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.

Which is basically a long winded way of responding to:

> I don't think I'm wired in some special way that lets me keep liking new things, it's just that I seek them out when I know a lot of people my age just don't.

With:

There's a non-zero cost to seeking out new things, so the "special way you are wired" involves considering that cost to be worth it.

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.

For me almost all of the music I discover is through the personal recommendations or AMVs (are they still called AMVs if they aren't anime related?) or video memes.

Finding new music is easier if people aren't penalized for using it in their own artistic pursuit. [[placeholder for a rant about current implementations of copyright laws being stuffling for artists. There are a lot of those out there, so pick any rant you are comfortable with]]

All artistic works categories should intertwine more, imo. But that's hard when we have one site for music, another for art, and another for video. Social networks like facebook or twitter almost solved it (although, I prefer to think that blogging platforms like tumblr or myspace solved it better). Common creatives is a very good license for this very reason (relatively easy artistic borrowing), and we should propagandize it more.

That's to say, many people have no good reason to engage with new anymore, having found the stuff that they like and other things they prefer doing. Which is cosmic, in my opinion. Not only they do what they like to do listening to the things they like, but also if everyone was always seeking out the newest thing, it would be a neck-breathing horse race between artists.

Back then, I'd say investing in a album was always safe, not because you went to the record store and asked for a new rock album, because you had heard 1 or 2 singles (unwillingly) and read a review (willingly)

Now, you can just ask the algorithm to play "something I like".

The selection in these channels was the tribe back then. They were the "bottleneck" of pop culture.

From around 2000 with broadband etc, "payola" (broadcasters being coerced by record companies to play their flagship songs "in heavy rotation") is less and less effective.

As a consequence, I think the "current fashion" of music seems less defined.

I don't miss the restrictiveness of a single culture and the expectation to fit into it, but with the benefit of hindsight I can't say it was a terrible culture, given all it had to do.

The sort of people you found at, say, a metal show in the 80s and the sort of people you found at a dance club playing the early era of house music were wildly different. Even if you keep it within rock, the overlap of the audience seeing The Cure would be wildly different from those seeing Judas Priest.

Anime? Even before the internet became what it is today, you could go to a comic book store and hang out. There was significant overlap between the comic book/dungeons & dragons/anime crowds.

There have been social spaces and places to meet people within specific cultures for forever.

I was into D&D, so I was exposed to anime, comics, Monty Python, Mel Brooks, and Tom Lehrer, because those were a certain subculture.

I was never a comic-book nerd, but I could probably name a dozen different series from image comics in the 90s because I was surrounded by people who read them.

I flat out dislike watching Mel Brooks movies, but I can quote about 90% of Spaceballs or Blazing Saddles because that was a part of the vocabulary of that group.

Nowadays if you have a streaming subscription or even Youtube, you have instant access to millions of songs and a multitude of curators creating playlists to fit any mood. Granted, Spotify and co will curate some popular playlists, and discovering curators outside of that bubble takes some more effort. But it's there.

We live in interesting times where on the one side we can be overwhelmed by choice, while at the same time delighted with new discoveries. Where budding artists can create from their proverbial basement and self-publish to a potential audience of billions.

I wish we had something like /mu/ flowcharts[1] but in a more general way. So after playing a song you can get a question or a prompt of what you liked and get some suggestion based on the input.

But IMO, music recommendation peaked 10 years ago with Last.fm and it's only been downhill since then, which is a shame because we had a lot of cool music in the last years, but the exploration is getting harder. But who knows, maybe I'm just getting old and I don't hang around the hip places anymore.

1: https://4chanmusic.fandom.com/wiki/Flowcharts

There is rateyourmusic.com, which is positioned as sort of a Letterboxd for music, but I haven't used it much.

Music discoverability is a big problem I'd like to solve, especially now that I'm in my 30s and don't really have the sort of social circle these days that would expose me to cool new music.

I've toyed with the idea of making an 8tracks-like service, where tastemakers can create playlists to share, and the streaming happens via the API of whatever streaming services you're subscribed to (Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, whatever). If anyone is interested in a project like this, feel free to reach out.

I've recently enjoyed using RYM to find music. Start with an artist/album I like, click on the genre, and try out the top-rated artists/albums.

It's a manual version of the flowchart, you're right that it'd be neat to automate that. I haven't even tried using RYM tags, but they'd probably be useful input, too.

The description you make about rym sounds similar, so maybe i’ll take a look.

100% the case. I keep telling my kids that, but they don't seem to get it.

> I imagine though that streaming may change this, since you can dive into just about anything. We really need music search which follows more interesting routes through content rather than just 'people who like this also like' or 'here's another album by someone you already listen to'.

So much so. Spotify became really popular when I was in my 30s and I tried it, listening to the "Discover weekly" for about 6 months. It was 10 weeks before I heard a track I had not heard before and the closest it came to playing an artist I hadn't heard before was a track from a 1-album super-group with two frontmen I was familiar with from their other groups.

