When do we stop finding new music?

I find it interesting that GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

The 1980s are still doing quite well among all but the oldest generation.

Is it possible that music may actually be getting worse? Corporatized, consolidated, computerized.

Look at Hollywood now too: everything is a sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, or adaptation. There’s hardly anything original anymore.

Spotify has financial incentive to obfuscate their UI to tilt people toward mindlessly consuming playlists. This is because labels pay Spotify to put certain songs on large playlists, and Spotify knows playlists are a good habit to push onto their users.

Radio was used to discover new music decades ago, but paying a radio station (directly) to play a song is illegal (payola), so DJs had to break new songs, styles, and have a wide array of music offered (within the theme of the station).

Spotify now has the ability to engage in a legal version of "digital" payola, so their handcrafted group of artists by major labels are peppered into their hundreds of in-house playlists, disguising this business practice as a wide array of music selection.

This is detrimental to music discovery, because discovering a song is a lot less meaningful than discovering a new album and consuming the project as a whole and appreciating its composition.

So you're discovering new music, but none of it is memorable, because listening to music in 2024 (for a lot of people) is often a wall of slightly groovy background noise, with the occasional standout track that you probably toss into your own personal playlist.

How I fixed this:

1. Disable the 'autoplay' feature

2. Don't use playlists and listen to albums (except for when I'm in a pinch or hosting a party)

3. Intentionally discover a new genre every few months and go down a rabbit hole. My current new genre is South African Amapiano. Excellent stuff.

4. Discover music across different genres and time periods using RateYourMusic.

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.

I must be some sort of freak.

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.

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’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.

Finding "new" music is a concept that the music industry has marketed to you like being skinny or that cola is a lifestyle. In times past people were happy with one genre or slight variations of that genre for millennia. Now we are spoiled for choice but are yet still made to feel ashamed if we are not consuming the newest and discarding the oldest. As if there is sickness to be found in enjoying something old and well worn.

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 think that it really depends on your relationship with music. I’m no longer in my 30s and still find new music all the time.

I wonder why parents consistently listening to older music than their childless peers

Well I'm in my 50s, and I mostly stopped finding new music when record labels, streaming, and social media destroyed the prospects for people who would otherwise make that new music for me to find.

New stuff still arrives (you're not going to predict that me-at-15-loving-Megadeth will much later also love Billie Eilish or Gin Wigmore or Mirel Wagner or ...) but most "new music" is garbage by the standards set by about 50 years of music (much of that before I was alive and thus well before my "peak influence").

I suspect the "findings" of the article suffer from environmental effects that weren't considered/controlled.

I 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.

The conclusions of this study - that musical open-mindedness drops off in the late twenties - is consistent with the fact that (pop) music creators also peak in their twenties, with a rapid decline into creative insignificance afterwards.

There's a lot of comforting analysis here on social and cultural development reasons why that might be, but the likely ugly truth is the same faced by creatives in some other areas - a clear cognitive decline, it's just too universal within those fields to be anything else than a physical cause.

With very rare exceptions old people don't make good pop music, there's no reason to expect listeners to not mirror the decline.

It doesn't seem like the article makes much of a distinction between newly released music and music that you haven't listened to yet. Personally, as I get older I've lost the ability to listen to the same Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd etc albums for the 100th time. I cringe every time I hear the opening of Don't Stop Believing. So I've kept trying to get deeper into prog and other genres lately as I'm just burnt out on the old (good) stuff.

I still don't get why after all this investment in AI Spotify can't just give me a seamless never ending stream of music. I need to keep selecting from playlists they generate which often repeat some songs extremely often. All I want from a Spotify interface is play/pause/skip/like/dislike. Then use those to continuously adapt the selection of the next song. If you want to be fancy add a warmup mode where you ask me some questions or show me some songs to like/dislike for that particular moment so that the initial selections start warmer. If I had that I could explore a lot more music. Because I don't I end up just listening to the greatest hits of things I remember and then that further pollutes the dataset to the point where my musical tastes must stagnate.

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.

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.

I loved this article. I have about 4k songs saved in my "liked" playlist on Spotify, majority of them were from when I was 20 to 24, then it tapered off a lot. I turned 30 this year and I still like to discover new music but not as much as I did in my early 20s.

Very difficult with streaming. Rdio used to have a slider to recommend more unusual music. No other service has this that I’ve found. They keep playing the same songs and artist forever.

Funny, when I was maybe 10yo, I got scared when I realized that given the number of notes is finite, the number of different melodies would be too, and so we would have one day to put new lyrics on old melodies.

I've got a rather wonky way of doing this. https://github.com/kristopolous/music-explorer

I've been building systems to find new music for 18 years or so. This latest one I've been using since early 2020.

It's really for just me so sorry if the documentation is a little scattered. I'm certainly doing some minor ToS violations all over the place with this thing so I don't want it to get too popular but I'll be happy to clean up the documentation if there's interest

From the article:

“But 'American Idiot' wasn't a true act of revolution. In fact, the album was produced and promoted by a multinational conglomerate with the intent of packaging seemingly transgressive pop-punk acts for my exact demographic.”

This is sort of beside the point of the article, but I was just reading an interview[1] with Billie Joe Armstrong about this album and it doesn’t sound like their process was anywhere as cynical as this take.

