. They rarely try to bring in something that diverges from the pattern. Of course, the libraries have limits and the algorithms will often match against characteristics that you do not consider relevant.
I would love diversifying, but it does not do that. It does "revert to mainstream" trying to push you toward the most generic thing accestible by association from what you like.
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.
I'm personally a fan of the old stuff (Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Chick Webb, Jimmie Lunceford, Slim Gaillard, Ella Fitzgerald to name a few) but the best thing you can do is go to dances and lessons, and when you hear a song you like, go up to the DJ and ask them what it was. The best music is the music you like and that makes you want to dance, regardless of who made it.
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'm a little puzzled as you're describing a music stylist on skin colour, black vs white. I presume you don't really mean that, so what distinguishes the two musical styles, black swing vs white swing? Serious question.
I admit I'm uncomfortable explaining it by skin color, but I've never found anybody who has been able to explain to me what the difference is, and I will admit lacking the musical knowledge to explain it. I fell into that style from dancing Lindy Hop; I was loving the music I was hearing when I was out dancing, so I went and bought an album from the only name I knew at the time - Glenn Miller. It was some of the most boring and trite music I'd ever heard in my life, and did not inspire me to dance.
For me (and I don't judge people for thinking differently) there's a certain joie de vivre in the music that is just lacking from what white musicians released commercially. I know they were capable of it (I once found a recording of Glenn Miller swinging it just as hard as anything Basie put out) but they were playing to their audience at the time. As I've learned more about the history of Swing and Lindy Hop, this was a specific choice made to "civilize" (as the white people of the time would have said) Jazz's savage rhythms. There's actually posters from the Arthur Murray school in the 1940s saying this exact thing.
(Aside, I had a friend who played a radio show in the 2000s playing old Jazz music. She told me once that if she put anything from a black musician on the show, she'd get hate mail from the listeners. Go figure.)
The simple explanation is that largely only white artists played on radio stations. Popular songs would be sanitized for white radio by recording what we would now consider as covers. However, it was also rather commonplace for a whole slew of artists to record a popular song at nearly the same time. The proliferation of covers wasn't so overtly motivated by bigotry since an original recording wasn't regarded with the same esteem as today.
>I'm a little puzzled as you're describing a music stylist on skin colour, black vs white
You may not realize this, but in the 1930-1950 era being described in America, there was something called "Segregation" where black people were considered legally inferior to white people. As such, there was a very hard line between "black" and "white", a line that was aggressively enforced by every level of society from lawmaking, policing and justice, to radio and TV access, to education, to neighborhoods, and frankly everything else.
With that context, I think it's very easy to see how there can be "black swing" and "white swing" -- it was in a society that forcibly separated everything into "black X" and "white X".
People not deep into music have hard time verbalize difference between metal and rock or hiphop and rap. Despite differences being super obvious when listening.
>You should be able to describe the sound differences if the music is that distinct.
They are and I can, however the existence of Black Swing is in no way predicated on a difference in sound only.
Consider this: white culture in America continually stole from a legally repressed black culture, including white swing which stole the black art and commercialized it. Even if a 1950 white swing song sounds similar to a 1940 black swing song, there is still a "black swing" and a "white swing".
Frankly, I think trying to reduce history of music down to "the sounds themselves" is a way to whitewash the history and destroy the true knowledge of what happened and why. The context is very important.
Go listen to Straight Otta Compton and then Vanilla Ice and you'll get it. Or for Swing Count Basie vs. the slicker more commercial Glenn Miller but it's subtle.
And then Coltrane and Orman and Davis come and change the whole jazz world.
I didn't ask for examples, I'm familiar with what race these artists are.
My point is if the music actually is so different, it should be noticable and describable without knowing the race of a particular artist. So how would you describe the black music that describes only black musicians but not white musicians from this period, and vice versa.