Doing the math: I didn't play the list religiously so figure about 20 weeks worth of songs would be 600 songs. I had heard over 80% of the songs before. I had heard nearly all of the artists before. It played a single digit number of songs that I didn't like. If I'm liking 99% of what I'm hearing, something is wrong.

I agree with this so much. We've had about a decade of this kind of robo-curation in every single aspect of our media consumption. Read books like the ones you like, listen to bands like the ones you listen to, more videos like this one, etc. I'm so sick of it.

The way to branch out of your rut is other people. Some band I'd never have listened to, and if I accidentally had, would have skipped it 30 seconds in, have become my favorites simply because someone I had a connection with played it or recommended it. Movies I wouldn't have picked, but watched with someone else, are often better than anything I'd have picked based on my past preferences.

These days, more and more, I am realizing how rewarding it is to read a book or try a new restaurant based on nothing except that a friend with completely different taste likes it. If it turns out to be a dud, it's worth it for when I find something completely new that I do like.

(in another domain, at some restaurants it's possible to order dishes which don't appear on their menu)

I've experienced this in Italy. Our host took us to a restaurant where he knew the manager and looked at the menu. He then asked 'but what have you really got?'. After a long very Italian debate (which I didn't understand) with a lot of gesticulation etc we were brought a multi-course meal that was absolutely delicious and involved various things that had just come into season, things that the manager kept back for friends, etc.

if you have more content, but someone filters it for you to 'your taste', you will end up with less content, and no more exciting discoveries. you'll learn what to expect from the feed quickly and everything becomes boring. hence the required upward spiral in ridiculousness, to counter the natural encroaching boredom.

the last maybe a little grim take, but i dont think invalid.

(Also, big pet peeve: they need to take into account time of day and factors like weather to do well, as well as habit; I will not respond the same way to a track on a rainy grey winter evening as on a sunny summers day)

these numbers presented seem a bit from a narrow dataset. all the people likely from one culture or even sub-culture, with one sort of social pattern that impacts this kind of stuff. - i live in a northen country, and find often in the south people are more actively outside and socializing at later ages. sharing more music and food, and likely the peak ages would thus be later too, or less of a peak.

But it grew broader over time, so that's possible. Now I might dig pretty much any kind of music.

I feel like trying to understand new types of music has an effect beyond just getting familiar with them: brain adapts to process a broader range of stimuli, so that also helps to understand other unrelated genres in future.

I experienced biggest change with Autechre: it was rather difficult to listen to (and I specifically took it as a challenge), but after Autechre I can listen anything :)

And in teens I had to listen something at least 5 times to start enjoying it. Now I can dig it right away. So it feels like brain processes music differently now

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.

People listen to a wider variety of music and the same Billboard notion of popularity doesn't really paint a useful picture anymore. What plays on the radio or in TV ads is the lowest common denominator corporate waffle, and is played heavily, but it doesn't represent what people listen to overall.

I have personal playlists of everything from House music and 90s Eurodance to all kinds of J-Pop to 19th century folk music to early 2000s rock to 80s synth pop to orchestral music. I couldn't name a single Taylor Swift song offhand, but apparently she's pretty big.

There's tons of music out there and I find the plethora of niche subgenres now fairly overwhelming and don't even know how to classify the stuff I enjoy listening to.

Recommendation engine feedback loops do not aid in discovery, just repetition.

I'd say it's never been better. Music is more accessible which means more folks get exposed to it earlier and in more variety and in turn we get more musicians.

It's only going to get better.

Some of these have been around longer than others.

Jacob Collier, Vulfpeck, Cool Sounds, Sylvie, Bobbing, Abigail Lapell, Big Theif, Tank and the Bangas, Richard Houghten, Kurt Vile, Thundercat, Little Simz, Nora Brown, Barrie, Dominique Dumont, Lusine, Cory Wong, Billy Strings, DoomCannon, Cory Henry, Mark Lettieri, Nate Smith, Yussef Dayes, Yumi Zouma, limperatrice, Slow Pulp, Vetiver, Bibio, Altin Gun, King Gizzard, Julian Lage.

I could go on.. give me an artist you like or a genre and I could likely find you new music.

Of course there's no denying we have lots of creative and talented new musicians, but very seldom do I think they beat "the greats", or are even on par. Usually they feel more like knockoffs, and I find I'd rather go back and listen to the original instead.

I'm not familiar with these artists, but I had a listen to about 20 of them, and I will say that I can hear where a lot of them got their inspiration from, but they (not all of them) feel lightweight compared to artists from back in the day.

In these genres I'd much rather listen to the following artists than any of the ones you mentioned:

Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Townes Van Zandt, Earth, Wind & Fire, The Isley Brothers, Johnny Cash, Coltrane, Gillespie, Miles Davis.

