8 ms·

Too Much Music: A Failed Experiment in Dedicated Listening

79 points by JasonFruit 9y ago

tonetheman 9y ago
I love this quote. 'claimed that we only ever really love 10 albums, and we spend the rest of our listening lives seeking facsimiles of those 10, pursuing the initial rush, so to speak' I too did the calculation from article about how much music I had amassed and could never listen to all of it. Good stuff.
- mikestew 9y ago
  Sure, I still seek the thrill of, say, putting Rush’s 2112 on the turntable for the first time, but I’m not going to get that by seeking out 2112 clones. Those moments now only come when I branch out. The breathy ambience of School of the Seven Bells doesn’t get found looking under the “prog rock” category. I mean, I see what the quote is getting at, but I just can’t see myself trying to relive the 70s. For one, despite having purchased everything in the Led Zepplin catalog at least twice, I’m getting just a little sick of what I grew up with. Might explain why I currently play bluegrass on a mandolin, and the Strat hangs on the wall.
  - aaroninsf 9y ago
    This scratched my raised-on-progressive-rock itch nicely. It's more early Crimson in rockstar mode than Rush, but. Old news but recent to me :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ3LvVHYMM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ3LvVHYMM8
  - scarecrowbob 9y ago
    Ha. That quote in the parent literally triggered in my brain "Tom Sawyer". At this point, I totally don't like any "prog rock" other than Rush (unless you want to count Primus). What you write is super relatable. I grew up listening to a lot of punk rock and older stuff including a lot of Zep, Beatles, Rush, Yes and all kinds of stuff. I just turned 40 and I'd much rather play and listen to old jazz or country. Most of my guitar and piano playing ends up being blues, though it's fun to cover Hendrix on a piano. Hell, I'd rather listen to my kid's vaporwave stuff or, say, Neon Indian, than make another pass through Zep IV. I play a lot of bluegrass (guitar, upright bass, banjo, dobro, etc) but can't hardly stand to listen to it. About the only stuff I can stand to listen to and work on playing at the same time is the Dead and related groups. Maybe that's like jazz but for late 20th century rock... I dunno.
    - abakker 9y ago
      Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuhHU_BZXSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuhHU_BZXSk I think that provides enough inversion while still hitting the right points in my brain.
      - scarecrowbob 9y ago
        I'd forgotten about that... thanks for reminding me :D
  - abakker 9y ago
    This provided me a similar thrill. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdTa2kYJMEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdTa2kYJMEM But, I didn't "get it" until about the 3rd listen. Part of what made Rush so great to me, was that I felt like I got more out of it the more I listened to it.
    - mikestew 9y ago
      Definitely on my "listen to later" list now, thanks.
  - epicide 9y ago
    When I first read that line, I was really annoyed with it, but then when I broke it down, I couldn't really refute it. You might not be looking for something that sounds like 2112, but rather looking for something that puts you in the same mindset 2112 did the first time. I think it could also be taken to mean what you initially liked about those 10 albums influences what you consider "good music". You could rephrase it as something like "your music taste is largely based off of about 10 albums".
- fhood 9y ago
  Honestly, that calculation deeply annoyed me. The author says he is 39, and that he has amassed so much music that he couldn't listen to all of it in 40 years, so what I would like to know, is why he owns so much music that he has never listened to!
  - saint_fiasco 9y ago
    Maybe he bought a lot of music back when you had to buy whole albums at a time even if you only liked a couple of the songs. Kind of like I do with videogames and bundles.
  - rb808 9y ago
    > But I will confess that when peer-to-peer file-sharing came into my life about 15 years ago, I was not immune to its siren song. Yeah downloading every mp3 in the world was easy, which I think is the point of the article.
  - fusiongyro 9y ago
    This guy is a music industry professional, so it's less surprising to me than if he were just some dude who makes websites.
  - Brockenstein 9y ago
    In the 21st century its pretty easy to acquire media of any type faster than you can consume it. I've got a backlog of books on my kindle. Over 14 years I've acquired games on Steam a few at a time to an extent that I could take a few years off work to play them. The problem is you can't listen to all the music that came out today, and then listen to all the music that comes out tomorrow and listen to your favorites from yesteryear too. Some people don't temper their buying habits to reflect that, at least not optimumly.
- ambrosite 9y ago
  I liked that quote, too. I think it is true of other art forms as well, like novels, movies, and even computer games. I find that most of the time, when I like a new book or movie, it is not because it was an original and unique experience for me, but rather because it reminded me of some other book or movie that I had loved a long time ago.
- xamuel 9y ago
  It doesn't have to be limited to 10. One day I realized my music tastes were determined by random chance and I was just listening to more of the same. So I started seeking out critically acclaimed albums, and listening to them repeatedly until they "click". Some albums take longer to click than others, but they all click eventually. In some cases, I'll have to temporarily give up on a difficult album. Listen to a few dozen other albums and let them click. Then come back to the difficult album, and bang, "This is amazing! How could I be so blind!" It's like you have to level up your musical appreciation stat. I'll never, ever trust my playlist to some recommendation engine. If I'd done that instead of seeking out classics, I'd've missed so much amazing music!
meri_dian 9y ago
I'm not sure if I'm unique in this respect, but I have about 15 to 20 songs/mixes/pieces that I regularly listen to. I never get tired of them, and they are satisfying enough to me that I don't need to really seek out new music. What does happen to me is that every 2 years or so I find that I get on a particular kick to listen to a certain type of music. This happened to me with baroque/classical/romantic orchestral music recently, but again I eventually reached a point where I had found about 15-20 pieces that I would repeatedly listen to and no longer needed new pieces as I was so satisfied with what I had found. It's not that I don't love music. I do, and each day I listen to it for 2-3 hours.
- aaroninsf 9y ago
  Playlists pls :)
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  I do something similar but I am not sure if it's a good thing. Sometimes I feel it feeds my autistic tendencies.
