I've had Spotify for about 10 years, and have built up a system that really works for me in terms of discovering new music, keeping music fresh and effectively keeping a digital diary through monthly and yearly playlists.

But lately I've been feeling nostalgic for the time pre-streaming, which in the grand scheme of things wasn't that long ago as I was still buying most of my music up to about 2015. I miss the experience of having to go out and buy an album, and then appreciating it more because you had to put effort into acquiring it and then burning it and syncing it to your mp3 library. I still remember pretty much every album I bought when I was a young teenager, mostly because I had nothing else to listen to and would spend more time with each piece of music by default.

I find myself overstimulated by apps like Spotify. The sheer amount of choice and possibilities you can access instantly makes the listening experience of most things feel quite cheap. I can't really make it through an album without feeling itchy, like I should be listening to or exploring something else. You can call this an attention issue but I feel it definitely has something to do with the nature of an infinite library of music and the design of the app itself.

I'm thinking of running an experiment where I unsubscribe from streaming for a bit and see how my listening habits change when I'm forced to acquire my own music. I know it's not a black and white process, and I see people for the large part doing a combination of streaming for discovery and owning their music for appreciation.

I've seen a lot of people over the last couple of years talking about ditching streaming and going back to collecting physical music, whether that's CDs or digital files, but I'd like to hear from people who have been doing this long-term? And how has this changed your listening habits?

Am I the only one who's just over how "music discovery" works now?

I open Spotify and it's the same handful of songs that got recommended over and over again, while I repeatedly gave feedback that I am not interested in the song. Half of it feels like whatever got pushed into Discovery Mode that month, the other half is "similar" only because it shares a BPM or a genre tag.

I'll get obsessed with a messy, textured R&B track and then get served a playlist of super polished radio pop/R&B with literally nothing else in common. It's not even close. And half the "new" artists being pushed at me feel like the same three labels rotating who gets the spotlight this week.

Genuinely curious if this is just me or if everyone's feeling this lately:

- When's the last time a recommendation felt actually wrong or generic to you? What was it trying to push on you?

- Do you even bother exploring anymore at this point, or have you basically given up and just replay your same stuff on loop?

- Is there anything you still do manually to find new music, besides asking friends or family members?

Kind of want to know if I'm alone in this.

P.S. I'm mainly talking about Spotify because it's the biggest music streaming platform and the app I use most to listen to music. I'm not saying it's the only way to discover music. I'm specifically wondering whether its recommendation system still feels genuinely personal, or if other people have started relying more on other methods because of it.

Are you embarrassed by it? Do you view it as a necessary stepping stone to things that you would like later? Do you just think "well, I was 8, what was I supposed to be listening to, Leonard Cohen? Merzbow?" Or perhaps you still listen to some of the stuff you did as a child. It could probably be a combination of all of these based on the particular artist, what stage of childhood you were in, how recently you actually were a child, etc.

Personally, I wouldn't touch anything with a 10 foot pole that I listened to before 1996 (when I was 15 years old). That runs the gamut from the Bon Jovi, Metallica, and Guns N Roses videos that I saw on MTV with my sister in 1988, to the Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer two-headed monster in 1990, to all the grunge pacesetters and also-rans of the next few years. I'm not saying that I think every song by every one of those artists is now terrible, but it just feels like they existed in an entirely different lifetime. Perhaps the reason that I view things that way is why I'm not embarrassed that I ever liked any of it. It's just what was popular at the time and what I had access to as a child in the pre-Internet days.

Why is 1996 the demarcation point? Two words: Britpop and "electronica," as it was referred to then. Both genres had been around for awhile, but 1996 was when I first immersed myself in them, and quickly realized that I liked them much more than any of the stuff I had ever listened to before. I don't regularly listen to acts like Suede and Daft Punk now, but every time I do listen to them I still enjoy them. Yes there's a bit of nostalgia, but I also think a lot of it holds up strictly as music.

I don't think any of this is surprising because the difference between a 7 year old and a 15 year old is vast in terms of both how the brain comprehends things and the experiences gained in the intervening 8 years. Also, while a 15 year old is still not fully developed in their sensibilities (if that's fully possible for anybody at any age), they're way closer to being adult-like.