"Should be describable" is a false metric. We can hear differences between categories and not be able to verbalize what we're hearing. It's the same for anything -- you could walk through a museum showing abstract expressionism and action painting, and feel that one of the styles speaks to you, and yet not be able to put into words how the two styles are different.
The brain can categorize much more easily than it can create a concrete definition for those categories.
> We can hear differences between categories and not be able to verbalize what we're hearing. It's the same for anything
For some reason, the view is widely held that internal thoughts are expressed in words. This would mean that anything you can think can easily be verbalized.
The fact that this view is quite obviously false seems to bother very few people.
There’s an assumption to your argument that I don’t believe holds true, that there is such a significant difference that it should be easily describable.
Talking about the arts is difficult. In everyday conversation, well known phrases for describing the arts include “I know it when I see it” and “if you have to ask, then you’ll never know”. I’m a fan of “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. It just isn’t easy to describing differences in performance and interpretation.
Since it’s widely recognised that describing music is difficult, and since you’re familiar with the artists in question, perhaps you could accept the point in good faith or put into words why you don’t think they are any different?
Sure. 99% of the white musicians at that time were total sellouts who played extremely straight, boring, conservative and no-frills music without any embellishment or soul.
The most obvious difference is the energy level and "rawness" of songs - those white bands had really carefully choreographed performances with minimal deviation, even solos were often written out in similar big bands.
Black musicians often shouted, yelled or mugged during performances - all of these are completely absent in white performances at that time.
Ya you're not being honest in the slightest. The OP likes the music made by the group he mentions. You instead say he's being racist for liking music of that group. I'm having a hard time discerning if you're trolling or serious.
That's extremely patronising, I know well about segregation of that era, and that segregation functionally continued far longer than the 1950s. Blatantly there's a difference, that was what I was asking about the effect of, which you ignored. At least @ Pannoniae provided an answer.
Not OP but I would assume that because they where still somewhat isolated groups in terms of directly lived culture, this would have influenced their works differently.
Like how the Blues didn't come out of a comfortable lifestyle.
Also isolated by force in many cases: even in states which didn’t have official segregation laws, things like redlining and police enforcement meant you had very distinct communities. This especially went for anything where alcohol is consumed (being drunk leads to deadly mistakes and could lead to crimes being ignored or minimized) or, especially, sexual contexts - if you’re a young black man, you’re probably not going to find it relaxing to be at a club where various white guys are stopping by to mention what’ll happen if you look at a white woman.
Looking of that period is a very sobering reminder of a very dark stain in our national history - and I’ve read too many stories about even well known performers being told they can’t play at certain venues or have to leave immediately afterwards to think everyone wasn’t aware of the stakes:
As an example of how widespread this was, it took Marilyn Monroe at the height of her fame intervening for _Ella Fitzgerald_ to be able to play at a club in Los Angeles! Not the Deep South, not 1917, but very modern California.
> In October 1957 Monroe made a call to the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles, on behalf of Fitzgerald. Monroe used her social status and popularity to make a deal with them. If they allowed Fitzgerald to perform, Monroe promised that she would take a front-row seat every night
The closest I can come to a silver lining for this is that it allowed more artists to find a niche where they weren’t competing with the major national artists but that’s nowhere close to compensation for so much tragedy.
Hey! I have a quite similar music taste. (my favs definitely include Slim Gaillard and Fats Waller, that kind of stuff)
If you have Discord, I've been curating a musicbot with a similar music rotation since I've also been completely fed up with streaming services pushing more Glenn Miller/similar straight bands, not the hip ones :) If you are interested, join my server, the bot is running 24/7: https://discord.gg/wjsC2TUZPK
I haven't used last.fm for a long time and it seems like a shadow of its former self, pre acquisition. I've discovered so much music on there, and I'm getting really disappointed by spotifys repetitiveness. Is last.fm still good to discover new music or is it just harvesting scrobbles?
In this case it's not that ridiculous because "black" here isn't just a skin color, but primarily a subculture/subgenre with some distinct musical attributes.
