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I've been saying this forever!! When I was a teen in the 90s, I got new music from the radio. The music director picked 40ish songs a week and that's what we

I've been saying this forever!! When I was a teen in the 90s, I got new music from the radio. The music director picked 40ish songs a week and that's what we listened to. I still like to listen to the radio for the curation. I even wrote a program to scrape the websites of my favorite radio stations (well the stations of my favorite music directors) and add the songs to a Spotify playlist. Whenever I meet a teenager today, one of the first things I ask them is "what apps do you use most", but the next thing I ask is "how do you find new music". The answer is usually something like "I don't know, I just sort of find stuff I guess?". Some have said they follow influencer's playlists on YouTube or Spotify, which I guess is the new version of the music director? Or they just get it from Spotify playlists. But what's missing is a shared cultural experience. In the 90s, everyone at my school knew those 40 songs that the local stations played. They might know other stuff too, but you couldn't avoid those top songs. It's not the same today. And it's the same problem for visual media. We all knew the top movies at the theater, because it was the only place to see new movies. And we all knew the top TV shows because they were only on four major networks. Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.

withzombies 1y ago
When we were kids, just knowing music that wasn't on the radio made you "into music". Things were very different! The internet has really allowed music choices to be much more personal and I think it's a good thing. We have such a wide variety of music available to us now. I've had some luck finding some TikTok creators who curate specific "vibes" and publish Spotify playlists. I think that's just how it's done now.
- jedberg 1y ago
  I love the variety for sure, I just miss the curation and the shared culture. It's harder to find people in person who know the same music and TV that you do.
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    Every silver lining has its cloud. Shared cultural touchstones came hand in hand with tastemakers and gatekeepers. We’re more directly connected to the movers and shakers than ever before, but it’s largely parasocial interaction, mediated by platforms and gated by subscriptions. We’re increasingly disintermediated with respect to creators so that we can be separated and reconstituted into our profit-bearing parts. We’re old wine poured into new wineskins.
  - bobthepanda 1y ago
    Is it hard because of the media landscape or is it hard because you are older? As someone who is still listening to today’s pop acts and whatnot, there are still tons of people you can talk to in person who probably listen to similar music, concerts are well-attended, etc. If anything the definition of popular has broadened to include new stuff like KPop, Latin pop, Afrobeats, etc. and I don’t have an issue finding people who like that music in person.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    This has always been an issue though. I am 30 years old, and I could remember back to elementary school. I remember us bullying a girl for liking songs such a Linkin Park among other songs we (they) considered emo. For the record, I love Linkin Park now, but all the bullies never bothered to listen, and we did not know English either. Talk to people, ask them about it, introduce them to new music and movies, listen to these songs together, or watch the movie together. That is what I do with my girlfriend. She does not have the same taste in music at all as I do. There is an overlap, since I like songs from classical to rock, but yeah.
ta12653421 1y ago
i like how you frame "shared cultural experience" which was mainly scarcity and lack of access due to less distribution channels as nowadays :-)
- jedberg 1y ago
  This is completely true. But there is something to be said for expert curation. Someone who spends their whole life studying these things so I don't have to.
  - defrost 1y ago
    > but the next thing I ask is "how do you find new music". > expert curation. Someone who spends their whole life studying these things For a long time I followed the Peel sessions (1967 - 2004) which was BBC DJ / Commonwealth new music and industry audience sized level of shared curation experience. That was richer in information and breadth and more niche an experience than the larger broader scale appeal of the UK's Top of the Pops, Australia's Countdown, the USofA's later MTV curated new music offerings. Curated or not, now or in the 1960's, 70's, later there is and has always been a sizable amount of industry capture and strong influence in bringing artist's to audiences / markets. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Peel_Sessions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Peel_Sessions
rout39574 1y ago
Jerry Pournelle wrote about this, I think I recall reading in USENET; how with the burgeoning availability of media, the role of the editor, the curator, would become critical. He thought well and deeply about the challenges of the growing net.
acomjean 1y ago
I always think it would be useful for radio stations to keep logs of their playlists. I do check out mit radios list from time to time. It’s somewhat useful to know the names of the shows that play music you like.. https://track-blaster.com/wmbr/ https://track-blaster.com/wmbr/
- jedberg 1y ago
  Most do now. Most radio stations have a "now playing" window on their website, where you can see the last few songs played. If you dig in, it's a JSON with the last 10 or so songs. If you grab that JSON every 30 minutes, you'll get a full playlist.
curun1r 1y ago
> But what's missing is a shared cultural experience This is my problem with the proliferation of streaming platforms when it comes to movies and TV. We’ve arguably got more and better content than we’ve ever had. But I find myself far less motivated to watch it. I used to watch content anticipating the conversations I’d have with friends and colleagues. Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it’s 30 seconds of, “Have you seen …?” “No, have you seen …?” “No.” Until we give up and talk about something else. It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.