"Nate Smith" in particular sounds so much like your stereotypical modern artist. Everything from the production, melodies, his voice and vocal chain sounds like at least 20 other artists. Very uninspired in my humble opinion. This is what we can expect AI to produce.

The guy has a lot of interesting work, but I think the thing that blew me away the most is the composition 'Warble'. If memory serves, that's the piece where he explored 64th note and dotted 32nd note displacements in order to mimic J Dilla's 'wonky' swing. I've tried capturing the Dilla swing; it's nearly impossible to do on the drums without sounding like you don't know how to play the instrument. Nate Smith, on the other hand, makes it sound fantastic.

The guy is a wizard.

Inspiration is a given, and nothing wrong with that. But I often feel like instead of inspiring to new heights we get a watered down version.

Watered down is just not how I'd describe any of the musicians I listed

Larnell Lewis also delivered a world-class performance on that entire album.

Note, Mitski debuted in 2013 but most of the strongest records over the past few years, from hip-hop, pop to experimental rock to metal, seems to be by artists or individual who've been making music for around a decade-ish roughly. Maybe this disqualifies the whole lot and you're trying to highlight some weakness in the debuts of the past few years. If so, maybe you should wait a decade? If not, I can assert that some of the most talented artists of history are making music today. By any metric.

Even something established like Punk reached new heights with more modern approaches (ex. Sleaford mods, Team Scheisse in German)

I think music is very subjective still but new music never stopped to impress me.

There's no hiding the "influence" of Sex Pistols, and I'd much rather listen to Sex Pistols, Ramones, and also Rancid than this band.

Do not see the appeal.

But there's a crucial difference between what's out there and what people are listening to. There's a lot of obscure stuff that not many people are listening to. Whereas the top charting music is what millions of people are listening to. It matters a lot what's getting marketed, what the majority of people are exposed to.

Unfortunately, very few repliers are addressing the first point that I made in my comment: "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music."

Musicians are more discoverable than ever. Unlike in the past it doesn't matter nearly as much what's getting marketing/ gets air play at the top of the charts, because if you have a desire to find music that you like you just have to try and it's all there for free with an Internet connection.

If one can't find new music to ones taste it's not because of what's being produced.

The "Internet" is just hand waving. The internet is massive. Almost everything is available on the internet, but that's a problem, not a solution. Sometimes it's like finding a needle in a haystack.

> If one can't find new music to ones taste it's not because of what's being produced.

So what is the explanation for "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music", which again, you haven't addressed.

I'm sorry that it's difficult for you to find what you like. My tastes are very broad and I find new artists every week just listening to Spotify, Bandcamp, YouTube while working. My wife and I and our friends share music that we like with each other. We see live music and get exposed to openers we've never heard of.

That said music is a big part of our lives.

The source was the submitted article under discussion in these comments!

> I'm sorry that it's difficult for you to find what you like.

I never said that. I'm not even discussing me, or you for that matter. I'm discussing the aggregate differences between the generations.

Seems very hard to accurately measure, could be that people don't know what was released in their decade but the stuff from the 80s is easy to pinpoint.

It seems implausible that young people don't know that new music is new.

Why would the 80s be easy to pinpoint for people who weren't even alive in the 80s?

As an extreme example, I'd argue the popularity of David Hasselhoff's I've been looking for freedom in Germany is almost entirely a result of "retconning" (if not fabricating) its supposed popularity at the time of its original release. It would have probably been forgotten entirely if it hadn't been rediscovered "ironically" in the context of ridiculous claims about its influence on the fall of the Berlin Wall. Heck, I remember owning a casette of the album as a kid only because "it's the guy from Knight Rider". For adult women his claim to fame was co-starring alongside Pamela Anderson in Baywatch as one of the few men regularly appearing bare-chested on daytime television - I'd say his musical talents played a very small role in his original popularity and it's telling nobody remembers any other songs than the one he performed on a TV show. He was never considered good, he was just a familiar face (and body) and made a catchy tune.

And definitely don't like things based on the real world, the real world is shit.

Vs:

> This may surprise some, but since 2000, just over half of all movies released have been original screenplays.

https://stephenfollows.com/are-movies-becoming-more-derivati...

The problem is they aren't blockbusters, so you don't remember them. From the same link:

> While the number of movies based on original screenplays has been increasing since the late 2000s, their box office share has continued to fall. In 1984, 73% of the box office were original screenplays, whereas forty years later in 2023, that figure was just 30.6%. And that’s despite their production share being similar (i.e. 60.4% vs 55.9%).

And from a separate post:

> Sequels were twice as frequent in the late 1980s than in the 2010s, if we use production figures as our measure

https://stephenfollows.com/are-there-more-movie-sequels-than...

https://stephenfollows.com/how-original-are-hollywood-movies...

> 39% of top movies released 2005-14 were truly original, i.e. not an adaptation, sequel, spin-off, remake, or other such derivative work.