Nobody finds separating French electronic music into its own subgenre ridiculous. Same with Italian Disco.
Such distinct movements are quite usual, so dissatisfaction about Black Swing on streaming services is understandable.
I think many here are missing the point being made. Of course there are stylistic differences between some groups of artists. The thing is that they probably aren't coded by skin color let alone period location etc, so of course it will bleed. Playing some swing and expecting it to continue to stay within very blurry racial lines is unrealistic, silly, and maybe irresponsible for a recommendation algorithm.
As it's been said, there are better methods of discovery for this purpose. In your example, I'm sure there are Spotify playlists for Italian disco that have been curated.
Also, the subculture exists in the US because of hundreds of years of intentional effort by the majority to destroy any preexisting cultures among black people and prevent any integration with the mainstream.
No, he's saying that within the genre of mid-20th century Swing there are distinct musical traditions found in black vs white bands, which he wishes he could partition against. What's ridiculous about that?
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 actually wonder if staying receptive to new music into or past middle age is enhanced by autism. I am a male on the spectrum, in my late 30's, and absolutely nothing about this article rings true to me. I generally operate on a 5 year cycle where I completely reinvent my musical interests, stop enjoying lots of tracks that I used to love (I hate just about eveything I loved at 14), and hang onto a handful of tracks that I consider timeless.
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.
Brains have to have repeated exposure to a stimulus before they find it pleasurable. This is why you may need to try a new food a few times before you develop a liking for it, and the same goes for new music genres.
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.
It seems plausible. I'm not on the spectrum (so far as I know), but my receptiveness to new music generally has some association with previous genres I enjoyed. I definitely don't experience the "reinventiveness" trait so much as gradual evolution. I don't like early 2000s electronica anymore, some trance I used to enjoy I don't, but now I just love some other genres that are tangentially related (chillstep, etc). On the other hand, I still enjoy some of the same metal groups that I used to (Disturbed, Epica, etc) even though I don't listen as often.
Perhaps there is, if you pardon the expression, a spectrum of receptiveness.
I'm thinking there's something to your speculation, though.
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'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?
Spotify gives me half a dozen suggested playlists, and they’re each broadly compartmentalized into different genres (or collections of similar genres).
> 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.
> 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.
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 use Pandora and I'm able to maintain genre-specific stations pretty well. Sometimes it will try to mix something new in but I just dislike that song and it happily keeps playing the genre(s) that I chose for that channel.
I don't know about Pandora, but I've always been cautious to use "dislike" in that way, because I don't know the scope. There's a difference between "I don't want to ever hear this" vs "I don't want to hear it on this station". I use it for the former but not the latter.
My experience has been that dislikes are station specific. I regularly dislike songs on channels in order to shape the genre, even if I actively listen to that song on other stations. Pandora's whole identity revolves around stations, so it would be weird if dislikes were global.
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.
Yeah, the opaqueness of your actions in Pandora and in other streaming services is always annoying.
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’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.
> It just sounds so dated, maybe because I listened to it too much?
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.
Not listening for some time indeed sometimes helps. I now try to avoid listening music I really really like too often. It's something beautiful you take out of its box every few months/years. Stuff like Ole Coltrane or Miles Davis' Filles de Kilimanjaro.
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.
I have started a little research project wherein I have been harvesting the feeds of various Internet-active radio stations so I can look for the "deep cuts." Not just for classic rock, but for various "new wave" stations, as well as combining old "top 500" lists, and so on. I am nowhere near done, but I have made some notes that confirm old suspicions.
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.
Indeed! Your comment resonates with my own thought and experiences.
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.
Aww hell yeah, dark jazz is great. I assume you know Bohren & der Club of Gore and Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble? (curious of any recommendations if you know more good stuff!)
I am working on one of my Master Lists, but the /r/darkjazz subreddit was good. Now, it is mostly dead but for spam from randos who aren't within miles of the sound trying to flog their own efforts. Black Chamber, Free Nelson Mandoomjazz, you might try those for giggles.