  - meri_dian 9y ago
    I'm not diagnosed autistic but I definitely have strong obsessive and ADHD tendencies about things I get interested in. For music, the pieces I find myself listening to repeatedly have a particular quality that I can't really describe, but they just sound so good, so perfect, that they make me feel transcendent .. it's honestly like sex. I like all music and I'm cool with having anything on in the background while I'm doing work, but when I'm really determined to focus on what I'm listening to I need to listen to the music I love, and the list of that music is very short.
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      That's exactly how I feel. I have a few pieces of music that speak to me and have done this for many years. Sometimes I find something new but that's rare. I am also not diagnosed but all the signs for some level of autism are there.
sfindie 9y ago
I never understand why people obtain music only to put it on a listening To-Do list and then never get around to it. I guess there's people who collect music and then there's others who listen to the records they collect. Call me weird, but I'd feel ashamed to get a record and never listen to it. All of the 34,000+ songs in my music library has graced my ears at least once.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Call me weird, but I'd feel ashamed to get a record and never listen to it. All of the 34,000+ songs in my music library has graced my ears at least once. If that "at least once" was actually "just once" for most of then, then you're not that different from those other people then, as songs as meant for multiple listens. A cursory single listen (and perhaps while doing something else at the time too, or with skipping forward) it's not much different than no listen at all.
  - fusiongyro 9y ago
    I love Led Zeppelin. When I was younger, I bought everything they released and listened to it obsessively. I heard on reddit they're planning to sweep up the dust from the studio floors again this year and make another lost recordings release. I can tell you, I will probably listen to Physical Graffiti another dozen times before I die, but I'm not going to touch BBC Sessions again except for the two decent songs, and this "new" release of Plant scratching his balls while Page gets high is a non-starter for me. 90% of everything is crap, including Led Zeppelin. Most music is worth exactly one listen. You can tell right away if you're going to need to hear it again.
  - klodolph 9y ago
    The idea that a song is meant for multiple listens is an interesting claim but does not support the argument. If you won't like a song then what is the purpose of listening to it again? This whole perspective is backwards. Is it our responsibility to listen to songs multiple times, or is it simply the goal of an artist to make songs that we would listen to multiple times? What any object is "meant for" shouldn't dictate how you use it.
spookyuser 9y ago
I love and totally agree with this article. Anecdotally at least, I can see an objective drop in the amount of songs I listen to now on my Spotify account versus eight years ago on my iPod. When I had to download individual mp3s and transfer them with a cable to my iPod I would probably have made a playlist of new songs every few weeks or so. Now the only time I ever 'make a playlist' is perhaps once a year. In fact, if there isn't a long trip I'm going on sometimes I don't make a new playlist for an entire year. Part of the problem in this is that there are simply too many songs to add to a new playlist. If I go back through just my spotify likes there could easily be three hundred+ I would need to collate and that's not including Soundcloud or YouTube. This means that when I've finally gathered together a playlist of songs I want listen to it can be 300/400 songs long, meaning I can listen to it for an entire year and some songs will only have been listened to once and others not at all. This, like the author, strikes me as being so much worse than when I was deeply listening to, if not albums, playlists over and over again for a couple of weeks. They might have only had a dozen or so songs but I knew each of them well and enjoyed them too. Now I can't think of one song in my last mega-playlist that I could recall offhand. What's even worse is that this clearly applies to more than music. I have an enormous goodreads list that I will almost certainly never finish. A year of Netflix shows that I am perpetually behind on, and a Pocket list that still has articles from the 2016 election. I don't know what the solution to this is, but there is definitely something weirdly limiting to having an unlimited number of x.
- zodPod 9y ago
  In creative ventures we tend to try artificially limiting ourselves. I know that is easier said than done but if you can say something like "I will only use five instruments" or "I will only read books that are non-fiction" or "I will only listen to (genre) of music" or something you then have a focus and it's no longer just an overwhelming list of white noise!
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  This is a big factor behind the resurgence of vinyl. When you have to dedicate time and effort to deciding what music you really want to listen to, when you have to take care of your music carefully (lest you damage it), and when you have an excuse to listen to music as a primary rather than background activity, all of those things enhance the overall experience and can make it easier to enjoy music more (even though in principle all of those things: extra cost, fragility, limited mobility, etc. are downsides).
klodolph 9y ago
Sure, people in their 30s will continue to grapple with their relationship with music. I know people of all ages who had some kind of revelatory experience putting on some particular songs or albums in high school. I can still remember what I was doing, where I was, and who I was with when I first listened to Led Zeppelin I, Tommy, or Hotel (by Moby). Hotel isn't even that good an album! But the same is true of other media like movies and video games. And it's true of people. Your first friends and your first loves change your life. Those experiences get farther and farther apart as you get older, and it has nothing to do with technology. The author seems to have taken up some kind of impossible geas as a countermeasure. Imagine if you thought you talked too much in conversations and so you took a vow of silence. It's a bit extreme. I take a different approach: my music library is sorted by purchase date, and anything at the top will only get pushed out after a few listens. I don't have to force myself to do anything, I'm just too lazy to look past the first page very often. This works equally well with iTunes and with physical media, and it gives me a chance to really fall in love with new albums, even if I don't get the same feeling I got when I was 15. Technology may have radically changed the way we consume music but our relationship to music is largely the same. The only difference is that you're older. Loving someone feels different at 15 and 30, and loving music is the same way. Edit: The part about novels is a bit weird. Remember that Brothers Karamazov was published as a serial. Moby Dick was a flop and didn't sell well until it was republished 40 years later, after Melville's death. So if anything, those examples illustrate the point that literary fiction doorstops have never been that popular. However, these days we have monstrous epics dominating genre fiction. Rowling proved that young children will pay good money to read a 3,400 story across seven books, the same way you'd binge Netflix, and I've known a few people who as children had to replace their hardbound Harry Potter books just from ordinary use. Page counts are, if anything, ballooning in genre fiction and the shelves are dominated by trilogies and longer series.