I don't know, I watch most of my movies at home (I have a nice setup) and watch as many old movies as new. I never feel like I have any trouble finding an original film. The blockbusters may soak up all the ticket sales, but there's just no shortage of original films to me.

But my comment was not about you. ;-) My original point was "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music." And if you "watch as many old movies as new", that's certainly not a ringing endorsement of new movies.

Nowadays I have quite some things in my record collection from my teenage decade, some of which I discovered only a few years ago, some of which I knew and liked back then, but it wasn't popular music back then.

I always liked to think of this as some kind of survivor bias. There is trash music in everybtime period, but the good music will be listend to more often and thus shape the collective musical memory of a decade. The time we're in hasn't had the chance for that to happen yet, so it seems arbitrary and random as it happens and more defined in hindsight.

It also matters where you look. The 80s have a very recognizable pop music, but it also has Punk and multiple other things.

So so much of it is awful. It's interesting granted, but people ignore that the charts were filled with bland covers of other popular songs even in the 60's.

Hip Hop is a great showing of survivor bias. Sure, Tupac, Biggie, Beastie Boys etc are classic but people are rarely listening to the bland safe music from that era. So so many songs where the rapper couldn't think of anything more inventive than "oh you're having FUN well wait till I go and get my GUN I'll shoot you dead and you'll be DONE"

In 30 years, people will hear Kendrick's discography and think "god no one makes meaningful hip hop anymore" while forgetting about the "pop music but instead of a guitar solo, it's a bad rap verse" or the vast amount of emo/trap/SoundCloud stuff where the good stuff is rare.

The exciting thing about living now is the ease that someone can send a link to me. Constantly my friends and I are finding recently released or decade old music that we can simply message the other and say "you'll love the production on this" - whereas for years, you saved up your pocket money and bought one album and that's all you had until you could afford another.

People who say modern music is rubbish rarely make any effort to actually find any. You've kids now talking about bands like Arctic Monkeys but they don't realise the indie landfill of shite guitar bands that all had the same look, same twangy sound, same trajectory. For every Panda Bear/Animal Collective - there was 100 bland animal based bands all copying the same formula in the hope of being as big as Pigeon Detectives lmao

Later, in 2000's, with P2P and streaming radios, I was astounded by some music genres. And, a bit further, with Jamendo and Magnatune, I found incredible gems not found anywhere.

Wrt/ Hollywood: I think they are not the monopoly they used to be, because the powers are shifting by streaming, and short video services. Similar to how AAA games are more stagnant than the indie gaming scene.

"Music" is too broad to "get worse". There are trends in music that can be considered bad, such as the lessening dynamic range of the recordings - the Loudness War[0]. But there is more music than ever, computerized or not, so if you find that some source of music is bad, you just need to look elsewhere. Music production is easier than ever, so even very niche sounds are kept alive, like the lofi sound of post-punk decades ago[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

[1] https://desmonddoom.bandcamp.com/album/doom-and-bloom

Is it a "return of the 80s", or is it a rejection of newer music? Again, "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music." This is a difference from previous generations, which tend to hold on stronger to the music of their times. The current trends of current pop culture have always had a much stronger influence on young people than any "nostalgic" trends. When I was young, nostalgia from earlier decades had almost no influence on myself or my peers.

I see rejection, disappointment and disillusion as a general theme that's going on in culture, but I can't say that these weren't present in the past cultures as well - going back some decades, the popularity of punk and its offshoots show just how much these feelings resonated with the audience back then.

I think that with the widespread access and nonexistent barrier to entry to past cultures via streaming, attention just spread over the existing cultural palette, resulting in lower average consumption of the new and current. It's not that the new and current is rejected - it's rather that long tail is longer and taller.

This is not an informative response to the observation that "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music."

Also, there has been a lot of corporate consolidation in the music industry, the film industry, in almost every industry.

I was in the car with an older Gen-Z'er last year and they expressed jealousy at me having grown up in the 80s because they "like the music so much" and were shocked to find out I didn't.

*yes this is hyperbole

Why not?

> if that's what keeps you listening.

That's the key, though. Kids are generally biased toward new music. This phenomenon is perfectly natural and consistent over the generations, as shown in the article. In the 1980s, it wasn't particularly hard to "discover" 70s or 60s music, and indeed parents might want their kids to listen to their music, but that's not necessarily what the kids want to listen to, because it's not cool. Parents are uncool. Kids want their own music.

What's interesting, though, is that GenZ and Millennials appear to be less biased toward the new music and less biased against the old. The fact that every song ever is available for streaming doesn't mean that people want to listen to every song ever. My understanding is the streaming plays are very top-heavy toward the top artists, and smaller artists are struggling mightily under the streaming payout system.

You really need a level of manual curation that a big data statistical model just can't provided at scale.

I’d guess if you created a profile and loaded it up with just black swing bands from the 30-50’s, it’d do OK.

If not, and I understand their algorithm correctly, it would not only be because no current listeners make that distinction (as discussed up thread).