- iknowstuff 1y ago
  there are definitely still cultural experiences like that around release time. The last of us is huge right now.
  - jedberg 1y ago
    > The last of us Never seen it. Not even sure what it's about.
    - ghaff 1y ago
      They're much more limited though. Heard of the series, but it's not Must see Thursday because I'm not in an office and know I can pretty much tune in whenever I want.
    - iknowstuff 1y ago
      Ok?
  - cpburns2009 1y ago
    Isn't that an old video game? Was it recently remastered like Oblivion?
    - matheusmoreira 1y ago
baxtr 1y ago
I am not sure if I agree. I feel like social media trough its amplification has lead to a global sync in topics and experiences. I’d argue a kid growing up India or China shares much more culturally today with a western Kid than 30 years ago. Take the news for example. Last weeks it was tariffs. The entire world was talking about the same thing. To the contrary I feel like we are living more and more in the same global reality going from one headline to the next every week.
- smackeyacky 1y ago
  Not just headlines being shared, but culture is still being shared. Sure the shared cultural experience of being limited to a handful of TV channels is gone, but it's been replaced by a handful of streaming services. The world has shared the Marvel Cinematic Universe and 800lb sisters and Taylor Swift.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - BlueTemplar 1y ago
    > 800lb sisters First time I hear of these. I now wish I had not looked them up (I did not think it would be so literal). (I also now realise that I cannot even remember how Taylor Swift sounds like, despite hearing about her quite frequently...)
  - anton-c 1y ago
    Seeing Taylor swift mentioned is weird to me cuz nobody I know listens to her. We had like, 10 international popstars thru my youth with the Disney ones too(not that anyone listened to those that I knew). When I was young you couldn't NOT know the song "semi-charmed life" by third eye blind, or 50 other songs. Nowadays idk if that's the case. Then again, I'm not sure how much would be lost if my whole middle school didn't know the song "shake that Laffy taffy".
- kranke155 1y ago
  Nope you’re wrong. Actually media has become hyperlocal. The whole world was talking about tariffs? Nope. They were talking whatever they saw on their personalised feed.
crm9125 1y ago
I think kids nowadays likely still have a shared cultural experience like we did when we were young. We're just, separated from that experience. Just like our parents were when we were young. Maybe they can't (or don't want to, out of fear of being embarrassed or feeling uncool/uncertain perhaps) explain to you how they find things, but when they are hanging out with their friends and are talking about similar interests, discovering they know about similar things, and sharing things they know about that their friends don't yet/learning similar things from their friends, that's where the magic happens.
- kaonwarb 1y ago
  Anyone with, say, a fifth grader in the US can compare notes with parents elsewhere in the country. If your experience is at all like mine you'll be startled at the (odd to me!) shared culture. Especially if they spend time online.
- darkwater 1y ago
  This. When we become adults we tend to forget how it worked when we were children. Plus, you think you remember but you what you remember has been already filtered by the adult's mind.
- Nasrudith 1y ago
  Reminds me of a dynamic I heard about with the rise of music backlog availability. Instead of just 80's kids listening to 80's music you would see a wider array of eras that kids would see more internet era kids having a more diverse amount of preferred eras. Because they have more of a choice now.
tonyhart7 1y ago
"Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did." they did, they just have different algos for that. I found italian brainrot meme and what surprising it was so popular for kids, like tens of millions of views seems like Trends are more personalize now, what popular song that adult like is different with younger audience like its like having different Trends that live on bubble
- DavidPiper 1y ago
  You kinda just disagreed with yourself. Every kid having their own tailored algorithm means there is no shared cultural experience by design. A shared cultural experience means there are people in it who don't like it or don't engage with it, even though they are aware of it, and they can engage with their peers about it. Tailored algorithms means maximal enjoyment and engagement at all times, but it's engagement with the software, not engagement with peers.
  - tonyhart7 1y ago
    "A shared cultural experience means there are people in it who don't like it or don't engage with it" You just disagreed with yourself, the kids on america can relate to kids that live on middle east and asia if this not shared cultural experience, then idk what else is because original post mention that most people on his hometown aware of song that got played, not every hometown on america have same experience
    - DavidPiper 1y ago
      Hmm I take your logical point. I think I disagree with the premises though. > the kids on america can relate to kids that live on middle east and asia ... if this not shared cultural experience, then idk what else is This sounds like parasocial connection standing in for shared cultural experience to me, but I don't really know because I'm quite distant from that kind of connection anyway.