munificent 9y ago
The author touches on this only glancingly, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I too have been suffering from information overload, mostly from social media apps on my phone. I have mostly solved it recently by getting a new phone and not installing any of those apps. My goal is to get back to the state where I am actually bored sometimes, because being bored is an opportunity to think and let my brain work through some of the information I've already jammed into my short-term memory. Insulating myself from media works, but it's a choice, and that choice itself has a cost. Before smartphones and the Internet, I could be in a state where I wasn't overloaded with information and I wasn't spending an iota of effort to maintain that state. I can be in that state now, but I am constantly paying a mental tax to keep those shields up. Don't install the app, don't let myself spend too much time on reddit (or here for that matter...). It may be that there is no solution to this problem short of radically excising myself from modern society. But I do hope we come up with broader solutions to it than what we have now where it's all on each of us to maintain constant, exhausting, vigilance against the tide of data that seeks to wash us away.
- JasonFruit 9y ago
  This comment captures exactly the reason I thought this article was worth sharing. When I was young, I never had to discipline myself from listening to too much new music, even when I staffed the music library and was alone in there for hours.
- daodedickinson 9y ago
  How can you feel bored instead of guilty? Whenever I pause, I just feel bad about things undone. This week I realized I haven't been bored since high school started, because at that point there was always something I "should" be doing that I wasn't. Haven't been bored in over a decade and I feel I probably won't again, though I try.
  - Delmania 9y ago
    > How can you feel bored instead of guilty? Whenever I pause, I just feel bad about things undone. It's a bit cliche, but if you were to die soon, what things would you seek to finish before you die so you can die content? What do you want your legacy to be? The stoic practice of meditating on your eventual death is a great way to put things into perspective.
busterarm 9y ago
I have mixed feelings about this article, agreeing with points and vehemently disagreeing with others. In particular I don't like the consumption rules for music. I have pretty anomalous/extreme music listening patterns. I've listened to every album in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (all editions of it...) at least once. When I was working remotely, I listened to about 16 hours of music every day, about 2/3 of that time spent listening to new music. I've done experiments where I've listened exclusively to Billboard & Oricon chart records for years at a time. I listened to Meshuggah's Catch 33 at least 4 times a day every day for a year and a half. Lately, I tend to spend my time devouring entire genres, learning all of the major talents & producers and the connections between them. My knowledge has become somewhat encyclopedic -- like a more-expansive, more-complete, mental version of Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music. Once I learned that lyrics don't matter to me, I stopped reading them along with listening. I stopped reading liner notes. I haven't picked up a physical copy of an album in at least 9 years. If anything, the changing music consumption patterns have enabled me to appreciate more music in a manner that I prefer. Maybe it's okay for people to appreciate music the way they want and not to have to put albums on some pedestal anymore like people did with 70s Prog Rock. Through all of this, I've retained my ability to be critical of music. Heck, I'm a cohost of a podcast where all we do is critique music. I would argue that it's not the change in consumption pattern that's to blame here, but rather a lack of tastemakers in public society and extremely negative reactions to criticism of any sort. Critical opinions are faux pas in our culture pretty much universally these days.
- davehtaylor 9y ago
  >a lack of tastemakers in public society I would call this a good thing. I despise the idea of someone telling me what I should or shouldn't like, as though I have no mind of my own to decide what I do or don't like, and as though they are somehow superior and have some kind of enlightened outlook on things that I could never hope to achieve.
  - busterarm 9y ago
    You're just exemplifying what I said later where critique is unwelcome. I don't think media is some egalitarian process where everyone is celebrated just for doing something. There's a lot out there in popular culture that is just outright technically flawed. Or just crap -- trust me, I've listened to more crap music and watched more crap movies than probably anyone (I much prefer to talk about the stuff I love though). We should be celebrating the stuff that's truly outstanding, not just because it's popular. Some really outstanding work isn't comfortable for the viewer/listener either. Do you even know what you really like anymore? A lot of stuff is just rammed down our throats. Your brain triggers that dopamine hit just for recognizing the pattern regardless. It's good for business, but is it _good_? I guess it all depends on how you about whether you feel media is artwork or entertainment.
Synaesthesia 9y ago
Autechre has to be the most far out music I’ve ever listened to. They really push the boundaries of what could be called music. I often find myself wondering, not only how they made it, but how I’m even making the slightest bit of sense of it at all.
daodedickinson 9y ago
The author is 39, so part of the symptoms are age of course, but I've had the same burn out after playing way way too many different video games. I can't be an "every genre" person anymore. I guess at some point I felt mortality and had to start paring down.
beat 9y ago