It would also be because the metadata doesn’t give any signal for it. They seem to use information such as record labels, song writers, producers, guest musicians, etc.

If that metadata has no signal, then my guess is that you’re trying to get it to racially segregate music that was produced before the big interracial marriage scare.

People were worried that if their kids listened to the same musicians, then whites and blacks (or worse!) might marry, so they created white radio stations and black radio stations.

Before that, I imagine there was a lot more interracial collaboration, and the metadata wouldn’t find clean clusters along race boundaries.

It could also be that the old metadata was never digitized.

This interpretation of their behavior is why I've stuck to buying my music (fortunately that's still common for the genres I'm into).

In this instance - and others in my experience listening to the recommendations on this and similar services - "diversify" is used when "dilute" would be more appropriate.

Would be great to have options to add stuff but keep it private while keeping in sync etc. Could be done with a meta layer on top of the Spotify player for instance ?

Maybe one day, they’ll get smaller clusters and lump you in with other listeners who favor black musicians within that category.

This is my problem with these services in that they are very generic and smooth out the outliers. So it’s good for pleasing the 80%, but people with specific tastes are out of luck. Big time regression to the mean.

If you have Discord, I've been curating a musicbot with a similar music rotation since I've also been completely fed up with streaming services pushing more Glenn Miller/similar straight bands, not the hip ones :) If you are interested, join my server, the bot is running 24/7: https://discord.gg/wjsC2TUZPK

For me (and I don't judge people for thinking differently) there's a certain joie de vivre in the music that is just lacking from what white musicians released commercially. I know they were capable of it (I once found a recording of Glenn Miller swinging it just as hard as anything Basie put out) but they were playing to their audience at the time. As I've learned more about the history of Swing and Lindy Hop, this was a specific choice made to "civilize" (as the white people of the time would have said) Jazz's savage rhythms. There's actually posters from the Arthur Murray school in the 1940s saying this exact thing.

(Aside, I had a friend who played a radio show in the 2000s playing old Jazz music. She told me once that if she put anything from a black musician on the show, she'd get hate mail from the listeners. Go figure.)

Like how the Blues didn't come out of a comfortable lifestyle.

Looking of that period is a very sobering reminder of a very dark stain in our national history - and I’ve read too many stories about even well known performers being told they can’t play at certain venues or have to leave immediately afterwards to think everyone wasn’t aware of the stakes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_Un...

As an example of how widespread this was, it took Marilyn Monroe at the height of her fame intervening for _Ella Fitzgerald_ to be able to play at a club in Los Angeles! Not the Deep South, not 1917, but very modern California.

> In October 1957 Monroe made a call to the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles, on behalf of Fitzgerald. Monroe used her social status and popularity to make a deal with them. If they allowed Fitzgerald to perform, Monroe promised that she would take a front-row seat every night

https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/ella-fitzgera...

The closest I can come to a silver lining for this is that it allowed more artists to find a niche where they weren’t competing with the major national artists but that’s nowhere close to compensation for so much tragedy.

You may not realize this, but in the 1930-1950 era being described in America, there was something called "Segregation" where black people were considered legally inferior to white people. As such, there was a very hard line between "black" and "white", a line that was aggressively enforced by every level of society from lawmaking, policing and justice, to radio and TV access, to education, to neighborhoods, and frankly everything else.

With that context, I think it's very easy to see how there can be "black swing" and "white swing" -- it was in a society that forcibly separated everything into "black X" and "white X".

My point is if the music actually is so different, it should be noticable and describable without knowing the race of a particular artist. So how would you describe the black music that describes only black musicians but not white musicians from this period, and vice versa.

The brain can categorize much more easily than it can create a concrete definition for those categories.

For some reason, the view is widely held that internal thoughts are expressed in words. This would mean that anything you can think can easily be verbalized.

The fact that this view is quite obviously false seems to bother very few people.

Talking about the arts is difficult. In everyday conversation, well known phrases for describing the arts include “I know it when I see it” and “if you have to ask, then you’ll never know”. I’m a fan of “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. It just isn’t easy to describing differences in performance and interpretation.

Since it’s widely recognised that describing music is difficult, and since you’re familiar with the artists in question, perhaps you could accept the point in good faith or put into words why you don’t think they are any different?

The most obvious difference is the energy level and "rawness" of songs - those white bands had really carefully choreographed performances with minimal deviation, even solos were often written out in similar big bands.

Black musicians often shouted, yelled or mugged during performances - all of these are completely absent in white performances at that time.

They are and I can, however the existence of Black Swing is in no way predicated on a difference in sound only.

Consider this: white culture in America continually stole from a legally repressed black culture, including white swing which stole the black art and commercialized it. Even if a 1950 white swing song sounds similar to a 1940 black swing song, there is still a "black swing" and a "white swing".

Frankly, I think trying to reduce history of music down to "the sounds themselves" is a way to whitewash the history and destroy the true knowledge of what happened and why. The context is very important.