On another note, I find Elton John’s Rocket Hour on Apple Music to be refreshing in terms of how earnestly he approaches new music and new artists. If you haven’t heard it, it’s nothing like what you might expect based on the title. It’s not “Elton plays songs from his back catalog and talks about them,” but rather “Elton plays new songs you haven’t heard by artists you haven’t heard of yet, and interviews them as his peers.”

[1] https://www.billboard.com/music/rock/green-day-billie-joe-ar...

Age has affected my taste in music, but I continue to discover new music as I reach my mid 40s. As a teenager, I wanted to listen to grunge, punk, and metal. In my 20s, I had a strong preference for indie music. In my 30s, I got into blues and American folk music. Now, I’m in a jazz phase and appreciating classic guitarists from the 1950s and 1960s. I have always loved classical music, and I still appreciate a lot of the music from my past decades of development, but I hear a lot of it filtered through nostalgia and historical experiences more than from an angle of objective enjoyment.

Whatever. I find new stuff all of the time. Anything but show tunes, most country, and recent pop music is fair game. Tidal has good shit whereas Spotify will randomly reach into your account to delete playlists or remove content without warning. Also, the Spotify app no longer controls volume across devices uniformly, doesn't work at all on Apple TV, and is generally getting buggier and crappier with popups and moving things around for no reason. I'm downloading elsewhere to use with PlexAmp and buying vinyl because you just can't get everything via streaming.

There’s something biological going here I would think. 30 is about the age where fluid intelligence peaks but crystallized intelligence continues to grow for a few more decades. Also, 30 is about the age where a lot of us come into our own as the person we will more or less be for the rest of our lives. I know for myself that in my teens and twenties, music was part of the process of defining myself. By my early thirties, I had grown out of that phase and mine or someone else’s taste in music was irrelevant to how we viewed each other. Interestingly, like many men, I have not touched a video game since the age of thirty even though I’ve had the time.

I discussed this with a friend pretty recently. I wondered whether I was getting "older" because I couldn't find anything I liked about the current rappy-pop or soft, high-pitched chic-pop that you hear over loudspeakers at the grocery store, gym, etc. It's grating to listen to, majority of the stuff I can't even determine what the melody is supposed to be.

Then I realized that I'm listening to new alt/indie stuff that I didn't know about three years ago, and that it's probably not me. It's probably just that this mass-music for the masses is indeed awful.

my thought is that music is a hobby and people mislead themselves into themselves into thinking that it’s their hobby or that everyone has music has a hobby. I think music is just a phase for most people, as have been most things I’ve personally tried but wasn’t really into

but I’m in my 30s, am still into finding my music, and I can’t see that ever going away.

and I know people love listening to music from their formative years and don’t get me wrong, I too was obsessed into 2010’s indie rock and pop punk too, but I think it’s just people reliving the phase.

personally I will only pretty much listen to 2020’s indie rock and pop punk from new bands if I do. you will rarely catch me listening to music that I used to listen to. it was good then. now it’s tired and boring.

I haven't read the article, but I know the answer pretty definitively for me: the second I stopped listening to the radio, which happened in 2008 (when I was 17), because my favorite radio station in Orlando that used to carry a lot of punk rock music got rebranded to music for the 50+ demographic. I'm not even going to pretend that I know the reasons why they did that, but it was the only station I was listening to regularly, and pretty much my only source for new music as a result.

Gradually I stopped seeking out new music, instead just focusing on buying CDs for bands I already knew until I got Spotify in 2012, and that just kind of became an echo chamber.

I have a SiriusXM account now, and I do try and seek out new music that way occasionally via their phone app, but it's been a bit difficult since I don't drive since I moved to NYC. My car was probably 80+% of my music-listening time and now I don't really have that anymore. I can't really listen to music with lyrics while working (way too distracting for me), so the only music I listen to during most of the day is video game music from the 90's: stuff that's meant to be pleasant to listen to, but also easy to tune out by design.

The author seems to be describing what happens when one's primary relationship with music is one of consumption. It is easy (for me at least) to find new music when you are looking for inspiration in your own practice of making music. Most people don't make music though so I'd imagine it's easy to get stuck in that rut.

I have discovered better music in my 30s and 40s and sort of regret my musical decisions in my teens and 20s.

Music to me is linked to my emotional state and like I’ve matured I’d like to think my music tastes have too…

but then I remember I’ve stopped listening to silly music of Fugazi and replaced it with the artistic stylings of Taylor Swift and I’m right back in my pit of despair knowing my musical sophistication is still out of reach.

This study identifies 33 as the tipping point for sonic stagnation, an age where artistic taste calcifies, increasingly deviating from contemporary works

In the time since I turned 33 I've experienced an almost-complete switchover in genre preference, from pop/rock/light metal to country. Almost all of it has been found through Spotify's Daily Mix N, where n >= 2.

Possible confounding factor: they only studied Spotify and Deezer users. This is like studying Kindle users for insights on readers at large. I would not be surprised if there were a correlation between using streaming services (or not) and openness to new music. Study, say, Bandcamp users, and I bet you get a different picture.

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.

the biggest reason I pay for Spotify is to enjoy each Monday my "discover weekly" playlist :)

I remember reading a headline that Despacito had been displaced from the #1 position on Billboard after a 16 week run, while I had never heard the song. At that point I became a bit more intentional about trying to find new music.