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.
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 want a station that plays everything that was ever in the rock top 100 from around 1950 to around 2010. There has to be all kinds of great stuff that never gets played on "oldies" stations. Probably a bunch of duds too, but if they made it as far as the top 100, there can't be that relatively many.
You could do this with almost any genre, I suspect.
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.
I had the realization a few weeks ago that I no longer listen to very much from before 2016. I didn’t pay attention to how it happened, but less than 20% of what I have actively listened to in the past 3 years going by all these recap playlists is from before 2016 and I keep adding new music every year. Half of the music from before that cutoff point is basically music that was new to me in the last few years even though it’s older.
I couldn’t imagine thinking that would ever happen 15-20 years ago. I’ve also realized that I’m not interested in trying to change that at all, because I’m now of the opinion that so far music has gotten better every single decade I’ve been alive; and the 2020s are off to a great start on that front.
On average, music is big for people during the teenage years, then other things in life take over and that same music continues the biggest music for them.
This is very different if music is a lifelong hobby for you. I'm in my forties and some of the artists I most listen to today I discovered during recent years. Still I find articles like this interesting because I can learn something about a larger demographic while being different myself.
> If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you.
Novelty in music of novelty of music? I never considered one could care about the former (it certainly seems orthogonal to popular music, which is all about being new but never novel). So you are actively seeking out to you new genres and artists?
I'm not a completionist, so I'm OK with missing out. I do keep track of artists or (sub)genres to check out, but I very rarely have time to actually check some of it out. I have so much music that the past years I've been deleting more than adding, and I still haven't heard much of it well. Also by now I realize tastes change but also experiences, a song sounds different in different phases of your life it seems.
That's an interesting distinction that I didn't have in mind in my comment. For me, personally, I suppose I'm interested in both (sounds and styles I've never heard, and music whose makings may be familiar to me but which I've not heard yet).
> So you are actively seeking out to you new genres and artists?
Yeah! I generally find that the more music I know and enjoy, the more music I can connect with or appreciate. At the moment I'm developing greater appreciation and taste for house music and extreme metal, while my go-to genres for a long time have tended to be folk and indie rock of various kinds.
> I'm not a completionist, so I'm OK with missing out. I do keep track of artists or (sub)genres to check out, but I very rarely have time to actually check some of it out. I have so much music that the past years I've been deleting more than adding, and I still haven't heard much of it well. Also by now I realize tastes change but also experiences, a song sounds different in different phases of your life it seems.
I'd say I agree with all of this. I used to listen to new artists and genres extremely systematically and dedicate a lot of time to it (many hours every week). Now it's more irregular than that but it certainly hasn't stopped.
> If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you.
Assuming what's "actually important to you" remains fixed as you age. The article suggests otherwise, with caveats:
> At the same time, stagnation is not a certainty. Research suggests that open-eardness and the discovery of new songs can be cultivated. Finding new music is a challenge, but it is achievable with dedicated time and effort.
Yeah - my taste has pretty steadily churned slowly over and over and over and that's how I like it.
There's so much music out there. It's like asking "when do you stop finding new books": you only stop finding if you stop looking. I enjoy the looking, and I see no risk at all of running out even if no more new stuff is ever made.
Yep. I'm in my 40's and I still every day check what new albums were released, and listen to as many of them as I can. Of course I take charades to old music every now and then, but over 50% of what I listen is new albums...
I think already this albums thing might leak my age. I guess people don't really listen to albums anymore...
> If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you.
One of the most traditional - and important - uses of music was to preserve the oral record, which existed in musical form to make it easier to remember accurately.
I wouldn't expect novelty in music to be important to many people.
For me, at least, the desire for new-to-me music isn't paired with a disdain for repetition or tradition. It's more like that I want to discover more traditions and connect with them, and to develop a better intuition for how the constituents of my musical universe are interconnected.