Nobody finds separating French electronic music into its own subgenre ridiculous. Same with Italian Disco.

Such distinct movements are quite usual, so dissatisfaction about Black Swing on streaming services is understandable.

As it's been said, there are better methods of discovery for this purpose. In your example, I'm sure there are Spotify playlists for Italian disco that have been curated.

If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you.

I couldn’t imagine thinking that would ever happen 15-20 years ago. I’ve also realized that I’m not interested in trying to change that at all, because I’m now of the opinion that so far music has gotten better every single decade I’ve been alive; and the 2020s are off to a great start on that front.

This is very different if music is a lifelong hobby for you. I'm in my forties and some of the artists I most listen to today I discovered during recent years. Still I find articles like this interesting because I can learn something about a larger demographic while being different myself.

Novelty in music of novelty of music? I never considered one could care about the former (it certainly seems orthogonal to popular music, which is all about being new but never novel). So you are actively seeking out to you new genres and artists?

I'm not a completionist, so I'm OK with missing out. I do keep track of artists or (sub)genres to check out, but I very rarely have time to actually check some of it out. I have so much music that the past years I've been deleting more than adding, and I still haven't heard much of it well. Also by now I realize tastes change but also experiences, a song sounds different in different phases of your life it seems.

> So you are actively seeking out to you new genres and artists?

Yeah! I generally find that the more music I know and enjoy, the more music I can connect with or appreciate. At the moment I'm developing greater appreciation and taste for house music and extreme metal, while my go-to genres for a long time have tended to be folk and indie rock of various kinds.

> I'm not a completionist, so I'm OK with missing out. I do keep track of artists or (sub)genres to check out, but I very rarely have time to actually check some of it out. I have so much music that the past years I've been deleting more than adding, and I still haven't heard much of it well. Also by now I realize tastes change but also experiences, a song sounds different in different phases of your life it seems.

I'd say I agree with all of this. I used to listen to new artists and genres extremely systematically and dedicate a lot of time to it (many hours every week). Now it's more irregular than that but it certainly hasn't stopped.

Assuming what's "actually important to you" remains fixed as you age. The article suggests otherwise, with caveats:

> At the same time, stagnation is not a certainty. Research suggests that open-eardness and the discovery of new songs can be cultivated. Finding new music is a challenge, but it is achievable with dedicated time and effort.

There's so much music out there. It's like asking "when do you stop finding new books": you only stop finding if you stop looking. I enjoy the looking, and I see no risk at all of running out even if no more new stuff is ever made.

I think already this albums thing might leak my age. I guess people don't really listen to albums anymore...

One of the most traditional - and important - uses of music was to preserve the oral record, which existed in musical form to make it easier to remember accurately.

I wouldn't expect novelty in music to be important to many people.

The traditional use of music you highlight really resonates with the way that I listen to music, incidentally. I joked recently with my roommate that for me, music is poetry with embellishments, while for him, it's drums with embellishments. Lyrical memorization has been a central part of how I've related to most of the music most important to me, too.

I suppose you're right, though. Most people engage relatively casually with music, and that's okay.

You're right that a lot of people seem to view lyrics as being at best an annoyance; I've seen multiple people on HN argue with a straight face that in order to translate a song from one language to another language, it's not necessary for the meaning of the new lyrics to be similar to the meaning of the old lyrics.

This is not a sense of "translation" that I'm familiar with for other linguistic phenomena.

I've also seen people take offense at the idea that the concept of a "song" might involve singing.

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.

Like you, I can't stand the music I grew up with all that much (maybe a few songs here and there), but I went through the trance/electronic fixation in the 2000s. Now it's almost anything that I enjoy, which probably doesn't say much, but I'm presently listening to some chillstep and was listening to metal covers of the sea shanties "Santiana" and "Roll the Old Chariot Along." A few weeks ago, I was listening to Norse-inspired works by Einar Selvik.

I can't imagine we're that statistically significant or if streaming may have some impact on availability and interest. I'm unwilling to believe it's a personality trait, for instance. (For another data point, I was born in the early 80s.)

I am already feeling myself reach the end of one of these cycles where I am digging through netlabels and indie internet radio stations looking for the next niche subgenre to become addicted to.

If you purposefully go out and listen to new music, you'll quickly get accustom to the sounds of new genres. On the other hand, people who are not in the habit of trying new things never train their brain to enjoy new types of music.

Perhaps there is, if you pardon the expression, a spectrum of receptiveness.

I'm thinking there's something to your speculation, though.

Kind of the same feeling where you upgrade to two monitors and if you have to use a workstation with one just isn't the same.

On the other hand, I really appreciate the minimalism of some modern ambient scores, but I'm not sure me from 15-20 years ago would have had any tolerance of it.

-- the recommendation algorithm

I do know people who turn on some streaming service and basically listen to the same genre all day long. I am not sure how they do it. Maybe we are in some small demographic that goes nuts if we do not discover new music?

