I'm 20, I grew up listening to albums on YouTube, never owned a CD, tape, or record. But my experience is and was still exactly what you describe. My friends and I have countdowns on our phones ticking down the days to eagerly-awaited releases, we make plans to listen to it together at a 'premiere' hosted by whoever has the best speakers. If they live up to the excitement they get replayed to death, memorized backwards and forwards, and discussed endlessly. In middle/high school we'd write our own reviews to post online and sometimes get the artist replying to us on Twitter which made our month. The fact that we didn't have to buy a 4"-by-4" piece of plastic and put it into another piece of plastic before hitting play didn't prevent any of that and I can't imagine it making the music more exciting or engaging.
I agree, that's certainly part of it and I'm happy to hear that young people are still obsessed about music. I'm not suggesting you need physical media to do it, but I am saying the medium has changed things to some degree.
Back then, if we wanted a mix tape, we'd have to mix it. Now, spotify generates five new ones each day for each of us, or we can request a new one on the fly for any genre, mood, artist, etc. So, it makes me wonder how these tools have changed the way young people today consume music. For example, how much of your digital listening is to entire albums start to finish vs some kind of mix/random play? What are you doing (if anything) while you listen to a complete album? Are you buying albums specifically or listening to them on a subscription service?
I’d consider myself into quite underground music (electronic/techno, nothing mainstream or commercial at all, I’d wager even most people who consider themselves into electronic music wouldn’t have heard of a lot of the artists I listen to) and it usually gets it pretty right, sometimes amazingly so.
I’ve been introduced to some of my favourite music by Spotify, and the interface makes exploring related artists etc. really easy. Ideally I’d like better cataloguing (e.g. tagging) and metadata (e.g. more emphasis on labels) but I know I’m a niche user and I can work around these limitations.
My tips if you try it again would be:
- if it recommends something you don’t like, press thumbs down (if available) and skip - they use skipping as a signal you don’t like something
- build up a collection of music you do like, using the save button and/or playlists
- check out the feature which plays related music after you’ve finished listening to a track or album - this often finds the most interesting music for me
- check out the “related songs” area under any playlists you’ve created. If you have focussed playlists (e.g. I have ones for different subgenres), this can help you discover some great stuff.
I’d actually say the stuff Spotify plays after an album/song is the best part of their recommendations for me. The daily mixes it generates aren’t bad. Release Radar and Discover Weekly can be a bit hit or miss, sometimes for example it will recommend overly commercial stuff for my tastes, but it’s always worth scanning through (and I do thumbs down the really off recommendations).
It’s not perfect of course, for example sometimes I find it gets “stuck” in a small subset of artists after a while, but combined with other sources and some input to guide, Spotify is the best service I’ve found for discovering music, and is way above for example YouTube suggestions
Wait, does that still happen or did you just describe what you used to do in the past?
As a music lover and collector on fridays my todo list is filled with numerous entries of new release I scheduled months and weeks in advance. And yet this kind of musical anticipation, exploration and discovery seems to be a rather solitary passion. For most people music has been relegated to background noise it seems. If you and your friends still enjoy and explore music the way you described, that's exceptionally wonderful.
I bet people that were 35 at the time had similar complaints about us not discussing and appreciating music like they did when they were had their mix-tapes playing on their parent’s stereo.
But I don't understand vynil records at all. It is worse than even CD, not to mention high-res downloadable albums. Dynamic range is worse, noise floor is worse, stereo separation is worse.
I'm old enough to listen A LOT of LP records in the past, before widespread of CDs in my country (ok, we have affordable CDs later than USA or UK or Eastern Europe, for sure), but, no, never again!
There was period of time, when mastering for CDs was much worse than mastering for Vynil, because CDs could bear "black wall" of sound and Vynil cannot. But, again, Loudness War seems to end about 15 years ago...
The sound quality is somewhere between "good enough" and "genuinely good", no match for good digital formats, but certainly good enough to get lost in the music and enjoy it. And my turntable cost around $100 second hand, nothing too fancy.
I mostly buy rock and metal from the 70s and 80s, second hand. The only new records I buy are from bands that could easily fool people into thinking they are actually from back then, like Visigoth and Smoulder, old-school heavy metal. It just feels like vinyl is the right format for it.
It’s a visceral thing.
But, as with photographic film, while I have a certain nostalgia for vinyl records, I don't really miss the scratches and the warping and need to flip the record or put a new one on every 20 minutes or so.
If you listened to metal you dressed that way too, indie pop another way, your music defined who you were, your friends, the magazines you bought.
There are just so many ways for kids to define themselves these days, music is important but I don't think they feel defined by what they listen to (not to the same extent).
I am jealous of how cheap music is now, I wish it could have been cheaper in my youth.
Signed, Old git.
I wouldn't say that I define myself by my taste in music, but it does influence my choices in clothes and so on.
PS - I Loved Brightest Lights. I am also looking forward to Porter Robinson's next album -- it's been a long time since the last album and I didn't love this first single initially, but it has really grown on me (the ducking is still a little much in some areas).
Honestly, I think Porter Robinson is sort of like Baynk in that they're both way better live. The latter especially feels less... 'tropical' live. Good stuff, though.
Have you heard the ABGT350 Deep warmup set? It's a nice journey, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5ZhKyOxZns
If you haven't been, I recommend the Anjuna weekender they're going to have in 2021 at The Gorge.
Dude, Brainwasher is this track I think I've been searching for for a while. Mega thanks. That with Black Hole.
I listen to both, and still have a CD collection that gets less use.
I decided a long time ago I didn’t mind not keeping up with every new arts trend and just slowly wade through works I like, finding others along the way. I could talk at length about some of my favourites but I also don’t encounter those situations anymore with people. I do with my partner, though. I’m lucky she’s interested—though she’s also more current usually.
On the other hand, when I listen to a record, I sit down and I listen to the record. I mean, you kind of have to do that anyway because you only get a few songs before you have to flip it. I find it makes me more mindful of the music; I feel more in-the-moment; and it reminds me of my youth. That was a time when we couldn't just tell our phone to start playing an AI curated playlist while everyone talks over it anyway. I'm not convinced we would we have wanted to do that either...
People rarely talk about music anymore, compared to what it used to be like. We used to line up when a new album was coming out from a favorite artist. We'd take the tape or cd from our car, into our bedroom, over to our friend's houses, and blast it on our parent's floor speakers before they came home from work. We used to talk about that album for days, sometimes months as we got deeper into it after many replays. I can't remember the last time I had a good conversation about a new album... few seem to care anymore. A lot of people will blame the music, but there is still some great music being made today.
Maybe it's the medium.