Listening habits & finding music

#1

yesterday I came across a list of June album release dates at genius and it made me realise once again how much new music is constantly produced and put out – and it’s not only the release of new music. Songs get remixed, edited, flipped, sampled and then circulated again through mixes, e-mails, on radio stations, music platforms, apps or social media websites – and that’s only the digital side. not to mention club nights, concerts, record stores or private listening parties.

Given this ever-expanding plethora of new music it keeps getting harder for me to listen to whole albums, find the time to listen through whole mixes or two hours of NTS/Rinse (and when I do I end up with a list of songs I most likely won’t return to), get back to EPs or songs I initially enjoyed, remember song titles, or recognise a single song through the span of a club night, because I can’t keep up with the onslaught of new music.
so how do you consume music and decide what you’re going to listen to?

and how do you even find new music? it feels as if nowadays everyone is either trusting the algorithms of apps and websites to provide them with tailor-made personified cuts or has their 2-10 channels, from spotify playlists, over youtube channels and review websites like p4k to that one friend who always seems to be aware of the newest trend.

let me know if you can relate to any of it and how you manage it all.

#2

It’s essentially become like a full time job and it’s overwhelming. It’s my main hobby so I spent all my spare time listening to, reading about, going clubbing, searching for music, but even that is tough going!

I find I can’t just miss out on things, I have to permanently keep up to date with all new releases. Twitter has now become a crucial method of discovery, by following all my fav producers and djs, can keep up to date with what they are into.

Though many people may be against it due to essentially being a filesharing site, Funkysouls has been instrumental (excuse the pun) in keeping up with new music, as it shows all the new music being put out, split by various genres.

#3

I was just thinking last night how overwhelming it is trying to keep up with the sheer amount of music that’s coming out. I tend to check the weekly release updates from shops like Hard Wax, RubaDub and Boomkat, as well as follow labels and artists on Bandcamp and Twitter. Problem is I can’t afford to buy them all so I end up saving a lot of stuff in Spotify or Play Music, or bookmarking the bandcamp page, but inevitably I end up forgetting about a lot of the releases I’ve saved.

I remember when I could tell you the name of every track on my favourite albums but sometimes these days I can’t even remember the name of the artist let alone individual tracks. I’ll hear something in a shop or on the radio and know I own it but not be able to identify it.

I’m not really offering a solution here but I can definitely relate and I’m interested to hear how other people manage this. One thing I thought of was to start adding everything I buy to my Discogs account and anything else I come across to my want list. That way I can check the app to see what I’ve already got (have bought things twice before) and also keep track of what I want to check out but can’t afford to buy.

#4

Got no money to keep up with stuff at the mo, but for a long time I got most of my recommendations from the Boomkat list of new releases, and latterly just been digging through discogs. The wish list and collection recording features are really useful.

I’ve also found it useful to stop getting too preoccupied with FOMO and be ok with going through phases where I am preoccupied with one genre to the exclusion of others.

#5

Not that great of a list, but I feel your pain, mate.

Still listen to albums, but it’s quite rare that I revisit an album more than twice. There are like two artists on my last.fm I’ve scrobbled more than 1000 times since 2010.

I’ve more or less given up trying to remember song or album names, it’s enough to remember the artist and genre—and I’m starting to give up on the artist names, too. Last.fm is a beautiful thing when you got a shit memory.

Try to avoid all the algorithms, except for youtube’s which is amazing when you want that weird 70s stuff. Otherwise, google all artist names I stubble upon, listen to them for 10-15 seconds, if I like it, I’ll try out a release or two.

Ways to stumble upon names to google: interviews with artists that like to name-drop other artists (Amoeba’s youtube show What’s In My Bag is bloody amazing for this), lists of recently leaked albums, several friends with great music knowledge, discover a genre and listen to EVERYTHING that is listed on the wikipage for the genre, and some times a vinyl factory list or two.

