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A massive chunk of my music collection recently came from random strangers. I found a waterlogged phone on the beach. No amount of dry rice could resurrect it.

A massive chunk of my music collection recently came from random strangers. I found a waterlogged phone on the beach. No amount of dry rice could resurrect it. But I located the owner and, via a micro SD card, returned a 100GB of family photos by EXIF GPS data that led me to their house. Happy repatriations. As a side effect I snarfed about 100GB of high quality MP3s. I'm still listening to bands I've never heard of before. On reflection I rather liked that. It shows my ego-driven so-called "tastes" are perhaps an over inflated sense of identity and that whether I'll like random music or not is only a little higher than chance. Another time someone gave me a USB with a PDF to read, and the rest of the drive was chock full of their whole music collection. Now that thumb drives are so HUGE and I literally have boxes of them lying around I wonder whether to just preload them with a shit-ton of cool music and give them to people I like. Like old mix tapes... it's nothing to do with the cost/purchase... it's a whole new formula for discovery and restoring a social dimension to music.

myself248 4y ago
Back when coffee shop wifi was a new thing, and AP Isolation hadn't been invented yet, I used to discover a lot of music on Network Neighborhood at my local Caribou Coffee. A lot of folks would have their file-sharing settings wide open, so I could just click around the WLAN and look for mp3's. Found all sorts of interesting stuff, and if someone left a writable folder, I'd take-some-leave-some in kind. Those days are long gone, so lately it's estate sales. Show up on the last day of the sale and pick up a whole milk-crate of CDs for $40, probably 150 pieces in there. Basically if I recognize and like a few artists in the collection, I figure this person's tastes overlapped enough with mine that I should give the rest of the collection a spin. Oh, wow. Best part is, it's all physical media which can never DRM itself out of my collection again. (I've ranted previously about random tracks just "turning gray" on my Spotify playlists, presumably because of some licensing dispute or whatever, and how deeply offensive that is to the fans who curated these playlists and assign significance to the songs therein.) It's a bit of work to rip and encode, but it's not like the old days where a 60-minute album might take 90 minutes to rip and encode. CPUs are quick and USB CDROMs are cheap; I can do 5 albums in parallel in 10 minutes. Then stuff the milkcrate in the basement and forget about it.
tzs 4y ago
Unexpected good music can be quite fun. I found a pretty good band while giving advice to a coworker on how to explain away inappropriate language at work if someone complained to HR. The coworker was putting together a new workstation for someone, and said "I need a network card". The person at the next desk said that they had an extra and tried to hand it to the guy building the workstation. He said "I don't want your sloppy seconds". Then he remembered the origins of the term "sloppy seconds" [1] and wondered if he's allowed to say that at work. I overheard and told him, "Don't worry. If someone complains just say you were talking about the band. Every sexual term and phrase has a band named after it somewhere. Even if HR tries to check, you can just say it was a band you heard at a bar when you were in college". Naturally I then Googled "sloppy seconds band" and sure enough, there is a band by that name and the first Google hit is a Wikipedia article about them [2]. The first two paragraphs of that article say: > Sloppy Seconds is an American, Ramones-influenced punk band sometimes referred to as a junk rock band from Indianapolis, Indiana, United States, that started in 1984. They gained notoriety in the underground punk scene with gritty and controversial songs like "Come Back, Traci," "I Don't Want to be a Homosexual", "Jani is a Nazi", "I Want 'em Dead" and "So Fucked Up." > The band's unusual and controversial lyrics encompass pornography, classic horror movies, classic television shows, comic books, alcohol, being fat, and getting drunk. After that second paragraph I had to check if they were on Spotify and they were. I listened to a few of their albums the rest of the day and sure enough, there were songs on all those things mentioned in that second paragraph, some of them quite good. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloppy_seconds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloppy_seconds [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloppy_Seconds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloppy_Seconds

myself248 4y ago

Back when coffee shop wifi was a new thing, and AP Isolation hadn't been invented yet, I used to discover a lot of music on Network Neighborhood at my local Caribou Coffee. A lot of folks would have their file-sharing settings wide open, so I could just click around the WLAN and look for mp3's. Found all sorts of interesting stuff, and if someone left a writable folder, I'd take-some-leave-some in kind. Those days are long gone, so lately it's estate sales. Show up on the last day of the sale and pick up a whole milk-crate of CDs for $40, probably 150 pieces in there. Basically if I recognize and like a few artists in the collection, I figure this person's tastes overlapped enough with mine that I should give the rest of the collection a spin. Oh, wow. Best part is, it's all physical media which can never DRM itself out of my collection again. (I've ranted previously about random tracks just "turning gray" on my Spotify playlists, presumably because of some licensing dispute or whatever, and how deeply offensive that is to the fans who curated these playlists and assign significance to the songs therein.) It's a bit of work to rip and encode, but it's not like the old days where a 60-minute album might take 90 minutes to rip and encode. CPUs are quick and USB CDROMs are cheap; I can do 5 albums in parallel in 10 minutes. Then stuff the milkcrate in the basement and forget about it.

tzs 4y ago

Unexpected good music can be quite fun. I found a pretty good band while giving advice to a coworker on how to explain away inappropriate language at work if someone complained to HR. The coworker was putting together a new workstation for someone, and said "I need a network card". The person at the next desk said that they had an extra and tried to hand it to the guy building the workstation. He said "I don't want your sloppy seconds". Then he remembered the origins of the term "sloppy seconds" [1] and wondered if he's allowed to say that at work. I overheard and told him, "Don't worry. If someone complains just say you were talking about the band. Every sexual term and phrase has a band named after it somewhere. Even if HR tries to check, you can just say it was a band you heard at a bar when you were in college". Naturally I then Googled "sloppy seconds band" and sure enough, there is a band by that name and the first Google hit is a Wikipedia article about them [2]. The first two paragraphs of that article say: > Sloppy Seconds is an American, Ramones-influenced punk band sometimes referred to as a junk rock band from Indianapolis, Indiana, United States, that started in 1984. They gained notoriety in the underground punk scene with gritty and controversial songs like "Come Back, Traci," "I Don't Want to be a Homosexual", "Jani is a Nazi", "I Want 'em Dead" and "So Fucked Up." > The band's unusual and controversial lyrics encompass pornography, classic horror movies, classic television shows, comic books, alcohol, being fat, and getting drunk. After that second paragraph I had to check if they were on Spotify and they were. I listened to a few of their albums the rest of the day and sure enough, there were songs on all those things mentioned in that second paragraph, some of them quite good. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloppy_seconds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloppy_seconds [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloppy_Seconds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloppy_Seconds