I go through periods of "studying" particular records or musicians. It comes easily and naturally to me, despite my large collection. Studying is often related to my guitar playing, though, so it's often not a regular listen - it's the act of jamming along, or rewinding and relistening to particular passages to figure them out. For the past couple of weeks, I've been on a massive Miles Davis kick - particularly the Agharta album (which, in the author's terms, is one of the ten albums for me, that thing you want all other music to be). I'm trying hard to grok certain Miles phrases harmonically, and capture the tonality of his trumpet with a guitar, which is very challenging. Work has given me a 300 mile each way commute this week, so I decided to spend the long highway hours listening to the collected works of Wilco (I have every Wilco album), beginning to end. This gets me listening to albums I usually ignore, like A.M., and hearing the evolution of the music. Highway drives are also a good time to dig into progressive rock albums - the musical equivalent of 800 page novels, that reward close, long listens.
sureste 9y ago
This may sound pretentious but from reading how this "experiment" was going to be I knew it was a bad idea. I get the idea here: wanting to have a deeper familiarity with some albums you've only heard once (personally, I listen to albums/EPs before passing any judgement) maybe some of them by a band that has produced one of your "masterpiece" records. But, on the other hand, I don't get why subjecting yourself strictly to some music would be good. I find it better to listen to new music or music I have not digested yet along with music that I love already. Just make it part of your routine. Do you want to listen to that obscure album? Just put it between some other music you enjoy or make that one your first listen of the day. Making it part of your routine is a good idea but variety is good and, in the case of the author, unavoidable. Especially because the author is a record producer. This is a no-go idea for me.
fenwick67 9y ago
> Each week's album must be something you own in physical, "hard copy" form, because the experience must involve interaction with the object as a whole. You will read liner notes and lyrics, and engage with the artwork. Become familiar with names of band members. Learn the producer's name. Where was the album recorded? What time of year? Can you hear this in the music? I absolutely hate this fetishization of the music creation process, and I think this might be the writer's real problem. These stories about the studio and the producer and the band members' favorite flavor ice cream sell records and give context for the music, but they aren't the music. To obsess over these details is to not see the forest for the trees.
slaymaker1907 9y ago
IMO you won't truly understand a piece of music until you play it. It's sort of weird, but I think there is something in the way it forces you to pay much closer attention to details. In some ways, it is kind of like how learning programming can change the way you view a computer.
freetime2 9y ago
The timing of this story is interesting to me because my Apple Music subscription is set to end today. On the one hand, I've really enjoyed the service as it has allowed me to discover many new artists and even genres that I like. On the other hand, I can really identify with the author when he says that "all music is becoming Muzak". The turning point for me happened recently on a road trip when I opened up my music library and tried to find something to play. While I have "liked" a large number of songs and albums in the last year which now show up in my "library", it turns out that the majority of them are not something that I would choose to go back to after a listen or two. I can't even remember what a surprising number of albums in my library are! And so it happened that with my library of 130-ish new albums that I've added in the past year, I couldn't find anything that I wanted to listen to, and listened to the radio instead. My plan is to take the $10/mo that I was spending on my subscription, buy a new album every month or two, and really listen to it before moving on to the next new thing.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  I struggled with this in the first few months of my Spotify subscription. The solution is to be a lot more critical about which songs you save. All of those other songs are still there, you can find them quickly if you want to listen to them again. But your saved songs should be the absolute favorites. After 6 months, I have 718 saved tracks, and the rate at which I add new songs has significantly tapered off. I occasionally stumble across a song that makes me go "why did I save that?", and off the list it goes.
xamuel 9y ago
The author's problem is he's cast his net way too wide. Even if we limit ourselves to e.g. Rolling Stone Magazine's "Top 500 albums of all time", it would take a decade to deep-listen all 500. With that much super-high-quality music, which has stood the test of time and left its mark on culture, the author is making a huge mistake by wasting so much time on the ridiculous obscura he keeps name-dropping in the article.
loorinm 9y ago
Maybe I’m projecting, but it seems obvious to me that the author’s root problem is that he isn’t producing any music. Of course, I’m assuming he isn’t based on no mention of it in the article. The natural result of observing and loving something is the desire to copy it. That’s what humans do. Such a lopsided preference for consumption over production suggests to me that the author has some extreme repression, fear, etc. around making music, and that energy is being channeled into this weird need to consume and judge other people’s music. I’d probably be this way if I didn’t make anything too. Just my 2 cents.
flavio81 9y ago
There is a difference between a music lover and a music collector. Author is a collector, thus buys stuff he knows he will never have the time to listen to.
- julian_t 9y ago
  Excellent observation. I realized this about myself a year or so back... I'd collected a lot of guitars, some reasonably rare, but most of them weren't getting played, and were sitting in their cases or on the wall. Given the amount of free time I have, there's no way I can really play a dozen guitars. I'd turned into a collector rather than a guitar player. So I'm in the process of selling most of them, leaving me with one of each type - 6 and 12-string acoustic, National resonator, a lap steel and an acoustic bass. And the weird thing is that I'm playing more and thinking about the music more and the 'stuff' less. I have a strange relationship with recorded music. I find I know stuff off by heart after 3 or 4 listens, and it lasts in memory. I can replay tracks in my head, separate out the separate instrumental parts... I could sing you the bass lines to any tune from 'Heavy Weather', even though I haven't listened to it for years. And this remembered music plays pretty continuously on my internal player, whether I want it to or not - anyone else find that? There are a few tunes/songs that are in some way 'perfect'... I can listen to them endlessly and they have a physical effect, but they are few and far between.