As a teenager it really bothered me that adults seemed to have lost the ability to appreciate good music simply because it was new- I vowed to make a point of regularly trying new music with an open mind as I grew older, and not to grow up like that. My own parents who loved good music when they were younger, and whose music tastes I could appreciate well, literally heard my music as basically random noise, and couldn't even process it... stuff that was deeply inspiring and meaningful to me. It seemed like such a loss and a shame that they were incapable of enjoying it.

Overall, in my late 30s, I would say it's worked pretty well. I try to spend a decent amount of time sampling new music, and my music tastes have evolved a lot over time. In just the last two years I came to appreciate two entire new genre of music I had never really paid attention to, and listen to them a lot. Although, I will admit that most of my overall favorite music is still the same stuff I liked as a teenager.

I think a lot of it is simply taking the time to sample new music, and to develop the mental pathways to process new music styles. Old people can do it just as well as young people, but generally, older people have less time and interest in doing so. Kids generally don't understand what its like to be a parent with a job, and how little free time adults have, and how precious it is to them.

Also- regarding the author's comments on "American Idiot." I've always found it amusing how American capitalism loves to unironically sell people whatever they are willing to buy, especially including rebellious and anti-capitalist products and services, which are a big business overall. Reddit is currently worth 7 billion, and caters largely to people that like to complain to one another about how evil they feel capitalism is, and especially how evil Reddit in particular is.

I listened to the radio and watched music videos (Boston had an OTA channel that was like MTV) as a teen, and was the public relations officer and then engineer at the KTEK college radio station, which exposed me to more music.

In my 20s though I was in grad school and monomaniacally focused on my work and I avoided mass culture almost completely. Around the time I turned 30 I got interested in new music again and it was first east coast hip hop (KRS One, M.F. Doom) then psychedelia and classic rock adjacent music (by that time I was really sick and tired of overplayed classic rock, one time I was tripping on acid at 2 am and called up the local college station to complain about the Doobie Brothers song they played that is on a twice a day during drive time and the program manager picked up, I told him to play what he thought was good music and he put on Miles Davis.)

Since then I have had pulses of being interested in "new" (to me) music but it's usually been a bit old. The last round has been the Super Furry Animals (Mwng for the win!) and similar UK bands like The Charlatans. I just found out that I like some of Cyndi Lauper's later albums. Before that it was early Japanese electronica like Yellow Magic Orchestra and Isao Tomita. Before that Synthesizer by Information Society was a revelation.

Recently my son got into the big hits of Fleetwood Mac but I was amazed that they made a lot of music before they hit it big and some of it I like.

I don't listen to a lot of "new" music in the sense of "released in the last few years" and I'd be inclined to blame the prevalence of auto-tune for that. People I know in the music industry make all sorts of excuses ("Don't you like the vocoders on Daft Punk?", "... look I like the vocoders in Laurie Anderson's work and in Neil Young's *Trans&", "Isn't T-Pain talented?", "... I got no problem with T-Pain, I've got a problem with all the other rappers who sound like T-Pain") but if I hear something on the radio that is auto-tuned I'm pretty quick to change the channel.

My next project is to learn something about traditional and contemporary Chinese music.

I'm still finding new music (look at my account creation date if you want an indication what my real world age is).

Go crate digging or something, I don't know what the secret formula is.

Spotify's robot dj just plays the same stuff over and over without much of a discovery component to it.

OK, I didn't read TFA yet, but here's some anecdata for you:

I'm 50, and literally 15 minutes ago I'm on a conference call with some colleagues in Brasil, and while we were waiting for a pipeline to run, I started asking those guys about other Brazilian heavy metal bands (other than Sepultura) that I should listen to. They mentioned Sarcófago, and in the process of reading about Sarcófago on Wikipedia I discovered Ratos de Porão. So now I have two new bands to listen to as soon as I get a break where I'm not on a call.

I love discovering new music, both "new" in the sense of "just released" and in the "new to me" sense. For example, there are still plenty of old NWOBHM bands I have never listened to, and occasionally one will pop up and I'll discover them and just be thrilled to death.

Beyond that, I keep branching out into new genres. I grew up as mostly a metal-head (if you couldn't tell) but around 2000 or so I started listening to a lot of rap and hip-hop. Then I started getting into a lot of synthwave/retrowave/darkwave/horrosynth/etc. around 8-10 years ago. And I've picked up a little bit of interest in blues and jazz over the last year or two.

I dearly hope that for me, the answer to "when do I stop finding new music" is "when I am dead."

When I lived in South Korea, one of the things that struck me was how much "flatter" the generations there were in terms of pop culture and music taste and awareness, compared to the US. I worked in an office with a bunch of suit-and-tie businessmen who were mostly in their 40s to 60s, and if you were to ask them about any current K-pop group, they all knew their hit songs.

As a middle aged guy, I've used TikTok to find new music.

Spotify recommendations are kind of crap after a bit. It's a fundamental problem with similarity based recommendations and people getting stagnant. I don't want to listen to the greatest bands of the 90s and 00s. I want to listen to new bands that were influenced by those bands.

For anyone who wants a good source of random music, radio Canada has a great French station with an excellent show “l’effet pogonat”.

You won’t understand the host if you don’t speak French but the station is mostly songs and I’ve found so many good ones there.