Since I went to digital music, I've had the same problem with practically every bit of software and streaming service. They all seem to have some mode where it wants to just mix stuff between genres and it drives me nuts.

My current service is Google Music, and the (auto-generated) "likes" playlist, which really contains only songs that I genuinely really like, even annoys me due to the mixing of genres.

I've found what works best for discovery is to make playlists (by genre, of course) and then from there pick "Start Radio". That is my main way of discovering new music, and when I find songs I enjoy I try to add them to the playlist, too, and "Like" them if they're especially great.

But I do always feel like I'm against the grain, wondering how anyone can ever use any of the auto-generated playlists that aren't constrained by genre, and why anyone would ever build such a thing.

I've found the pandora community post below that seems to confirm it, though I'm not sure whether the community admin answering the question is actually a pandora employee or not.

https://community.pandora.com/t5/My-Collection/What-if-you-l...

Likewise, Pandora allows you to create a station with multiple seeds, or (is it the same?) like songs within a station.

I used to use that, and then I felt like it was narrowing the breadth of the station. I realized that in my mental model I wanted it to be a station of Artist A plus Artist B, so a more expansive station, but Pandora seemed to be treating it as "Artist A ∩ Artist B," i.e. just the small intersection.

Instead, music has become much more timeless for me. 50/60ies jazz, 70s prog rock, Bowie, 2010s hiphop, it’s really all over the place.

Something like that happened to me, again and again.

Overlistening things I love (not necessarily because of me, sometimes it's third parties piling upon my own listening), then at some point I start to not like it anymore to a point ranging from "I have no interest in it anymore" to "it makes me cringe".

Then if I manage to avoid it for some time, often I end up rediscovering it (often by accident) and like it again, but the reason I re-like it is usually deeply different from the original one, and certainly far removed from nostalgia.

The guitarist for RHCP is making the best modern IDM.

The song Party Dozen by the band Party Dozen.

Follow rabbit hole from there.

There is a TON of great classic rock to enjoy that never sees airplay and the reason is the researched tunes have "known" demographics that can be sold.

One, you're quite right about classic rock having a lot of deep cuts that just don't make it outside of some specific instances. On the other hand, not only was new wave not entirely congruent to the 1980s, but a lot of what gets called new wave on various stations is only music that existed in the 1980s, rather than being actual new wave. New wave was fairly tight and the rest is padding.

"Darkjazz" really came and went, and it's unfortunate. I'm still working my way through it but there was a hell of a drop-off.

Speaking of researched tracks, I think when an artist dies, there's a contraction of what of their tracks get played on air.

Another thought, this one purely math. If you bought, say, ten CDs every year, new releases, well, the average age of your collection will age at about half your own age rate. The only ways to prevent that, if this concerns you, is to either jettison your old music or gather ever-increasing amounts of new music.

All of this is to say that, unless your preference is "whatever is on the radio ... played a reasonable volume" (Pictures for Sad Children), you're swimming upstream, against the fantastically evolved. Taste gave way to faddishness, then payola, and now, well, The Algorithm. It's a fight to find what you might like rather than what is just being extruded like soft serve.

In another comment, I said it helps to be around others seeking new tunes. It helps a lot! Their bias into our system can bend things back into a fairly normal curve. It is like rolling back the clock on our music age.

Right now, I am living that with people at their music seeking peak. Super fun and very invigorating.

Recommended.

I had expected that some of Badalamenti's stuff would have opened up since his death, like his score for Witch Hunt, but no luck. His stuff was sort of a wellspring, among others, which intermingled into that little creek we called darkjazz, for a while.

I originally got into it as a primary component of a long set of mixes for a particular mood, namely that I would have instrumentals (primarily darkjazz) buffering slow tempo "torchy" kinds of songs (Mel Torme, Julie London, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday) and the "once every ninety minutes" track which was a little newer. The idea being that the darkjazz doesn't call too much attention to itself and keeps the mood going.

The genre is not really defining in most cases for me, because so much is mislabeled, or not even labeled at all, and I've found in searching music by genre, that most of the recommendations are flooded with SEO spam, and typically never the best music within the genre to begin with...

Ai recommendations will also primarily be based on what makes platforms and their partners the most money, which is often coincidentally the generic sounding pop drivel we're all so used to being played in every retail outlet around us, the best music I've noticed is often hidden below 10k views or less.

That's every bloody station nowadays. It doesn't matter if its radio, SiriusXM, Spotify, or whatever they all degenerate into a small number of repeated songs.

I loathe this pigeonholing. It makes finding something new you might like REALLY hard.

For example, I don't want an "80s station" with the same old crap. How about a station that plays all the songs released since 1990 by those 80s artists? Nope. Nada.

Or, how about just the other tracks from the same albums. Sure, you've heard "Faithfully" from Journey's "Frontiers" album a zillion times and hate it. Have you heard "Chain Reaction", "Edge of the Blade" or "Frontiers" from the album? Bet you haven't and if you hate their sappy ballads you're likely to enjoy those tracks.