79 points by JasonFruit 9y ago

I love this quote. 'claimed that we only ever really love 10 albums, and we spend the rest of our listening lives seeking facsimiles of those 10, pursuing the initial rush, so to speak' I too did the calculation from article about how much music I had amassed and could never listen to all of it. Good stuff.

mikestew 9y ago
Sure, I still seek the thrill of, say, putting Rush’s 2112 on the turntable for the first time, but I’m not going to get that by seeking out 2112 clones. Those moments now only come when I branch out. The breathy ambience of School of the Seven Bells doesn’t get found looking under the “prog rock” category. I mean, I see what the quote is getting at, but I just can’t see myself trying to relive the 70s. For one, despite having purchased everything in the Led Zepplin catalog at least twice, I’m getting just a little sick of what I grew up with. Might explain why I currently play bluegrass on a mandolin, and the Strat hangs on the wall.
- aaroninsf 9y ago
  This scratched my raised-on-progressive-rock itch nicely. It's more early Crimson in rockstar mode than Rush, but. Old news but recent to me :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ3LvVHYMM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ3LvVHYMM8
- scarecrowbob 9y ago
  Ha. That quote in the parent literally triggered in my brain "Tom Sawyer". At this point, I totally don't like any "prog rock" other than Rush (unless you want to count Primus). What you write is super relatable. I grew up listening to a lot of punk rock and older stuff including a lot of Zep, Beatles, Rush, Yes and all kinds of stuff. I just turned 40 and I'd much rather play and listen to old jazz or country. Most of my guitar and piano playing ends up being blues, though it's fun to cover Hendrix on a piano. Hell, I'd rather listen to my kid's vaporwave stuff or, say, Neon Indian, than make another pass through Zep IV. I play a lot of bluegrass (guitar, upright bass, banjo, dobro, etc) but can't hardly stand to listen to it. About the only stuff I can stand to listen to and work on playing at the same time is the Dead and related groups. Maybe that's like jazz but for late 20th century rock... I dunno.
  - abakker 9y ago
    Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuhHU_BZXSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuhHU_BZXSk I think that provides enough inversion while still hitting the right points in my brain.
    - scarecrowbob 9y ago
      I'd forgotten about that... thanks for reminding me :D
- abakker 9y ago
  This provided me a similar thrill. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdTa2kYJMEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdTa2kYJMEM But, I didn't "get it" until about the 3rd listen. Part of what made Rush so great to me, was that I felt like I got more out of it the more I listened to it.
  - mikestew 9y ago
    Definitely on my "listen to later" list now, thanks.
- epicide 9y ago
  When I first read that line, I was really annoyed with it, but then when I broke it down, I couldn't really refute it. You might not be looking for something that sounds like 2112, but rather looking for something that puts you in the same mindset 2112 did the first time. I think it could also be taken to mean what you initially liked about those 10 albums influences what you consider "good music". You could rephrase it as something like "your music taste is largely based off of about 10 albums".
fhood 9y ago
Honestly, that calculation deeply annoyed me. The author says he is 39, and that he has amassed so much music that he couldn't listen to all of it in 40 years, so what I would like to know, is why he owns so much music that he has never listened to!
- saint_fiasco 9y ago
  Maybe he bought a lot of music back when you had to buy whole albums at a time even if you only liked a couple of the songs. Kind of like I do with videogames and bundles.
- rb808 9y ago
  > But I will confess that when peer-to-peer file-sharing came into my life about 15 years ago, I was not immune to its siren song. Yeah downloading every mp3 in the world was easy, which I think is the point of the article.
- fusiongyro 9y ago
  This guy is a music industry professional, so it's less surprising to me than if he were just some dude who makes websites.
- Brockenstein 9y ago
  In the 21st century its pretty easy to acquire media of any type faster than you can consume it. I've got a backlog of books on my kindle. Over 14 years I've acquired games on Steam a few at a time to an extent that I could take a few years off work to play them. The problem is you can't listen to all the music that came out today, and then listen to all the music that comes out tomorrow and listen to your favorites from yesteryear too. Some people don't temper their buying habits to reflect that, at least not optimumly.
ambrosite 9y ago
I liked that quote, too. I think it is true of other art forms as well, like novels, movies, and even computer games. I find that most of the time, when I like a new book or movie, it is not because it was an original and unique experience for me, but rather because it reminded me of some other book or movie that I had loved a long time ago.
xamuel 9y ago
It doesn't have to be limited to 10. One day I realized my music tastes were determined by random chance and I was just listening to more of the same. So I started seeking out critically acclaimed albums, and listening to them repeatedly until they "click". Some albums take longer to click than others, but they all click eventually. In some cases, I'll have to temporarily give up on a difficult album. Listen to a few dozen other albums and let them click. Then come back to the difficult album, and bang, "This is amazing! How could I be so blind!" It's like you have to level up your musical appreciation stat. I'll never, ever trust my playlist to some recommendation engine. If I'd done that instead of seeking out classics, I'd've missed so much amazing music!

meri_dian 9y ago

I'm not sure if I'm unique in this respect, but I have about 15 to 20 songs/mixes/pieces that I regularly listen to. I never get tired of them, and they are satisfying enough to me that I don't need to really seek out new music. What does happen to me is that every 2 years or so I find that I get on a particular kick to listen to a certain type of music. This happened to me with baroque/classical/romantic orchestral music recently, but again I eventually reached a point where I had found about 15-20 pieces that I would repeatedly listen to and no longer needed new pieces as I was so satisfied with what I had found. It's not that I don't love music. I do, and each day I listen to it for 2-3 hours.