The Montreal Gazette had a good write up: https://montrealgazette.com/news/pop-goes-the-world-ici-musi...

You stop when you want to stop. I picked up an affinity for K-pop in my 30s. Currently exploring a few other genres and also enjoying music that my kids are finding.

Most people stop making an effort to expand their taste in art at a young age because it's not useful for them. People can afford to have narrow tastes and still enjoy music. If parents made being exposed to different types of music as important to one's growth as being exposed to different types of vegetables, I doubt we would have this cultural phenomenon.

Theoretically, I should have given up trying to find new music years ago, but that hasn't happened. This is because music is the only artform that resonates with me on a spiritual level. Finding new music is important to me because it is a part of my identity. Contrast this with the fact I haven't been to a cinema since 2022. I don't broaden my taste in cinema because it has little impact on how much I enjoy films.

On the other hand, I'm listening to a new album at least three times a week. Using tools like last.fm and some private trackers helps to keep things fresh. Never give up on finding that next tune!

I wish there was a music service that actually provided recommendations based on features of the track itself, like similar chords, tempo, rhythmic composition, emotional tone, etc.

Instead it all seems to be variations on "people who liked this also like", which--while obviously easier to code--is rather disappointing compared to what I thought we'd have by now.

I find the soundtrack for EA Sports FC (the video game) exposes me to a lot of different types of music that I otherwise wouldn't be exposed to.

For those looking to expand their musical pallet try bbc radio 6, consistently delivers various genres of quality music.

I think my new music discovery slowed down because the music distribution system stopped propagating metadata. I discovered a lot of new music by looking at the back of the album cover or CD case and following the threads. Who else has this producer or session musician worked with? Who actually was the songwriter and what else have they done? What other albums are on this label? Now none of that is discoverable from streaming. It's just primary artist and song title--every track is just an isolated data unit apparently not even made by people.

Very interesting to see these things observed in numbers. Impressive 80ies peak among us gen X!

My music taste brain was initially formatted by that 1990ies idea of MTV mainstream vs independent (which paradoxically, also defined itself through existing on MTV, just in different niches), and from there it had been a slippery slope towards ever nichyer niche. Stuff where the big hits now have accumulated total Spotify plays in four-digit range, if they do exist there. When eventually I realized that winning at niche one-upmanship is a lonely celebration, what followed was mostly silence.

This is how I've solved this problem for myself: by using monthly playlists as a forcing function to motivate myself to find new music every month, where the whole ends up being greater than the sum of it's parts: https://transitivebullsh.it/my-10-year-music-diary

The trend towards flatting the curve with the preferred decade of music for each generation is cool to see. I had assumed this was happening anecdotally, but it looks like a pretty large effect here.

I am 45+ and constantly and exclusively seek out new music, rarely listening to anything more than a year old. However... I think this may have as much to do with a life-long novelty seeking manifestation of ADHD than anything entirely neurotypical. But I'm okay with that!

Why's the writer listening to james blunt still, that your beautiful song sucked when it came out too lol

I used to be really into music, writing, releasing, curating everything. But yeah around my 30s idk, i lost interest i guess like any other hobby. I listen to podcasts now when I drive. In my 20s finding music was like hard work. I went through a lot music all the time.

One thing I think is interesting is older music seems to be sticking around more. Like maybe in the 60s and on more timeless music was written? like in 2000, Idk anyone that listened to 40s or really 50s music, music that would be 50-60 years old at the time. But in the 2020s, 1960s, 70s, 80s music is still around. I think still has a lot of cultural relevancy. Or maybe the kids today don't care about the beatles or jimi hendrix? I find that hard to believe though. In 20 more years are we going to say Queen and ACDC sucked and never listen to it again?

What do rebelious kids and angsty teens listen to now? Who are the red hot chili peppers, and weezers and blink182s right now.

Thanks to Shazam, I find new music all the time. Often times in hip places like hotel lobbies and restaurants.

This doesn’t resonate with me at all.

I’m always looking with my ears.

A current fascination is the unnamed genre of popular American music from the era when jazz and ragtime and vaudeville sort of intersected with jug bands and blues: https://www.youtube.com/live/GGxIeMxG5l8?si=RLaYnnWGqQkfMXk1

I also listen to a ton of music in languages I don’t understand, from Balkan dance music to Brazilian pop and psychedelia.

And there’s a certain DJ in New Orleans (Mark LaMaire) I listen to every week who has turned me onto a whole mountain of music I’d never heard of before.

I find soundcloud's autoplay to consistently give me fresh new music that i enjoy and many times in a style never heard before.

Intersting question is when does humanity stop finding new music. Or when did it stop.

I hate this article. Can’t we do some philosophical introspection instead of just this data driven drivel? There is even a clue in the empty nesters vs parents section but no discussion. Is the author just afraid of saying something offensive? Age being causative is just taken as fact.

I’d suggest that music discovery is centered on having the desire to do so. As people get older they often stop caring about being cool[+] (take a look at the author) and only listening to the same old music is lame. “We stop being interested in new music at $AGE” is just unimaginative, lazy, and counter to the facts.

Being “with it” is a choice.

[+] And, btw, nobody gets to decide what “cool” is(and your mom definitely doesn’t), but it is by nature always changing.

