Music discovery

the mindlab

Somehow I missed a ton of great music in the last decade. I blame it on a couple of things:

  • The decline of radio. It got so bad that I just stopped listening around 2012. Thus it became much harder to discover new stuff that way.
  • I moved to Ohio in 2012. This is coupled with the above point. I knew of a couple non-mainstream radio stations in Philly, but the decent ones in Cleveland didn’t quite broadcast to where we lived on the far East side.
  • The rise of streaming music. I have a ton of ripped music in a carefully curated collection. When Apple Music came out, there were lots of stories of it screwing up your local library in various ways. As a result I stayed away for a long time.

As a result, I got in a rut where I was purchasing music from bands I was already aware of, but finding anything new was getting difficult. During the early pandemic, I finally finished ripping the last of my CDs in a lossless format and tagged everything right. I also bought a new drive for music backup; if anything happen I would be good.It was time to try some of the streaming services. I tried Amazon Music for a tiny bit. I tried Spotify for a bit longer and finally settled on Apple Music. We have a lot of Apple devices so it just made sense.

Long and short of it, I’ve gotten recommendations for a bunch of albums that came out in the 2010’s that are really great. I’ve added a number of new bands to the rotation. I’ll write about some of them at some point.

It’s clear each service has its own algorithm for recommendation. They suggest different bands; they also get stuck in a rut sometimes. I’m starting to branch out to some streaming radio and curated playlists to keep things fresh. I’m also playing around with last.fm.1 We’ll see it goes.

It still blows my mind that I have access to all this music so easily. 1995 me would be so very jealous.

  1. How very 2000’s of me. ↩

7 thoughts on “Music discovery”

  1. The algorithm on Apple Music does get in a rut, but like you, I think what astounds me is that I can listen to anything I want. It kills the magic a little, and I’ve never really worked out what it must be like to be someone who’s only known this type of music consumption. I use Sirius and tag some new music off it, but they tend to put stuff in fairly heavy rotation on all their channels so that it can get a bit the same. Maybe I should give last.fm a go.

  2. Last.fm is a bit goofy. It basically records a history of what you listen to and eventually gives you recommendations based on it. Who knows if those recommendations will be better, different, or deeper than what you get on Spotify or Apple Music. The catch is that when you are listening to music, it needs to get sent to last.fm. I think you can set up Spotify to do it automatically. Apple Music requires you to use a companion app or a different player on your phone.

    The primary reason I’m trying it is that you can set up a Sonos speaker to send the info regardless of what service you are listening to, which is exactly the place my listening habits were not informing any recommendations.

  3. Well, riddle me this, nutface: why should I engage with a new band if the band name doesn’t relate to poop, pee, or fermented plums?

    That’s what I thought.

      1. Cool how you use Nordstream to be “relevant” in the most arbitrary of ways. No way to achieve Anderson Cooper’s grandfather status. Rap about early 20th Century worker exploitation.

        I straddled rail lines in the rags, sold canned steaks to the hags. OONCE OONCE OONCE

  4. Years ago when I was weird and hot, no one put my dance on Netflix.

    (never Craig T. Nelson, never read a Reagan Bio, neverPOOP…still weird though)

  5. So, I had made plans earlier in the week to watch Aubrey Plaza on SNL tonight…but I had forgotten as of 15 mins ago. Fortunately, a niche Twitter personality, hardly known, (@dril) tweeted about canned octopus, and now I am reminded of my parasocial engagement with muh moving pictures.

    Later, taters.

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