aaroninsf 9y ago
Playlists pls :)
maxxxxx 9y ago
I do something similar but I am not sure if it's a good thing. Sometimes I feel it feeds my autistic tendencies.
- meri_dian 9y ago
  I'm not diagnosed autistic but I definitely have strong obsessive and ADHD tendencies about things I get interested in. For music, the pieces I find myself listening to repeatedly have a particular quality that I can't really describe, but they just sound so good, so perfect, that they make me feel transcendent .. it's honestly like sex. I like all music and I'm cool with having anything on in the background while I'm doing work, but when I'm really determined to focus on what I'm listening to I need to listen to the music I love, and the list of that music is very short.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    That's exactly how I feel. I have a few pieces of music that speak to me and have done this for many years. Sometimes I find something new but that's rare. I am also not diagnosed but all the signs for some level of autism are there.

sfindie 9y ago

I never understand why people obtain music only to put it on a listening To-Do list and then never get around to it. I guess there's people who collect music and then there's others who listen to the records they collect. Call me weird, but I'd feel ashamed to get a record and never listen to it. All of the 34,000+ songs in my music library has graced my ears at least once.

coldtea 9y ago
>Call me weird, but I'd feel ashamed to get a record and never listen to it. All of the 34,000+ songs in my music library has graced my ears at least once. If that "at least once" was actually "just once" for most of then, then you're not that different from those other people then, as songs as meant for multiple listens. A cursory single listen (and perhaps while doing something else at the time too, or with skipping forward) it's not much different than no listen at all.
- fusiongyro 9y ago
  I love Led Zeppelin. When I was younger, I bought everything they released and listened to it obsessively. I heard on reddit they're planning to sweep up the dust from the studio floors again this year and make another lost recordings release. I can tell you, I will probably listen to Physical Graffiti another dozen times before I die, but I'm not going to touch BBC Sessions again except for the two decent songs, and this "new" release of Plant scratching his balls while Page gets high is a non-starter for me. 90% of everything is crap, including Led Zeppelin. Most music is worth exactly one listen. You can tell right away if you're going to need to hear it again.
- klodolph 9y ago
  The idea that a song is meant for multiple listens is an interesting claim but does not support the argument. If you won't like a song then what is the purpose of listening to it again? This whole perspective is backwards. Is it our responsibility to listen to songs multiple times, or is it simply the goal of an artist to make songs that we would listen to multiple times? What any object is "meant for" shouldn't dictate how you use it.

spookyuser 9y ago

I love and totally agree with this article. Anecdotally at least, I can see an objective drop in the amount of songs I listen to now on my Spotify account versus eight years ago on my iPod. When I had to download individual mp3s and transfer them with a cable to my iPod I would probably have made a playlist of new songs every few weeks or so. Now the only time I ever 'make a playlist' is perhaps once a year. In fact, if there isn't a long trip I'm going on sometimes I don't make a new playlist for an entire year. Part of the problem in this is that there are simply too many songs to add to a new playlist. If I go back through just my spotify likes there could easily be three hundred+ I would need to collate and that's not including Soundcloud or YouTube. This means that when I've finally gathered together a playlist of songs I want listen to it can be 300/400 songs long, meaning I can listen to it for an entire year and some songs will only have been listened to once and others not at all. This, like the author, strikes me as being so much worse than when I was deeply listening to, if not albums, playlists over and over again for a couple of weeks. They might have only had a dozen or so songs but I knew each of them well and enjoyed them too. Now I can't think of one song in my last mega-playlist that I could recall offhand. What's even worse is that this clearly applies to more than music. I have an enormous goodreads list that I will almost certainly never finish. A year of Netflix shows that I am perpetually behind on, and a Pocket list that still has articles from the 2016 election. I don't know what the solution to this is, but there is definitely something weirdly limiting to having an unlimited number of x.

zodPod 9y ago
In creative ventures we tend to try artificially limiting ourselves. I know that is easier said than done but if you can say something like "I will only use five instruments" or "I will only read books that are non-fiction" or "I will only listen to (genre) of music" or something you then have a focus and it's no longer just an overwhelming list of white noise!
InclinedPlane 9y ago
This is a big factor behind the resurgence of vinyl. When you have to dedicate time and effort to deciding what music you really want to listen to, when you have to take care of your music carefully (lest you damage it), and when you have an excuse to listen to music as a primary rather than background activity, all of those things enhance the overall experience and can make it easier to enjoy music more (even though in principle all of those things: extra cost, fragility, limited mobility, etc. are downsides).

klodolph 9y ago

Sure, people in their 30s will continue to grapple with their relationship with music. I know people of all ages who had some kind of revelatory experience putting on some particular songs or albums in high school. I can still remember what I was doing, where I was, and who I was with when I first listened to Led Zeppelin I, Tommy, or Hotel (by Moby). Hotel isn't even that good an album! But the same is true of other media like movies and video games. And it's true of people. Your first friends and your first loves change your life. Those experiences get farther and farther apart as you get older, and it has nothing to do with technology. The author seems to have taken up some kind of impossible geas as a countermeasure. Imagine if you thought you talked too much in conversations and so you took a vow of silence. It's a bit extreme. I take a different approach: my music library is sorted by purchase date, and anything at the top will only get pushed out after a few listens. I don't have to force myself to do anything, I'm just too lazy to look past the first page very often. This works equally well with iTunes and with physical media, and it gives me a chance to really fall in love with new albums, even if I don't get the same feeling I got when I was 15. Technology may have radically changed the way we consume music but our relationship to music is largely the same. The only difference is that you're older. Loving someone feels different at 15 and 30, and loving music is the same way. Edit: The part about novels is a bit weird. Remember that Brothers Karamazov was published as a serial. Moby Dick was a flop and didn't sell well until it was republished 40 years later, after Melville's death. So if anything, those examples illustrate the point that literary fiction doorstops have never been that popular. However, these days we have monstrous epics dominating genre fiction. Rowling proved that young children will pay good money to read a 3,400 story across seven books, the same way you'd binge Netflix, and I've known a few people who as children had to replace their hardbound Harry Potter books just from ordinary use. Page counts are, if anything, ballooning in genre fiction and the shelves are dominated by trilogies and longer series.