I've found two somewhat surprising effective ways for new music discovery:

1. Spotify Weekly Discover (personalized) ~ Still can't work their silly UX, but their recomms are good. Is it time yet for "Bring Your Own Client" to their API ??

2. Online Communities: Many a twitch streamer has music bots or accept music request while streaming. Has been a great source for new discovery.

I find this argument interesting though I have found that the same Jungle music I listened to in the 90s is now cutting edge again similar to around 2007 when 80s Italo House was considered the most stylish and hippest thing to listen to.

In my mid-30s and I can’t imagine not being interested in new music.

I have to wonder how much of this is societal expectations as you age? or "Being an adult".

The idea that once you reach a certain age, you settle down, get into a routine, doing less new things, etc.

While yeah, a music streaming service could introduce you to new music. Maybe you will just find yourself in less situations where you will experience new music?

Listening to a new song on your phone is a drastically different experience to overhearing it while traveling, with friends, whatever.

I know I have a number of songs that bring up an emotional response due to certain events tied to them. And some of them are genres I would not have normally found myself listening too.

Never! It gets just gets harder with time to find what you like, as your taste ossifies, and music evolves.

I must be an outlier - I'm in my 40s and haven't listened to former favorites like Radiohead forever.

Darkwave, Phonk, Witchhouse, Glitch Hop, KPop, and a lot of electronic music that crosses genres are what I listen to now.

I think the main thing that reduces music discovery as a parent is sheer exhaustion, you just don’t have as many hours anymore. It’s not just that you’re listening to less new music, you’re listening to less, period.

Meanwhile, having a kid getting into music is fabulous. I’ve been forced to listen to every Taylor Swift album. I know who Olivia Rodrigo is. I managed to discover Wet Leg all on my own. Steve Lacy, Mitski, Zutomayo, sohodolls…

And then there’s The Crane Wives. Honestly one of the best things I have heard in a very long time. Try “Keep You Safe”, if you don’t like it the rest is probably not going to be your thing. If you do, there’s a lot more like it.

I really enjoy music but realized after trying to follow several hundred artists—and failing that it is merely a question of bandwidth. For example the Doobie Brothers have released new albums post-2020, while at the same time I'm trying to be up on the latest from B. Eillish for a nearby young person. Just can't keep up.

Haven't even mentioned my weirder tastes. At some point something has got to give if you have a job, family, or another interest or two.

I’m just diehard I guess, serious evolutions in my preferences and new artists I love almost weekly. Huh!

I'm in my 40s and still vibing on a mix of novel and nostalgia. I don't know what my secret is but I've never been in a position where discovering new music was difficult. I don't listen to much radio, but when I do, it's a community station with people that care about music. I don't use any streaming services. I have a large, physical music collection that I still add to, both CD and vinyl, supplemented by a digital collection from places like Bandcamp. I explore a bit on Youtube and Discogs, I read music zines and local whats ons, I take recommendations from friends, I go to gigs: local pubs, concerts, festivals. Music seems to come easily if I put myself in front of it.

I went to a gig last night and saw a great band I found a few months ago with two other new (to me) bands and came home with a head full of tunes, strengthened friendships, and a CD from the merch stand.

It's just part of my life and I give it some time each day. :)

Two sailant points to me:

- With work from home, time spent with no one else around increases and it's never been easier to listen to ambient music.

We see this in the lofi youtube channels uprising, or the whole "work music" genre, but I think most people will listen to whatever they like that doesn't need to be fighting against the open space noise anymore.

I'd expect music discovery to be strongly impacting by that.

- The impact of technology and rhe new platforms is understated.

What my generation could listen to at 14 is a ridiculous fraction of what we have access to now. The author poses it as "need to sit down for two hours to find new stuff" problem, but if you watch tv shows, listen to podcasts it will happen organically, and even browsing random channels or checking ranking charts (spotify's top 50 for instance) will gradually inject new things without that much active research.

All in all, I think the current state of tastes getting frozen at some point is an artifact of the older generations, and might not affect people growing up now.

I would guess there's a strong correlation with trait openness to someones ability to integrate new music into their collection. IDK if its a lot, but I listened to 90 genres in 2023. I do find myself frequently liking music that is about 10 years old, but I think that's a function of discovering it, not of a willingness to try new sounds on for taste.

I’m almost 40 now and still actively seeking out new music, bands, albums.

Is it something to do with genres? I have been listening to punk, metal, hardcore, rap music, alt since I was in grade school.

My old process (still the same) was going on RateYourMusic and looking at the user lists. If a list has a title that resonates with me I tend to find some really cool albums in there. I'll listen to a sample on YT and grab it on Soulseek, and if I really like the album I buy it on vinyl.

I used Spotify for 10 years or so and it never seemed good at recommending me music. Within the last two years I cancelled my subscription and have returned to the old ways.

The sad thing is, life is too short to hear all the amazing music out there!

Most of the music I enjoyed was made before I was born. I don't listen to music anymore. I stopped when I went fully remote a decade ago and didn't need anything to drown out the office noise anymore. I'll play music on an instrument, but that's about it.

I actually bought a nice stereo system with bose 901 speakers to set up in my house, but it's still sitting in storage 9 years later.

I find and listen to plenty of new music, for some reason I find it hard to listen to the teenage stuff. Even though I love it, its too fraught.