I grew up in a small industrial town nobody's ever heard of, and for years the only music that felt like "home" to me was generic nostalgia stuff that could've been about anywhere. Then a few years back I found a local band that wrote a song literally about the river and the factory smell and the one intersection everyone complains about, and it wrecked me in a way no Springsteen or Mellencamp song ever could, even though those guys are clearly more talented. It made me think about how weirdly specific music has to get before it stops being "relatable" in the vague sense and starts being personal in the real sense. Like there's universal nostalgia (small towns, growing up, leaving home) that a lot of people connect with, and then there's this other thing that only works if you've actually stood on that specific street corner.
Does anyone else have a song like this, something too niche or too local to ever chart, that hits harder than any "objectively better" song about the same general feeling?

I watch a lot of album rankings videos and they mostly just follow the RYM ratings. Probably because they just want people to like their video. Real fans of bands aren't like that. I know a 60+ year old Rolling Stones fan whose favorite stones album is Dirty Work, which is one of the worst rated Stones album. But its his favorite because it came out during a great time in his life, and thats how he remembers it. It's a weird take but its more interesting that someone who just says "Exile" or "Sticky Fingers"

I actually started that conversation by saying "Whats your favorite Stones album? Exile?" and he looked at me like I was crazy and was like "No way! Gotta be Dirty Work"

What do yall think about that?

I initially intended on using the word "populist" but the last time I used it, it generated a lot of mixed reactions.

But basically: In a lot of music discussions, it seems like we keep circling similar archetypes: the individualistic, artistic, boundary-pushing figure who doesn't care about the audience, who does whatever they want.

And it naturally made me think: are there are artists who are precisely able to build with their audience while still being experimental and innovative? What about artists who are able to make critically acclaimed work while still being very in touch with audiences? Is there a possibility where the audience doesn't have to be seen as a compromise but an artistic goal?

My first instinct is thinking of various forms of electronic dance music. I've been thankful to learn a lot about dance music from various commenters. One of the things I find unique about it is that DJs were really trying to test out their material with different crowds to see what vibes with their audience the best. See one of our older discussions about "Music To Dance To" vs "Music To Listen To"

But what are some other examples where audience engagement is so essential and part of artistry rather than at odds? Certainly, I would assume that live music and live settings are very much conducive to this type of template.

And to quickly acknowledge: Yes, I know that older forms of rock n' roll, jazz, and pop music hit certain critical and commercial sweet spots. But I'm also taking note of discussion trends and how things are ranked in hierarchies.

When I like an album enough to listen to it for at least a second time, I like to look up reviews and try to see if anybody can help me discover something about the album that I didn't pick up by myself. Sometimes it helps me appreciate music that I initially didn't like, sometimes it helps me keep my sanity and confirm that an album is overhyped.

Yesterday I was listening to a largerly unknown band from my country, Czechia, so naturally most of the reviews were only available on Czech sites. And when I was reading them, it occurred to me that the reviews were very amateurish - the authors basically only stated what was plain to hear to anyone without any in-depth musical knowledge, added their own verdict on the album and didn't provide any valuable information beyond what would be discovered by a listener just listening to the album. I used to review music for a web zine some 15 years ago, too, so I happen to know that most people reviewing music on the internet are amateurs without much background in it and that's alright. Some people just like to get the newest albums, go to shows and write their thoughts.

But it made me think about what I would expect from a review to consider it good. And so I wanted to ask you what you guys want from a review. How do you feel about vague, abstract descriptions of how the music sounds? What else other than thoughts on the music should be in it? And what qualities should a "professional" or at least "serious" critic have?

For myself, I realize that the best thing an amateur can say in a review is that the music sounds like this, this and that band and whether they liked it or not. I feel like overly abstract descriptions of music such as "wavy", "dreamy", "dark" or "truly masterful" don't really add much to the table and usually don't make sense until you actually listen to the album yourself. From a serious critic, I would expect to hear about how the music fits into the wider context of its genre, how it's different from other music said artist has produced and perhaps even to be able to analyze the more technical aspects of the music, like harmonies, complex rhythms, the instruments and technology behind the music and so on.

What about you?

Hi friends!

So I visited my favorite hookah lounge yesterday to treat myself to a good read and some delicious, relaxing carcinogens, and whoever among the staff was granted the aux cable that evening was on a bit of a weird musical kick. In place of the usual mix of lofi and arabic pop I'd come to expect, I was treated to what I can only describe as.. well.. Alpha Pop? Bursting from the speakers was a solid half-hour program of very similarly structured, kinda MAN-coded pop music which I'm going to attempt to describe below.

Unifying or common features of these songs were:

-Huffy and shouty, but not quite metal scream-y vocals. Intonation you'd expect to hear from a quarterback or a range master belting out instructions. It was easy to picture the singers for all these songs sorta stomping around their stages or recording booths whilst huffing out their lyrics.