The traditional use of music you highlight really resonates with the way that I listen to music, incidentally. I joked recently with my roommate that for me, music is poetry with embellishments, while for him, it's drums with embellishments. Lyrical memorization has been a central part of how I've related to most of the music most important to me, too.
I suppose you're right, though. Most people engage relatively casually with music, and that's okay.
Where did I say people engage relatively casually with music? I highlighted a form of engagement that is (a) extremely serious, but (b) actively undermined by novelty.
You're right that a lot of people seem to view lyrics as being at best an annoyance; I've seen multiple people on HN argue with a straight face that in order to translate a song from one language to another language, it's not necessary for the meaning of the new lyrics to be similar to the meaning of the old lyrics.
This is not a sense of "translation" that I'm familiar with for other linguistic phenomena.
I've also seen people take offense at the idea that the concept of a "song" might involve singing.
Me neither, for two reasons. One, I was a DJ briefly as a young person and digging crates for new discoveries and hidden gems is still as fun as ever. And two, I exercise a lot, and you can only run to the same song so many times before it loses its juice (at least temporarily).
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.
How deep are you digging that you can say most that is out there isn't good? I find this surprising. Or do you mean good as in to your liking? The amount of talent out there is kind of mind blowing to me.
This mostly an assessment at scale. By volume, irrespective of genre, and even accounting for subjectivity, most of the material that gets published isn’t very good.
That being said, I generally don’t agree with conclusions like “culture is frozen”. You are correct that there is _more_ high quality material available than ever before. The challenge is just that it’s harder than ever to find it.
You can try some college radio e.g. some smaller colleges in WA, or U. Mich radio station. But for freeform, I think in the US at least WFMU is considered the best. https://wfmu.org/
Davide of MIMIC Radio is good for classical music, as it's pretty much the only one I know that usually plays a whole classical music piece, and not a single movement, etc. and it's high bitrate as well.
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.
> it is a small subset of what they were actually listening to back then.
I think there was also more variation on that than there is now. Music cost a fair amount of money to buy so what you heard as a kid depended on what people around you were spending hundreds of dollars on, and radio stations were far more diverse in the era before ClearChannel bought everything and consolidated onto a handful of choices. My wife and I had relatively similar suburban upbringings in many ways but there are a ton of 80s and 90s bands I was more familiar with because I happened to live within range of two different college radio stations at different points, and she basically had only very big commercial options.
There’s still variety these days but I think it’s undercut a lot because every teenager with a smartphone has access to pretty much anything, and the social media pressure to like the big names has never been stronger.
a lot of this is your choices. You may be choosing to engage less with new music.
I spend at least an hour each week doing something that I can also listen to new music at the same time, and I add it to my favorites, so that those dark AI recommendations start adding similar recommendations to my listening mixes. I don't listen to top 100 because by and large I don't like it. In modern music my taste has shifted away from prog rock and classic into techno/psytrance/etc. All it took was spending a bit of time looking, every week, to enrich my taste in music and make sure I wasn't repeating the stuff I heard on the radio growing up forever.
It's up to you to do it. It's your choice to make.
SXM satellite radio has channels based on decades, and they often do top 100 countdowns for this day in that decade, and for the most part the selection is absolute crap until they get to the top 5-10.
So, yeah, survivorship bias is what you are seeing here, and only the best 0.1% of songs of any decade will be played decades 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’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.
Well, older people (40, 50, even 60+) more passionate about music, they still do all of those (going to concerts, discussing music, crafting the right playlist for roadtrips), not unlike like they did in their 20s.
So, yes: most people do care less about music and stop finding new music.
This is maybe true if we talk about superstar kind of show. But I think it's now easier than ever to find out about little gigs, which were hard to find before social networks.
I live in medium size capital city (Belgrade), there are options to listen to live music every single day. Sometimes it's just classic music, sometimes there are cover bands, but quite often there's a chance to listen to original music. And these small gigs are quite cheap or even free. I very often listen a song or two (Spotify or youtube really help with this!), then if it looks promising I listen to some more while walking to the show.