But, its not like I love any of the new music I find. I can like it, but I'm never going to blast it on repeat for weeks on end like 15 year old me could. Its hard to make an emotional connection like that as an adult.

As a result, I care less about music discovery. I know I'm not going to find a revolution in my own tastes. I know I'm not going to convince a whole group of friends to do the same, like you might in highschool. Its just a little more colorless now.

When I was in my teens, I really had nothing to do. Not that I was a loner - I was in a sports club and I had a pretty active social life. But the thing is - compared to having a job, the time I spent at school each day left me with so much more spare time than today [1], you gotta do something with that. And my knowledge of music was still pretty limited, so of course exploring new styles of music and new bands was exciting! Plus, everyone of my friends was doing the same, and at that age, doing what the peer group does was very important...

[1] By which I mean, having a day job, commuting back and forth, oh, and having a family with little kids, which basically means zero spare time.

I can't buy an argument about there being too many options. If there were a lot of options, and you liked a lot of them, you could just randomly sample new albums, or listen to whatever Spotify told you to listen to, and there would be no problem finding new music. I suspect the issue is there's a lot of music out there and none of it sounds like what you want.

Note that this isn't saying music today is bad, it's got nothing to do with that.

At a certain point, changing trends in music cause it to drift too far from your internal model (developed in youth) for what a song should be, and it becomes hard to take, decreasing returns with increasing effort, and you say "fuck it, I'll just listen to what I already like for the rest of my life".

I am wondering when Suno.ai or similar are replacing licensed background music like radio with AI generated hyper-optimized streams?

For those interested in finding new music, let me strongly recommend some good radio station youtube channels. KEXP and KCRW both come time mind. In that vein, sometimes you can find good new music through labels. For example, 4AD. I'm not sure why, but YouTube often suggests good stuff seemingly at random, especially in the electronica genre. Radio stations have music only streams on their websites, too. I've often found artists I like going to local shows and paying attention to who they like. YMMV

It also helps to pay attention to the bands you like and where they end up. For example, the band Marriages split up and Emma Ruth Rundle went solo and the guitarist started Drab Majesty.

The unstated underlying assumption that only a commercially constructed popular zeitgeist qualifies as “new” for self-discovery purposes is corporate lickspittle fawning at its most conceited.

The author also appears to trip over the ecological fallacy in responding to population results as though they apply to themselves the individual. They do not. This is broad information of interest to anthropologists and marketing droids, it doesn’t define or describe a person.

I really love to dig new old music. Still discovering artists from 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, 50s, 20s. I like that the list grows naturally. Been on the train from 90s.

When do we stop finding new music?

for me never. The older I get I find more interesting new music. Maybe because I play an instrument and live in a very diverse and rich physical cultural context, not in a playlist or AI generated content.

Now I want a tool that analyzes my last.fm history and tells me how many new artists (= artists I never scrobbled before) I scrobble every year.

I've only been listening to the BBC Essential Mix since ~2005. Pretty much nothing else, it's always about the latest music and trends (especially if it's something from the UK like dubstep, grim etc.). 2x2 hour episodes are absolutely perfect for a week (there's a Classic show where they play the old ones again)

Whenever I sit in a venue that has background music, I realize that I know all the songs that are being played.

I think the problem is that new music isn't as played (except of course for the corporate pop that is imposed on us).

I know the article is mostly true, but I'm apparently the contradiction that proves the rule. I've listened to music from the current decade for decades, but also discovered old stuff that was new to me along the way.

Life is too short to listen to the same music over and over.

There was a time when SXSW released one track from each featured artist on a massive torrent. That kept me going on new music for nearly the entire year. Repeat.

This doesn’t match my personal experience at all. I hardly liked any of the music I heard on the radio as a teenager. (That would be the 90’s). Later on, I found that I liked the current music better- and there are still songs from my 20’s that I come back to. But each decade I discover new artists, I stay with those records for a while, then they start sounding dated and I move on. I do put deliberate effort into discovering new artists though. And, I’m a musician myself so maybe that’s part of it. I really listen to almost nothing from my teenage years though. There is such an incredible amount of new music coming out every day that it’s hard to keep up with it! Right now I’m listening to 100 gecs a lot, childish gambino, narrow head, ohtis, thee oh sees, fazerdaze, and wimps.

Anybody who really just gets stuck on music from their teens is missing out on so much I can’t even express it.

My personal observation is that listening is different today than it used to be. I grew up in the 70s and 80s when bands focused on making an album that you sit a listen to. Today, kids listen to songs, not albums so to me, the artists aren't as interesting as they used to be. Also, recording has changed a lot and has impacted the feel of most music. Listen to Led Zeppelin and you hear a very practiced band that is good enough that their performance is what you hear on the album (for the most part). Today, bands play to click tracks individually and the DAW scrubs a and polishes the performances until they are perfect. This give a different feel to the music that doesn't sound quite right to someone used to listening to more lifelike performances. I do listen to a lot of newer music and have some favorites like Lana Del Rey and St. Vincent, but I have to admit, I don't give some music the attention it deserves because it often sounds like a copies of music I already know.

I listen to a lot of music, and thanks to Spotify, regularly find new material across a decent range of genres.

But at the back of mind, I hear the echoes of Steven Pinker's words: "music is auditory cheesecake". Capable only of conveying emotions, unless lyrics are involved.