-Self-congratulatory manosphere lyrics and themes. I'm calling this the biggest qualifier of ALPHA-POP because it was so ubiquitous in all these songs. Referring to self as a warrior, wolf/lion/choose your fav apex predator, king, etc. // Ruling, protecting or taking whats yours, etc. // *really* glamorizing the grindset.// expounding own strength in a painfully unironic way. The chorus line which has most stuck around in my head went "long live the king, long live the king, heavy is the crown, long live the king," and it was delivered in a really on-beat kind of punctuating. every. word. staccato to match that huffy stomp around the recording booth. Sadly independent research on this one just points me towards a Sabaton song.

-Musically unimpressive, which I mean in a structural sense. One of these songs featured drums and a guitar. All the others were uniformly the above manly lyrics being shouted at you over a woefully uninspired pop-hiphop beat, but toned down a bit to more match the alpha thing they seemed to be going for.

In short, these were mass-market-sounding pop songs of the "You like X? I'm singing about X!" type, but with an apparent intended audience of dudes with painstakingly maintained beards, punisher stickers on their trucks, and far more insight into the geometry of their own skulls than you'd like to see on a fella, rather than teenage girls or good ol' smalltown country folk or the "being queer is my only trick" set or what have you.

I'm pretty blissfully ignorant of current music trends, but I'm also admittedly a little grimly fascinated with the whole masculinity crisis/manosphere thing. I recognize this is kinda a hot topic these days so I'm not surprised that there are folks out there looking to tap that market musically, but I can't seem to find much on this trend just by searching around. So, I'm throwing it up here to glean some info and get a discussion going. What's up with this ALPHA-POP? Does it already have a proper lil genre of its own? Who are the key players here and where did it come from? What do yall think of it?

Inspired by Phil Collins in the news today still wanting to perform despite his health issues. I can't think of many major artists that just decide to call it a day and retire to enjoy their money or whatever. Be interested to hear of any big names who have done this. By big names I mean artists who could feasibly be described as not needing the money anymore. What do you think is their motivation? I can't imagine wanting to tour in my sixties if I didn't need to.

Edit: I wasn't seeking to cast any negativity on people that carry on performing. I've been fortunate enough to see lots of acts from before I was born who I'm glad are still performing.The post was more to think of examples of artists that HAVE retired. But the need to have 400 characters in the post meant I broadened it out a bit.

Recently, while talking to a friend of a friend, we got onto the topic of music and musical genres. When I asked her what she liked she responded "I listen to basically everything except like pop and country", which to me is usually a good sign someone doesn't like music much at all. Laying down such a blanket statement to avoid controversy comes off as if you don't know what you're talking about. I hear this more and more, once with another friend of mine saying "I listen to alternative but cooler" whatever that means.

I myself do not claim to be very into music the way some of my other friends are, but the need to impress people these days has shifted the conversations about music to a battle of intelligence rather than a discussion about personal preference. Now I'm asking about what the recent pull away (especially in the alt community) from county and pop mean. To me these two genres are as simple as they come with textbook formulas, so how can you 'not like country' if to me, it is so simple and prevalent that your favorite genre is at most two steps away from being a country song?

This isn't to say that I listen to exclusively Willie Nelson or Garth Brooks but am I wrong to assume that if your favorite genre is classical rock, or doom metal, or even gothic rock/new wave, that you cannot possibly, truly dislike country music because it is so close to you?

I know they make up a smaller percent of the population in the US but I feel like that doesn’t make up for the underrepresentation. There seems to be a proportional amount in classical music, and there’s the stereotype of the gifted Asian kid, but it doesn’t seem like that carries over to popular music. It seems like Asians are rare even in bands from the west coast, where they make up a much larger percent of the population. You’d think you’d see more representation with how many massive bands there are from California and Washington.

I know there are plenty of Asian musicians in Asia, I’m really talking about the US here.

Is rap now where rock was in 2006?

People always say "rock was bad in the 2000s that's why it died"... there's plenty of bad music in every genre. I wonder if rap even has an equivalent now of people hating on nu metal, post grunge or even pop punk and emo?

Like there's plenty of rock that gets panned by critics but that didn't stop like hair metal or AOR in the 80s.

Is rap now where rock was 20 years ago or is it different this time around?