munificent 9y ago

The author touches on this only glancingly, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I too have been suffering from information overload, mostly from social media apps on my phone. I have mostly solved it recently by getting a new phone and not installing any of those apps. My goal is to get back to the state where I am actually bored sometimes, because being bored is an opportunity to think and let my brain work through some of the information I've already jammed into my short-term memory. Insulating myself from media works, but it's a choice, and that choice itself has a cost. Before smartphones and the Internet, I could be in a state where I wasn't overloaded with information and I wasn't spending an iota of effort to maintain that state. I can be in that state now, but I am constantly paying a mental tax to keep those shields up. Don't install the app, don't let myself spend too much time on reddit (or here for that matter...). It may be that there is no solution to this problem short of radically excising myself from modern society. But I do hope we come up with broader solutions to it than what we have now where it's all on each of us to maintain constant, exhausting, vigilance against the tide of data that seeks to wash us away.

JasonFruit 9y ago
This comment captures exactly the reason I thought this article was worth sharing. When I was young, I never had to discipline myself from listening to too much new music, even when I staffed the music library and was alone in there for hours.
daodedickinson 9y ago
How can you feel bored instead of guilty? Whenever I pause, I just feel bad about things undone. This week I realized I haven't been bored since high school started, because at that point there was always something I "should" be doing that I wasn't. Haven't been bored in over a decade and I feel I probably won't again, though I try.
- Delmania 9y ago
  > How can you feel bored instead of guilty? Whenever I pause, I just feel bad about things undone. It's a bit cliche, but if you were to die soon, what things would you seek to finish before you die so you can die content? What do you want your legacy to be? The stoic practice of meditating on your eventual death is a great way to put things into perspective.

busterarm 9y ago

I have mixed feelings about this article, agreeing with points and vehemently disagreeing with others. In particular I don't like the consumption rules for music. I have pretty anomalous/extreme music listening patterns. I've listened to every album in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (all editions of it...) at least once. When I was working remotely, I listened to about 16 hours of music every day, about 2/3 of that time spent listening to new music. I've done experiments where I've listened exclusively to Billboard & Oricon chart records for years at a time. I listened to Meshuggah's Catch 33 at least 4 times a day every day for a year and a half. Lately, I tend to spend my time devouring entire genres, learning all of the major talents & producers and the connections between them. My knowledge has become somewhat encyclopedic -- like a more-expansive, more-complete, mental version of Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music. Once I learned that lyrics don't matter to me, I stopped reading them along with listening. I stopped reading liner notes. I haven't picked up a physical copy of an album in at least 9 years. If anything, the changing music consumption patterns have enabled me to appreciate more music in a manner that I prefer. Maybe it's okay for people to appreciate music the way they want and not to have to put albums on some pedestal anymore like people did with 70s Prog Rock. Through all of this, I've retained my ability to be critical of music. Heck, I'm a cohost of a podcast where all we do is critique music. I would argue that it's not the change in consumption pattern that's to blame here, but rather a lack of tastemakers in public society and extremely negative reactions to criticism of any sort. Critical opinions are faux pas in our culture pretty much universally these days.

davehtaylor 9y ago
>a lack of tastemakers in public society I would call this a good thing. I despise the idea of someone telling me what I should or shouldn't like, as though I have no mind of my own to decide what I do or don't like, and as though they are somehow superior and have some kind of enlightened outlook on things that I could never hope to achieve.
- busterarm 9y ago
  You're just exemplifying what I said later where critique is unwelcome. I don't think media is some egalitarian process where everyone is celebrated just for doing something. There's a lot out there in popular culture that is just outright technically flawed. Or just crap -- trust me, I've listened to more crap music and watched more crap movies than probably anyone (I much prefer to talk about the stuff I love though). We should be celebrating the stuff that's truly outstanding, not just because it's popular. Some really outstanding work isn't comfortable for the viewer/listener either. Do you even know what you really like anymore? A lot of stuff is just rammed down our throats. Your brain triggers that dopamine hit just for recognizing the pattern regardless. It's good for business, but is it _good_? I guess it all depends on how you about whether you feel media is artwork or entertainment.