A good reminder for parents to push beyond their comfort zones when playing music with their children, otherwise they will take the path of least resistance: popular music.

It's like junk food next to you in versus in a cupboard upstairs. One you eat now impulsively the other you won't eat due to the effort needed as minimal as it is it still slows you down.

If you put in a cassette tape and let it run you would usually always listen to it in order. To some extent a CD too but it and vinyl were easier to jump song to song.

Radio was even more uncontrollable it made you wait for your favourite song while it played other songs. Sometimes a day or two waiting for that new song to appear. Radio mercilessly teased you too. Even Top 40 radio shows you had to wait not knowing was your song now higher up making you excited but it meant you had to wait, excitement grows. Or was it lower down and it played sooner (a dreadful feeling) or you missed it completely!

I've noticed this over the years that more and more I rarely listen to anything new just what I know from years past.

When we quit seeking.

It helps a lot to be among other people seeking new music.

Without that, many of us stop mid life.

That Say Anything scene... originally was going to use a Fishbone song, because Cusack is apparently a big fan. It didn't really work for the scene though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say_Anything...#Cultural_influ...

Coincidentally, Fishbone was part of the wave of awesome music in the early 1990ies when I was finding new music because there was good music and before music started not being quite so good any more.

It's such an amazing coincidence that they made the good music right when I was young. I got lucky, I guess.

The article might describe a common scenario, but there are plenty of outliers. I hardly listen to music I liked in my teens and early twenties. I love discovering new music.

Many comments here are very insightful and discuss phenomena like high music diversity, music proliferation and easy of producing music, and automated recommendations.

One thing that has been occupying me is that curation is still harder than I'd like when using streaming tools like Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Tidal. Pandora had good roots with its music genome project, and have built on that. (I can't use it without a VPN since they discontinued supporting the country I mostly live in). It's probably a function of how I consume my music today - no longer desk-bound at work, but on the go, so iPhone (and Apple Watch) are primary tools. Being able to select/skip/preview/tune what I'm listening to is nowhere near as powerful as I'd like. I've written library curation tools in the past, these always expected me to spend significant dedicated time in front of a screen (e.g. a similar tool like the cool looking https://github.com/kristopolous/music-explorer, I think).

This has strong parallels to how older people consumed music - either totally passive curation (radio), or very deliberate, like finding music in record stores, at a friend's place. Also replay involves selecting records/CDs in your own bookshelf. Today's ephemeral digital libraries are much lower effort, are huge and curation/selection tools are not easy enough to use, so I tend to fall back onto old favourites or recommendation engines that usually don't satisfy me.

A solution might be a much more configurable curation assistant that is also super easy to use (and, in my case) very accessible on a mobile device with 0-1 clicks (because I'm busy doing other things). Music discovery tools that don't allow in-situ music playing is thus also a no-go.

It wouldn't be super hard to build an interactive tool, but as always, making a super intuitive and useable UX experience is the hardest part. Most streaming tools are giant swiss-army knives for listening use-cases.

Related, though not so much to the question in the article which more applies to individuals but societally:

Melancholy Elephants: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

I deleted/tossed my entire music collection, subscriptions/accounts about two years ago. I decided it was kind of keeping me in a mental rut and reinforcing old patterns rather than supporting new ones im modifying my life with.

I think it helps. Kinda like being 16 again.

I feel like the more I listen to it, the less new patterns I find. In addition to auditory sensory stimulation, spiritual identification is also increasingly important, and the latter is not easy to be constantly fond of the new and dislike the old.

Overall, music plays its own specific role for each person. For some, music is a significant part of life, almost like a whole life, while for others, it's simply meant to be in the background.

Art isn't "found" it is created

FOllow Professor Skye's Music rewview.

There's a great episode of the Ongoing History of New Music on this topic

What A Drag It Is Getting Old (Musically)

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/what-a-drag-it-is-gett...

  "Ah…there it was again: an example of how someone’s musical tastes evolve with age… it’s just something that happens with most people… most of take that as a given…not me, though…this is something that’s always fascinated me…there has to be some science behind why we listen to different types and styles of music as we go through life… So I tracked down this science and I have some answers…we’ll call this episode “what a drag it is getting old—musically”…"

i'm a huge spotify user and my goal much of the time i'm listening is to find new music... last.fm tells me that 27% of the artists i listened to this week are ones i'd never listened to before (the yearly report says 55% of the 1,512 artists i listened to last year were new to me). i also like the "yearly rewind" and "recent rewind" playlists because it automates putting those newly discovered artists of tracks into my rotation.

My musical tastes have changed a lot, I've found new bands and artists pretty much every year of my life. I listen to music from my teenage years now & then, but more often than not I'm listening to completely new music.

Instead of slowing down my discovery of music at 30, i started releasing my own! Check it out if you are interested: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0gzvd38Qse9LCxpmJUWLaN?si=MC...

Streaming Radio is often narrow-casting and an excellent if overlooked genre-based means of new music discovery. e.g Prog-Radio

Interesting article. I expect today's streaming tech will drive some change in these patterns, between easy access to a massive library and recommendation features.

Much of my music discovery is aided by Spotify - some automated (radio, "Made For You"), some more manual ("Fans also like" related artists). However, as I continue to use Spotify, some of these features seem less effective. It's like I'm filling in interconnected regions of Spotify's graph of music and there are less edges to unvisited nodes.

