I too listen to different genres of music depending on mood, and I hate when they mix. I used to make mix tapes and later audio CDs like "Alt Rock #" and "EDM #" and I had dozens of those.

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 use Pandora and I'm able to maintain genre-specific stations pretty well. Sometimes it will try to mix something new in but I just dislike that song and it happily keeps playing the genre(s) that I chose for that channel.

I don't know about Pandora, but I've always been cautious to use "dislike" in that way, because I don't know the scope. There's a difference between "I don't want to ever hear this" vs "I don't want to hear it on this station". I use it for the former but not the latter.

Yeah, the opaqueness of your actions in Pandora and in other streaming services is always annoying.

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.

My experience has been that dislikes are station specific. I regularly dislike songs on channels in order to shape the genre, even if I actively listen to that song on other stations. Pandora's whole identity revolves around stations, so it would be weird if dislikes were global.

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...

I'm the bane of any recommendation algorithm. They just give me random crap because nobody, not even me, can figure out my taste. I like a little bit of virtually everything, with no rhyme or reason.

I like music with good lyrics, which similarly no algorithm can figure out.

"You once listened to a cover from Metallica of an Ennio Morricone song? Here's Metallica entire discography as a suggestion!"

-- the recommendation algorithm

I don't think you're completely alone, but you're probably statistically insignificant (don't worry, I'm right there with you).

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 actually wonder if staying receptive to new music into or past middle age is enhanced by autism. I am a male on the spectrum, in my late 30's, and absolutely nothing about this article rings true to me. I generally operate on a 5 year cycle where I completely reinvent my musical interests, stop enjoying lots of tracks that I used to love (I hate just about eveything I loved at 14), and hang onto a handful of tracks that I consider timeless.

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.

I'm going on mid 40s and could have written a very similar comment, except my five year cycle is more additive than reinventive.

It seems plausible. I'm not on the spectrum (so far as I know), but my receptiveness to new music generally has some association with previous genres I enjoyed. I definitely don't experience the "reinventiveness" trait so much as gradual evolution. I don't like early 2000s electronica anymore, some trance I used to enjoy I don't, but now I just love some other genres that are tangentially related (chillstep, etc). On the other hand, I still enjoy some of the same metal groups that I used to (Disturbed, Epica, etc) even though I don't listen as often.

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

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

Brains have to have repeated exposure to a stimulus before they find it pleasurable. This is why you may need to try a new food a few times before you develop a liking for it, and the same goes for new music genres.

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.

Anecdotally for me it's that music is now more complex the simplicity of older music just doesn't please the senses as it did back then.

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.

You know... this makes a LOT of sense to me.

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.

I find this very interesting, as my path is nearly identical, with the added note (like some other replies) that I just can not stand 60s-70s rock any longer... but I find my musical interests are much wider, and I am listening to more new music than ever before (trance, IDM, experimental, jazz, classical).

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?

Spotify gives me half a dozen suggested playlists, and they’re each broadly compartmentalized into different genres (or collections of similar genres).

I think we have the same taste from the 2000s on. If you had to recommend one artist\track I probably haven't heard of yet, which would it be?

I'm not who you're asking, but this is a relatively recent release that put me on my ass:

The song Party Dozen by the band Party Dozen.

Follow rabbit hole from there.

I have a very similar history as well, so jumping in. You've probably heard of the artist, John Frusciante. But probably not the album, Maya.

The guitarist for RHCP is making the best modern IDM.

"ambient, techno and IDM" is a broad bucket but my favourite noname I found post 2010s is a greek sampler going by Moderator

Closer to trip-hop maybe but has elements of ambient and some dance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX1SpTUdZQM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MjAGr09yWo

https://moderator.bandcamp.com/album/sinners-syndrome-2

If you're more into the techno / IDM side then maybe you'll like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMGkis0E2r8

it's the dustiest deep house track i've found in a decade

also this one makes me nostalgic for 90s rave scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpZ2s1BrLHI

I listen to anything new I can get my hands on without a bunch of ads disrupting the vibe.. YouTube is my favorite music resource these days, as the videos are better in telling me more about whether an artist is genuine (non Ai, and non-industry-plant).

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.

"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."

You literally just make things up and try to pawn them off as fact. Just saying... When you can't even make something as simple as a responsive website... you really shouldn't weight in on things like this.

Im much the same, but today I'm constantly in the search for anything new, anything in any genre that breaks the well-worn formulae and surprises me, but it's honestly hard to find, everything is derivative.

I go through periods like that

I want a station that plays everything that was ever in the rock top 100 from around 1950 to around 2010. There has to be all kinds of great stuff that never gets played on "oldies" stations. Probably a bunch of duds too, but if they made it as far as the top 100, there can't be that relatively many.

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

> I can’t even stand any more due to the incredibly small playlists that most classic rock stations use.

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.

The local oldies station plays 1950-2004 (now-20) and does seem to delve a little past top 40 from time to time.

> 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.

WQXR plays an extremely shallow list. Very little 20th century, minimal baroque, sticks to the more well known romantics.

Me too, but it may be because as a teenager I listened to heavy metal. It was awesome, and I still like hearing those songs occasionally. But it's so loud and exhausting that I don't seek it out. Instead, I'm usually drawn back to Motown and R&B from the 60s and 70s, which is definitely before my time.

They use a set of researched tracks by Arbitron and others seeking to maximize AD revenue by demographic.

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.

I have started a little research project wherein I have been harvesting the feeds of various Internet-active radio stations so I can look for the "deep cuts." Not just for classic rock, but for various "new wave" stations, as well as combining old "top 500" lists, and so on. I am nowhere near done, but I have made some notes that confirm old suspicions.

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.

Indeed! Your comment resonates with my own thought and experiences.

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.

Aww hell yeah, dark jazz is great. I assume you know Bohren & der Club of Gore and Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble? (curious of any recommendations if you know more good stuff!)

I am working on one of my Master Lists, but the /r/darkjazz subreddit was good. Now, it is mostly dead but for spam from randos who aren't within miles of the sound trying to flog their own efforts. Black Chamber, Free Nelson Mandoomjazz, you might try those for giggles.

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.

I’m similarly weird. I grew up in the 90s and listened to a lot of grunge when I was 14 (the music age we seem to prefer according to the article). But I can barely listen to the music from that time anymore. It just sounds so dated, maybe because I listened to it too much? Something like Pearl Jam or Soundgarden just sounds so dreadful now.

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.

> It just sounds so dated, maybe because I listened to it too much?

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.

Not listening for some time indeed sometimes helps. I now try to avoid listening music I really really like too often. It's something beautiful you take out of its box every few months/years. Stuff like Ole Coltrane or Miles Davis' Filles de Kilimanjaro.

On rock, try this:

http://s2.stationplaylist.com:9460/guerrilla

On Jazz, Archive.org has full legal backups of Revolution Void, some gem I discovered wiatth the K.Mandla/Inconsolation blog (now defunct).

Statistics are not descriptive of an individual. This data should not be used to make boundary assertions about anyone’s actual preferences.