#6

I feel you :frowning: and I think I have the same issue with listening. I feel like I’m more of a singles guys, but when a good album hits - good meaning the album I enjoy - I listen to it without skipping a song. For instance Dedekind Cut’s $​uccessor, I listened to it bunch of times - of course I like specific songs - but for me I really like the listen to that album as a whole. It has a story some mystical story to it.On the other hand, some albums I just listen to for one particular song and I’m gonna admit I have no issues with this attitued. Most people around me are questioning this method of listening, but I just can’t get into listening the whole album without skipping. I think the issue is right now is that we consume music. The act of consumption is the issue. I think companies like Spotify or iTunes made it this way.

As for finding new music, I usually go to discogs, click on explore and filter things that I’m into. For instance I pick the style and the decade I filtered them for my preferences and sort all the records to most collected and start searching from the last page. Next, I just copy and paste the album title and artist’s name on YouTube or Google to see if it’s on the web and listen.

#7

the youtube account associated with my work email is fucking amazing at giving me new music.

if you dedicate a youtube account to music - just vinyl rips and static image music uploads, no dodgy speed runs or goofy streamers or simpsons clips - it’s the best algorithm out there for finding music. i swear by it.

#8

I try to keep it old-school: dj charts, specific reviewers/bloggers I feel I “know”. Never trust an algorithm “based” on anything otherwise you decidedly want to deindividualize your music experience.

#9

Indeed. You’ll never reach a stage where you think you’re perfectly on top of things. Maybe you keep on top of the big new releases but there’ll be loads of stuff from small labels you’ve never heard of. Then there’s all of the corners you’ve never explored, back catalogues you’ve never dug through and so on.

I think the only sane approach is to just accept that you’re only getting a tiny sip from a fire hydrant of music. It doesn’t really matter how you get to it then. Other people have different approaches and get different sips, that’s cool as long you enjoy what you get.

That said, I hate it when everyone in a club cheers when a particular track drops and I have no idea wtf it is.

#10

it’s definately important to avoid FOMO and trust your taste, I’ve gone on a few wonderfully serendipidous(spelling?:weary: ) wormholes on bandcamp searching by area/reigion hastag ie: glasgow, portland, Bangkok etc, or searching entire discographies of sound engineers on discogs.
boring yes. but to find gold one must sift through the mud

#11

A smattering of blogs. Friend recs. Twitters of artists and critics that I like (if they think another artist is cool I’ll for sure give it the time of day). Bands that are coming through my area on tour. I still read American Songwriter and try to pick up zines every once in a while, which can really help you get familiar with a specific scene. Bandcamp’s editorial content has been great.

#12

I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet going for every time I’ve listened to something bigger than a song since 2016, and I’ve found it has helped me be better aware of how I’m spending my time, since I had been feeling a little like I was constantly moving on to whatever was “new”, endlessly in the present. One thing I’ve noticed though is I’ll get midway into a year, and I’ll put on an album from last year, and I’ll be shocked to find out that it was the first time I’d put it on all year. The first time it happened I was convinced it was a mistake, but it’s happened enough times now to make me think that the significant relationships we build with music comes as much from thinking about it as it does from repeat listens. But I think what got those albums to that point where they stayed fresh in my mind was that I did spend time repeatedly listening to them, until I didn’t. So I would say that the best approach in the deluge of new music is to be OK letting some things get past, hearing more things isn’t worth sacrificing what you can get out of building a relationship with a piece of music. Though people have all sorts of different relationships with repetition and memory so it’s totally fair if someone can get it to work with minimal repetitions.

As far as finding new music, I’m a big fan of using the Bandcamp fan account feature to follow people who buy music I like, so I can see what else they’re buying. Usually it just ends up pushing me over the edge on stuff I’ve already been hearing about but I’ve found out about some great stuff through that too.

#13

Holy hell! That’s some übermensch shit right there.

Have you tried last.fm?

#14

It started because I was using spreadsheets at work and only barely knew what I was doing, so I wanted to get more familiar with them. And with last.fm I always hear about people running into issues scrobbling something, I like having the control. And it’s easier to calculate things like the days between listens so I can get a good look at the way different sorts of consumption patterns can emerge.