I've been using http://somafm.com and it's really the only thing that got me back into listening to music. ( https://radio.garden is also interesting )

Other than the opportunity for a misplaced pun on the term “spiral”, why would you take an otherwise linear-in-time graph and make it radial? Why would age 0 to 50 be somehow cyclical?

I was looking forward to my kids introducing me to new music as I've stagnated. Their favourites?

- Nirvana - Weezer - Blink 182 - Jimmy Eat World

:-/

(although my new favourite band is The Beaches)

My #1 source for finding new music: teen-aged daughter

I'm old enough that I've seen Miles Davis and Fats Domino live. I am listening to more new artists than I ever have.

Gnoosic is still a good source for me.

I search torrent sites for users who upload obscure artists I like - and then mine their history for artist recommendations.

I have a lot of regular listens I first heard on LastFM channels. It's the only streaming service I've ever used.

I've 5 sons who turn me on to artists I wouldn't hear otherwise.

The most utterly useless source for new artists (or music, or anything) is commercial FM radio. It has no redeeming value.

In contrast, local indy stations are amazing.

most likely never is the answer.

My music tastes were pretty much static since highschool until I started using Spotify 5 years ago

I'm 53 and love Spotify and Reddit's 80s subreddits for music discovery.

I love finding new stuff (IDLES, Shame, and High Vis are recent faves) and finding old stuff that's new to me (I flew across the country to see The Cult playing in LA as their old band name -- Death Cult -- and never knew there was a live album version of Dreamtime that's terrific from back in the day).

Not being a user of Spotify nor other services, I can only say that I continue to find new music in each decade. And I like much of newer music better than the old classics (which is saying something because I started listening in the 1960s). Thus what Parris says doesn't speak to me.

I’m 38, and I don’t think my exposure to and discovery of music has ever been so high.

I joined a metal discord last year (though my favorite album of the year so far is actually chamber folk / Americana from a recommendation there):

* general recommendations

* seeing what other people listen to

* "themed history months" (Screamarch for Screamo, Finlapril for Finnish metal etc.),

* sampling of any new release that seems slightly interesting (usually about 20 releases per week that I spend a few seconds to minutes with to gauge my enjoyment)

All those expose me to a constant stream of new and old music that I usually never even heard of before.

But then, not using streaming services probably makes me a statistical outlier anyway.

The article hints at, but doesn't really nail the strong associations between music and our past that develop as we age. The older we get, the more listening to old music takes on the role of time machine, teleporting us to an earlier time where we can forget all the bad parts, leaving just the good.

Strangely enough, the same thing can be said about cars, and even software.

There seems to be a focus on something about the brain "calcifying" or people getting stuck in their own pattern over time here.

That may be a component, but I think anothet thing that correlates heavily with the graphs presented in the article is simply: When you have enough spare time to prioritize music. (although you could explicitly prioritize it like some commenters mention)

I still find lots of new music, but it always comes in periods of my life when I have some leeway, and those are fewer and farther between now.

I find as I get older the period that the music I listen to extends in both directions.

While most of the popular music released these days is crap, that was the case when I was young also. The things fondly remembered is the good stuff.

It's quite fun to look at old top 10 lists to see masterpieces sitting alongside fluff.

Recent discoveries. Klaus Nomi, Kirin J. Callinan.

I'm in my 30s and still pretty open minded with music, and don't listen to all that much of my teenage years stuff.

I think I just sacrificed my ability to enjoy new video games instead.

I never did stop, even though I'm a graybeard. I wonder if that might be because I didn't really start to enjoy music until after I was done being a teenager. I don't have any music I fell in love with when I was that young.

I don't believe music was better in my day but I do think the older you get the harder it is to find things that sound truly fresh (e.g. someone like black midi would probably blow me away if I was 16 now but instead they just keep reminding me of various acts I've heard before years ago)

Similarly I find myself being a lot more interested in competent but not especially ambitious late period albums by acts where their comfort with knowing what their sound is and how to play with it can be the main source of interest.

I think I've got possibly the opposite problem of most people. I quickly tire of music. I'm always building brand new playlists, adding 1000 amazing beautiful songs to it, and then getting so tired of it all I just slam skip through 70% of it. Eventually the playlist gets so bogged down I have to make a new one and start over again with all fresh music.

Each time I start over I say to myself "only the best ones get in this playlist" and sure enough I'll only add the very best, my favorite music. Songs that'll be stuck in my head for days. But alas, I fall back to earth and loathe the whole set of them and the cycle repeats.

If I'm being honest, I'd say pretty much right after the music industry sucked the last drop of blood from the actual musicians which has brought to where we are today: session musicians on shoestring budgets performing tunes written by repurposed advertising jingle composers.

I'm mostly into punk/hardcore myself but music is probably one of my numerous passions that never seems to fade and nowadays I love to listen to radio to be exposed to music I wouldn't be exposed thru algorythms. Sometimes I don't like it and it's ok, but I often encounter great discoveries. https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip is perfect for it. Give it a try !

Listening to the music of one's childhood time from other countries is a way to find comfort-genre but new-to-you pieces.

Sometimes there are nice surprises: for instance, "My Way" (1969) and "Comme D'Habitude" (1967) share a tune but are very different songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FEwW0W9AvA (did Sid influence this interpretation?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeTn56-lahg