Sure, sometimes it's not good. But very often I like it a lot and you can bet I listen to it much more focused then if that same music came on autoplay at home.
If you're in big enough city or have something bigger nearby - find a way to discover new gigs, follow venues, event organizers, local cultural institutions, festivals, etc. That's my main use of Facebook.
The artists have made it harder. They've pushed for aggressive one sided fan behavior policies (phone less), they've increased aggressively with the prices, the quality has gone down with many established bands, pushed large shows without building a performance with the space, and they've done a ton of things that don't help their product.
It feels more like greed in the business than an experience.
That being said I'm still sitting on the idea of paying 123$ for cage the elephant show on an album I haven't heard yet.
I am 100% onboard with the phone bans. There's nothing worse than hundreds of phone screens glowing in your face while you're trying to enjoy a live act. I can't imagine how weird it must feel for the performer(s) too. To go from people looking at you, making eye contact, engaging with the performance, to suddenly seeing a sea of phones pointed at you, with everyone watching you indirectly via their phone screen.
Yea, the whole "I want to watch the concert through my phone" thing I don't get at all. If you just want to watch it on your phone, why not just stay home and watch a professionally-produced concert video? Are they actually recording it for later (and are actually going to watch their low-quality recording later), or do they simply need to frame everything they experience inside a phone bezel?
> Are they actually recording it for later (and are actually going to watch their low-quality recording later)
What's wild is how much the "low-quality recording" on a modern smartphone looks and sounds way better than bootlegs I listened to (or, god forbid, watched) in the 90s.
I don't film entire concerts but I will usually try to get a nice clip from one of my favorite songs. It's fun to revisit. I'd love it if I had short clips from shows I saw when I was 20, especially ones of bands who blew up later or fell off the face of the earth.
Thank you for pointing this out. Everytime I bring up the "phone free" thing, everyone keeps jumping on and saying "well i don't like people filming". The situation that you mentioned is exactly how I do that and what I've seen.
The exception to this is extremely mainstream performances that attract people, where it may be the one big thing they do in the year or the next.
They just want to brag about it, I guess. Like with photos of their meals and... well, lots of things. To each their own, but I stopped attending most shows mainly because of the annoying seas of phones in front of me.
I'd bet that most of such recordings are not even shared or perhaps even looked at by the author (personally, I'm guilty of this). It's just some sort of compulsion to record it.
There are far better ways to address people holding up their phones to record than to outright ban them from everyone. There are strong reasons (Bataclan) to need and have those there.
What's with the sympathy for the performer? It's hard for them to even see the audience. Most of the light is focused on them and the audience is in the dark.
What's the better way? I'm not saying phones need to be physically removed from people, just kept in pockets/bags/whatever.
As for my comment about the performer, I'm just picturing it from their perspective and to me it would feel odd to go from looking at people to looking at phones. I'm sure there are lots of people who film with their phone lights on, so that's got to be noticeable through the stage lights.
> There's nothing worse than hundreds of phone screens glowing in your face while you're trying to enjoy a live act.
Plenty of worse things. People throwing up on you. Harassment. Tarps. Passing out. Being sold water even though it's supposed to be free. Taking bottle caps away from you. People talking during the show. People yelling about politics.
I don't enjoy all the phones either, but it is what it is.
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.
What were you trying to do? After Rdio folded, I switched from Spotify after failing to get it to give me anything other than top 40 pop (no matter what I started with, it was two tracks and then “have you tried our top hits? You will!”). Apple Music wasn’t as good as Rdio back then but it’s gotten better even within relatively obscure sub genres in my experience.
Yeah I'm more open minded now than I was when I was younger. All my taste seems to stem from the same roots (for example I like a wide variety of electronic music but the common thread is sounds and/or harmonies rooted in funk/soul/jazz/blues) but when I was a teenager I was only interested in rap music.
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.
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