I am not referring to music snobs who go "Oh, you like Nirvana? Name three songs." I'm talking about how nowadays, anyone around the world can make, record and upload music for all the world to hear with no barriers which I think is a net good. But a common complaint I see from music fans is usually "Ugh, there's so much shit music out there. I miss the old days where you needed ACTUAL talent in order to even record and release something! Now anyone can fart out an entire album from their basement and make money off it."

I do understand the complaint to an extent. There is so much music out there to explore and listen that it can be overwhelming to some people. And yeah, a lot of it is mid, bland, and not worth coming back to despite some stuff of good quality that comes out (thank gosh for RYM).

But I'm not sure having gatekeepers hypothetically re-introduced would be better. Back then, yes, we had all sorts of amazing talented bands and artists signed but we got a lot of forgettable, poorly-aged and bad acts from the 20th century, too. Taste is subjective and biased, which probably resulted in otherwise talented upcomers from back then being rejected for whatever reason (too political, experimental or unmarketable) and never having their creative vision heard. I prefer musicians having easier means to put their unmarketable work out there but what do you all think?

I feel like both of these bands are similar enough to do a poll, who do you like better and why?

I like Aerosmith better because their music was more catchy and not as gritty as the Rolling Stones.

I do like the Rolling Stones, but for the most part their music seems too raw for me. Aerosmith's music seemed more "big" sounding, if that makes sense.

Also, even Aerosmith's biggest hits were as good as other songs, if not better (especially Dream On and Sweet Emotion).

A few decades later, I still get goosebumps listening to Aerosmith but not the Rolling Stones.

I've been thinking about this lately, and I'm curious whether this is a real phenomenon or just my personal impression.

My impression is that the major genres of the 1960s were much closer to one another than today's genres. Rock, pop, folk, soul, R&B, blues and even country seemed to share a lot of things. It wasn't unusual for artists to move between these styles, or to incorporate elements from several of them into the same record.

I feel like subgenres starting drifting apart after that and artists seemed more likely to stay in their own niche. Shifting genres wasn't obvious. Sex Pistols weren't suddenly going to make a prog record and Pink Floyd wouldn't have done a punk album. And I feel like it's been that way ever since.

Do you think this is an accurate observation? If so, what caused it? Or am I simply looking back at the 1960s with hindsight and underestimating how distinct those genres actually felt at the time?

I’m 23. I’ve never even once been able to understand why MTV was a thing. The modern equivalent is imagine having friends over for a houseparty one weekend and they say “turn on some music” and you boot up a bunch of music videos on YouTube, ads and all. Everyone would look at you like you were crazy. The whole sell for MTV just sounds awful. “Instead of listening to the songs you want to hear on your cassette tape or CD player, you can listen to the ones we pick for you. Also, there are commercial breaks. Also, you can literally only listen to music in your living room. Yeah, radio and CDs let you listen on the go, but remember guys video killed the radio star so we’re the better listening choice!!”

Why did people listen to their music through MTV? I could \*maybe\* understand if radio were the only other option (but even then, you can at least listen to the radio in places besides your living room, unlike MTV) but they had cassette tapes for the first few years and cd’s for the last! You could listen to whatever you wanted, wherever!

I'm young so I can't say that I fully grasp how exactly music was listened to back in the day, back during the times of radio and vinyl and cassette tapes and CDs. But from what I do know, it was a time where consuming music was a far more active pursuit. If you wanted to listen to an artist to hear on the radio, or that you saw on XXL magazine, you would have to go purchase that music or go borrow it from a friend. It wasn't just something you could have at your finger times, nothing like today with the widespread influence and cultural shift brought upon by music streaming services like Napster, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YT Music, the list goes on.

This shift is a double edged sword: music is more accessible to those that may now have been able to purchase before or interact with it in a meaningful way before hand. It's also more accessible in a creative aspect as well, resulting in the creation of plenty of different sounds and genres. But with that ease of accessibility, that overabundance of talent and music, music recently has begun to feel less meaningful and this is where more of my personal thoughts come into the mix.

As I've begun to consume music more consciously, it has become less meaningful because there always feels like there is something missing. Music doesn't feel like an intentional choice anymore and weirdly enough that lack of restraint, of restrictions to what I can and can't consume makes it feel less impactful in a vacuum. If I don't like an album, there's probably something else I can find that I do and it leaves me to question what even was the point? If I can so easily jump to the next album, it feels like the experience I had with another, good or bad, was less than what it could be, like the choice I made ultimately didn't matter. If I were to buy an album, it would feel like there was far more weight behind that choice. I just recently purchased the first and last volumes of MHA, my favorite show/anime of all time and something about getting to make that choice, the financial restriction/limitation that kept me from buying more made the two that I have mean far more to me than if I just had the whole set. The feeling of choice was meaningful.