Like here’s a chart of the days between listens for my most listened to release of 2017, Kara Lis-Coverdale - Grafts. Left to right is overall time, and the height is determined by the number of days between listens. The higher the line, the longer it was before I put it on again. And then the letters a, b, c, etc. correspond to the number of listens, even though clearly those should be numbers because that is so much more clear.

So I had a heavy consumption period in the beginning, getting up to my 10th listen before a month had passed, gradually getting to the point where it was about a week between listens, but then I had that one spike where I needed to hear it immediately again. Then it drifted to weeks, and then it hit the point where it was months between listens, but then it went back into weeks again when I got all reflective about the end of the year. And now it’s gone back into months between listens.

So here’s the chart of my second most listened to release of 2017, Visible Cloaks - Reassemblage.

So here you can see I got to 15 listens over roughly a month’s time, and most of that was done in the first half of the month. I was playing it at least once a day for the first week there, sometimes twice. This sort of overconsumption leads to a clearer trend with no deviation. I love both of these albums, but I’m confident I will listen to Grafts more over the course of my life because I feel like I’m still able to mark new time with it. But Reassemblage, because of how I consumed it, is something I will only ever want to just check in with. Of course it’s important to note that this heavy consumption happened in February 2017 and everything was politically miserable and so I needed something. I regret nothing. But I like that I can be more aware of when something like that is happening so that I can consciously lean into it when I feel like I need it or pull back when I feel like the album would work better as something not directly associated with a specific point in time.

Sorry for nerding out there lol but I think it’s on topic.

#15

Dude, don’t be sorry, this looks wonderful! Do you have real life input into it too? Like what happened on that day so you can trace your music patterns after what’s happening around you, like people you met, shows you’r been to, or as you said, politics?

Yeah, last.fm can be a dick sometimes, but works most of the time. Plus, the last couple of years they’ve had this last.week/year function with some really nice graphs of your listening. It’s become a really important tool for my listening, just to be able to check if I’ve listened to an artist or not is so worth it.

#16

Oh it would probably be good to combine all this with some kind of journaling like that, but the only supplemental stuff I throw in is shows. Probably an instance of laziness saving me here since I could probably end up getting lost in trying to figure it all out if I had all of that and forget to actually keep doing new things.

And yeah last.fm does seem to be stepping up and giving people good visual access into what they’re doing, the time of day breakdown they had is something I’d never have the patience to enter in manually.

#17

Would be an interesting idea for a blog/book or something.

But it depends a lot on how much you’re listening to, too. If there’s an album a day or something it’s simple to do manually. Now when I’m looking at how many tracks I scrobbled last year… yeah, I would never, Never, NEVER!!! do that manually. And…what the fuck am I doing with my life? And… what the fuck is wrong with me?

#18

One thing I try to do is to set time aside each day to listen to one album: put away the mobile, try not to get distracted, actually do some active listening. Works better with vinyl than CDs, because of the shorter running time (I only do one record if it’s a double/triple), and because the work of turning the record over is a good moment to refocus attention. Hopeless with downloads - you’re gonna be near the computer and end up checking social media or whatever. It’s kind of an old man anachronistic thing to do at this stage, but I figure it does help me enjoy music more so I’ll keep doing it.

Also wanna echo everyone here saying FOMO is your enemy - in my late teens I would try to listen to literally every record the press was talking about and it just made me hate music, plus I got way more invested in staking out positions depending on who said what about which record than listening. One thing I do miss is the energy to engage with music I don’t “get” and to delve into it sufficiently until I start to enjoy it. I’m too fickle for that now.

#19

interesting idea! may try that out.

#20

can relate for sure.
it’s became so much, that old Quality over quantity strike it all.
still doing best effort forward the music, but sometimes leting it strive a bit like if it doesn’t make it’s may up to me…
and I never used deezer/spotify/iTunes or any youtube/bandcamp recomandations algorythme,
but better trusts labels or musicmakers references.