Or, God forbid, brand new artists that sound like what you want. Try coughing up Blossoms from liking 80s. You might get there if you really work by starting from the very specific "jangle pop" angle.

Ever heard anything from "Blackstar" out in public? I know I sure haven't.

However, I would also argue that music is simply a LOT less important to today's youth. It's background noise while doing some other activity and not an activity in and unto itself.

Maybe. But then you get t-swizzle teenagers with turntables who rediscover the idea of sitting and listening to an album.

You could do this with almost any genre, I suspect.

- 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.

Is this within a narrow genre?

That being said, I generally don’t agree with conclusions like “culture is frozen”. You are correct that there is _more_ high quality material available than ever before. The challenge is just that it’s harder than ever to find it.

Davide of MIMIC Radio is good for classical music, as it's pretty much the only one I know that usually plays a whole classical music piece, and not a single movement, etc. and it's high bitrate as well.

To get the freeform format with newer, “shinier”, and often more electronic sounding music, I also like NTS.

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.

I think there was also more variation on that than there is now. Music cost a fair amount of money to buy so what you heard as a kid depended on what people around you were spending hundreds of dollars on, and radio stations were far more diverse in the era before ClearChannel bought everything and consolidated onto a handful of choices. My wife and I had relatively similar suburban upbringings in many ways but there are a ton of 80s and 90s bands I was more familiar with because I happened to live within range of two different college radio stations at different points, and she basically had only very big commercial options.

There’s still variety these days but I think it’s undercut a lot because every teenager with a smartphone has access to pretty much anything, and the social media pressure to like the big names has never been stronger.

I spend at least an hour each week doing something that I can also listen to new music at the same time, and I add it to my favorites, so that those dark AI recommendations start adding similar recommendations to my listening mixes. I don't listen to top 100 because by and large I don't like it. In modern music my taste has shifted away from prog rock and classic into techno/psytrance/etc. All it took was spending a bit of time looking, every week, to enrich my taste in music and make sure I wasn't repeating the stuff I heard on the radio growing up forever.

It's up to you to do it. It's your choice to make.

Well, older people (40, 50, even 60+) more passionate about music, they still do all of those (going to concerts, discussing music, crafting the right playlist for roadtrips), not unlike like they did in their 20s.

So, yes: most people do care less about music and stop finding new music.

This is maybe true if we talk about superstar kind of show. But I think it's now easier than ever to find out about little gigs, which were hard to find before social networks.

I live in medium size capital city (Belgrade), there are options to listen to live music every single day. Sometimes it's just classic music, sometimes there are cover bands, but quite often there's a chance to listen to original music. And these small gigs are quite cheap or even free. I very often listen a song or two (Spotify or youtube really help with this!), then if it looks promising I listen to some more while walking to the show.

Sure, sometimes it's not good. But very often I like it a lot and you can bet I listen to it much more focused then if that same music came on autoplay at home.

If you're in big enough city or have something bigger nearby - find a way to discover new gigs, follow venues, event organizers, local cultural institutions, festivals, etc. That's my main use of Facebook.

It feels more like greed in the business than an experience.

That being said I'm still sitting on the idea of paying 123$ for cage the elephant show on an album I haven't heard yet.

What's wild is how much the "low-quality recording" on a modern smartphone looks and sounds way better than bootlegs I listened to (or, god forbid, watched) in the 90s.

I don't film entire concerts but I will usually try to get a nice clip from one of my favorite songs. It's fun to revisit. I'd love it if I had short clips from shows I saw when I was 20, especially ones of bands who blew up later or fell off the face of the earth.

The exception to this is extremely mainstream performances that attract people, where it may be the one big thing they do in the year or the next.

Before this was mostly done through in person communicate, now this is primarily done through smart phones.

What's with the sympathy for the performer? It's hard for them to even see the audience. Most of the light is focused on them and the audience is in the dark.

As for my comment about the performer, I'm just picturing it from their perspective and to me it would feel odd to go from looking at people to looking at phones. I'm sure there are lots of people who film with their phone lights on, so that's got to be noticeable through the stage lights.

> There's nothing worse than hundreds of phone screens glowing in your face while you're trying to enjoy a live act.

Plenty of worse things. People throwing up on you. Harassment. Tarps. Passing out. Being sold water even though it's supposed to be free. Taking bottle caps away from you. People talking during the show. People yelling about politics.

I don't enjoy all the phones either, but it is what it is.

“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...

As far as cultural impact over a larger timespan: Iron Butterfly, The Dead, Frank Zappa, Quiet Riot, Ozzy, MJ, Nirvana, Cake, AiC, NIN, Marilyn Manson, Soundgarden, TOOL, Beastie Boys, RATM, Kool Keith (and other aliases), Jay-Z (and Danger Mouse mixes), RZA (and family relations).