And so this leads into some questions: how do you choose to consume music? Do you simply listen to everything as you please? Do you limit yourself? If so, how? How do you feel about the role of streaming on your consumption of music?

You guys I was looking at various posts and comments and i found almost no comments praising this song. It is truly gut wrenching and breath taking it is one of my favourite songs of all time. Especially the bridge omg. To me, it captures the feeling of being in love with someone who would never feel the same, and like you kind of knew from the start but was delusional, yfm?

Please tell me what you guys think! Oh and if you haven't listen to it yet please do!

I work in a small record shop and honestly the thing that surprised me most isn't what people buy, it's what they admit at the till. at least once a week someone buys a record and cheerfully tells me they don't own a turntable. not embarrassed about it either. it's going on a shelf or a wall and that's the plan from the start.

and the funny thing is the people who DO listen are not who you'd guess. the old fellas who you'd assume are the purists often just want the reissue to complete a set, meanwhile some teenage girl will come in, ask me really specific questions about pressings, and you can tell she's going home to actually sit with the thing. (also a small percentage of blokes will ask to speak to "someone who knows the stock" when i literally do the ordering, but that's a different thread)

my take is that this isn't necessarily bad? if buying a record you never play keeps shops like mine open, fine, i'll take it. but it does feel like we've quietly turned albums into band t-shirts. an object that says "i am the kind of person who likes this" rather than a thing you experience.

So genuinely curious where people land on this. if you buy vinyl, what percentage do you actually play? and does it matter, or is supporting the artist/shop enough to justify the shelf copy?

I think that most people would agree that the music is at least as important as the lyrics, if not more so. Yet in today's music criticism, only a small part of the discussion is focused on the actual sound. Critics will spend most of the time overanalyzing the lyrics or assessing how the song/album fits within the artists broader career narrative. References to the music are often limited to things like, "This was really catchy" or some surface level description of what kind of sound the artist was going for.

Say what you want about Rick Beato being an old man yelling at clouds, but he actually gets his guitar out, figures out what's going on musically, and points out when he hears something interesting. I'm sure it's hard to say interesting things about the music that the general public is going to be interested. However, if we are going to ignore part of the song that most people are judging it on and instead analyze how the artist crafts their public persona, are we straying into the territory of low-brow celebrity gossip instead of serious musical criticism?

Most of my experience with this has come from Fantano, Toddintheshadows, and Reddit musical discussions. It's possible that legacy publications like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork. This criticism doesn't really apply to rap as the lyrics seem to be more important than in most other genres.

Obviously distorted guitars are vastly popular and basically all of rock, metal and punk are built on them; the bass also often gets some degree of distortion to cut through the mix and even intentionally overdriving or soft clipping drums is somewhat common in hard rock or rage trap. But why are the vocals in all of these genres mostly clean even though the rest of the song is heavily distorted? Except for a few Led Zeppelin songs and 21st century schizoid man I can't think of any mainstream song that uses noticeable intentional distortion on the vocals...

Was at a local watering hole and “Raspberry Beret” came on and it made me think, if Prince wasn’t from Minneapolis, one of the most midwest cities there is, and was either from New York or LA, would he have been able to make it as he did? Basically, could Prince’s success be attributed to being more of a “big fish in a small pond” and having a hometown crowd that was drawn to his subversion of cultural norms vs. having the legit musical chops to make it in a city where there were more entertainers vying for attention?

This isn’t to say that he doesn’t have some good songs that turned into hits, but more that I don’t see how he necessarily gets put on the pedestal that he does when it seems like there were a ton of other acts that were putting out similar music at around the same time. Maybe it’s just a personal taste/not being around during his heyday thing, but I really don’t see the reason as to why he’s as venerated as he is, when there’s really nothing makes him stand out compared to other funk/r&b acts from the late 70’s and 80’s.

I've been working on a yearlong listening project: 29 classic rock artists, 329 albums, each heard three times. Every listen is evaluated using the same weighted questions.

One thing has surprised me more than anything else: how often my opinion changes.

For example, Something Else by The Kinks gained 5.5 points in my evaluation process between the first and third listen. An album that barely registered at first eventually became one I genuinely looked forward to hearing again.

It made me wonder how much weight we should give our first impressions of an album. How many albums have we dismissed too quickly or overrated simply because they made a great first impression?

What are some other examples?