Synaesthesia 9y ago

Autechre has to be the most far out music I’ve ever listened to. They really push the boundaries of what could be called music. I often find myself wondering, not only how they made it, but how I’m even making the slightest bit of sense of it at all.

daodedickinson 9y ago

The author is 39, so part of the symptoms are age of course, but I've had the same burn out after playing way way too many different video games. I can't be an "every genre" person anymore. I guess at some point I felt mortality and had to start paring down.

beat 9y ago

I go through periods of "studying" particular records or musicians. It comes easily and naturally to me, despite my large collection. Studying is often related to my guitar playing, though, so it's often not a regular listen - it's the act of jamming along, or rewinding and relistening to particular passages to figure them out. For the past couple of weeks, I've been on a massive Miles Davis kick - particularly the Agharta album (which, in the author's terms, is one of the ten albums for me, that thing you want all other music to be). I'm trying hard to grok certain Miles phrases harmonically, and capture the tonality of his trumpet with a guitar, which is very challenging. Work has given me a 300 mile each way commute this week, so I decided to spend the long highway hours listening to the collected works of Wilco (I have every Wilco album), beginning to end. This gets me listening to albums I usually ignore, like A.M., and hearing the evolution of the music. Highway drives are also a good time to dig into progressive rock albums - the musical equivalent of 800 page novels, that reward close, long listens.

sureste 9y ago

This may sound pretentious but from reading how this "experiment" was going to be I knew it was a bad idea. I get the idea here: wanting to have a deeper familiarity with some albums you've only heard once (personally, I listen to albums/EPs before passing any judgement) maybe some of them by a band that has produced one of your "masterpiece" records. But, on the other hand, I don't get why subjecting yourself strictly to some music would be good. I find it better to listen to new music or music I have not digested yet along with music that I love already. Just make it part of your routine. Do you want to listen to that obscure album? Just put it between some other music you enjoy or make that one your first listen of the day. Making it part of your routine is a good idea but variety is good and, in the case of the author, unavoidable. Especially because the author is a record producer. This is a no-go idea for me.

fenwick67 9y ago

> Each week's album must be something you own in physical, "hard copy" form, because the experience must involve interaction with the object as a whole. You will read liner notes and lyrics, and engage with the artwork. Become familiar with names of band members. Learn the producer's name. Where was the album recorded? What time of year? Can you hear this in the music? I absolutely hate this fetishization of the music creation process, and I think this might be the writer's real problem. These stories about the studio and the producer and the band members' favorite flavor ice cream sell records and give context for the music, but they aren't the music. To obsess over these details is to not see the forest for the trees.

slaymaker1907 9y ago

IMO you won't truly understand a piece of music until you play it. It's sort of weird, but I think there is something in the way it forces you to pay much closer attention to details. In some ways, it is kind of like how learning programming can change the way you view a computer.

freetime2 9y ago

The timing of this story is interesting to me because my Apple Music subscription is set to end today. On the one hand, I've really enjoyed the service as it has allowed me to discover many new artists and even genres that I like. On the other hand, I can really identify with the author when he says that "all music is becoming Muzak". The turning point for me happened recently on a road trip when I opened up my music library and tried to find something to play. While I have "liked" a large number of songs and albums in the last year which now show up in my "library", it turns out that the majority of them are not something that I would choose to go back to after a listen or two. I can't even remember what a surprising number of albums in my library are! And so it happened that with my library of 130-ish new albums that I've added in the past year, I couldn't find anything that I wanted to listen to, and listened to the radio instead. My plan is to take the $10/mo that I was spending on my subscription, buy a new album every month or two, and really listen to it before moving on to the next new thing.

KozmoNau7 9y ago
I struggled with this in the first few months of my Spotify subscription. The solution is to be a lot more critical about which songs you save. All of those other songs are still there, you can find them quickly if you want to listen to them again. But your saved songs should be the absolute favorites. After 6 months, I have 718 saved tracks, and the rate at which I add new songs has significantly tapered off. I occasionally stumble across a song that makes me go "why did I save that?", and off the list it goes.

xamuel 9y ago

The author's problem is he's cast his net way too wide. Even if we limit ourselves to e.g. Rolling Stone Magazine's "Top 500 albums of all time", it would take a decade to deep-listen all 500. With that much super-high-quality music, which has stood the test of time and left its mark on culture, the author is making a huge mistake by wasting so much time on the ridiculous obscura he keeps name-dropping in the article.

loorinm 9y ago

Maybe I’m projecting, but it seems obvious to me that the author’s root problem is that he isn’t producing any music. Of course, I’m assuming he isn’t based on no mention of it in the article. The natural result of observing and loving something is the desire to copy it. That’s what humans do. Such a lopsided preference for consumption over production suggests to me that the author has some extreme repression, fear, etc. around making music, and that energy is being channeled into this weird need to consume and judge other people’s music. I’d probably be this way if I didn’t make anything too. Just my 2 cents.

flavio81 9y ago

There is a difference between a music lover and a music collector. Author is a collector, thus buys stuff he knows he will never have the time to listen to.

julian_t 9y ago
Excellent observation. I realized this about myself a year or so back... I'd collected a lot of guitars, some reasonably rare, but most of them weren't getting played, and were sitting in their cases or on the wall. Given the amount of free time I have, there's no way I can really play a dozen guitars. I'd turned into a collector rather than a guitar player. So I'm in the process of selling most of them, leaving me with one of each type - 6 and 12-string acoustic, National resonator, a lap steel and an acoustic bass. And the weird thing is that I'm playing more and thinking about the music more and the 'stuff' less. I have a strange relationship with recorded music. I find I know stuff off by heart after 3 or 4 listens, and it lasts in memory. I can replay tracks in my head, separate out the separate instrumental parts... I could sing you the bass lines to any tune from 'Heavy Weather', even though I haven't listened to it for years. And this remembered music plays pretty continuously on my internal player, whether I want it to or not - anyone else find that? There are a few tunes/songs that are in some way 'perfect'... I can listen to them endlessly and they have a physical effect, but they are few and far between.