      - tonyhart7 1y ago
Cheetah26 1y ago
Gianmarco Soresi discussed this on an episode of his podcast. He says how there used to be a number of nationally known comedians who could make jokes that appealed to everyone's shared cultural experience, but now that's effectively impossible because a) culture isn't tied to geography / location, and b) niches are much more prevalent. I loved the example that huge venues can now often be sold out for artists you've never heard of. On one hand it's not neccessarily a bad thing since individuals are getting more of what truly appeals to them, but I also think that the result could be increasing the barrier to connect with others because it decreases the chances that you'll have interests in common.
kjkjadksj 1y ago
Interesting you mentioned movies because I think movies are resurgent now where it seems like everyone is seeing all the new releases. I can hardly book imax anymore because they book up a month in advance and are booked up a month out and then they pull it from the imax theater to make room for the next thing to be fully booked out a month out. There is serious demand it seems to keep up with the latest movies especially when it is offered in higher fidelity like imax and 70mm releases.
throwaway2037 1y ago
I am confused. Spotify and Netflix both have recommendation engines that include a wide variety of factors, including popularity with other users and "closeness" to your favourite musical styles. I assume these are AI/ML models of some sort. Essentially, these automated engines have replaced the music director from 1990s radio stations.
- jedberg 1y ago
  That's precisely the problem. Everyone gets a different experience. No shared cultural experience. Until recently, everyone in the same village/town/city/country had the same experience, and could talk about it.
- msla 1y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkfpi2H8tOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkfpi2H8tOE That's "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson. It's 8:21 and quotes both the Tao Te Ching and the US Postal Service. It peaked at number two on the UK Singles Chart in 1981. Why? Because John Peel curated a radio show on BBC Radio 1 and happened to like it. That's the advantage of human curation: Every so often you get a John Peel in the booth and hear something so off-the-wall no well-written algorithm would ever mix it in with everything else you listen to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Superman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Superman
- Barrin92 1y ago
  > Essentially, these automated engines have replaced the music director from 1990s radio stations. They haven't. A nearest neighbor pseudo random walk from one viral song to the next doesn't replace a music director who could give you thematically, aesthetically or conceptually coherent selections of music. There's an interesting observation about this at the individual album level, the death of the concept album. Albums that tell coherent two hour long narratives are effectively dead because the almighty algorithm favors the exact opposite. Disjointed, catchy , viral, hook centric music that's short enough to fit over a TikTok clip. The medium is the message, thinking the Spotify algorithm replaces a music director is like thinking the Youtube short algorithm replaces a film director.
kilroy123 1y ago
Yes, I agree. I think we're at the point where tastes are more important than ever and how to differentiate in this new AI slop world. No fancy algorithm or AI tool will replace human curation with good tastes (or what you think is good taste) I dig this for music curation: https://ghostly.com/ https://ghostly.com/ If anyone has other similar links I'd love to see them.
verisimi 1y ago
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did. I tend to think that humans historically have had very isolated, independent experiences. It is only recently with mass media that we all share a collective experience. I take your point that kids today are not having a shared one-directional (tv to person) experience. However, they are sharing apps, with that data being intermediated. It is uni-directional too, so more immersive. I tend to see technology, and the direction of travel, as highly collectivising rather less of a shared cultural experience. Everyone is endlessly exposed to exciting ideas and content that are not self-generated. So, collectivised thinking UP, independent thinking DOWN.
b0ner_t0ner 1y ago
> When I was a teen in the 90s, I got new music from the radio. The music director picked 40ish songs a week and that's what we listened to. Those Top 40 singles were spoon-fed to you by Clear Channel within a very limited selection from the Top 5 major record labels.
- chgs 1y ago
  And? That doesn’t change the shared cultural experience. Decades had “sounds”, disco was a thing in the 70s because everyone heard it. Today there’s no shared cultural zeitgeist. You might find communities on reddit etc, but they aren’t local.
chrismorgan 1y ago
Among those that read and study the Bible: A hundred years ago, everyone used the King James Version of the Bible.¹ Poorly though it reflected the common language², it was a shared experience, and things like memorisation and making and recognising scriptural allusions were straightforward, because everyone used the same words. Now, a wide variety of Bible translations are in common use, some more accurate than the KJV, some more loose paraphrases, all more understandable. There are some big advantages in this variety and modernity—but we have lost something. The shared experience had a virtue of its own, quite a significant one. —⁂— ¹ OK, by a hundred years ago the RV and ASV were used in some areas, but it was mostly as a distant extra to the KJV, not replacing it. ² I understand that some of it was already becoming archaic, or at least overly formal, when it was published, such as thee/thou (singular you). The fact is, it was “appointed to be read in Churches”, and they wanted it to sound impressive. Compare it with Tyndale’s translation almost a hundred years earlier, and Tyndale’s generally reads much more easily—because Tyndale wanted uneducated people to be able to understand the Bible.³ ³ “And sone after Maister Tyndall happened to be in the companie of a learned man, and in communing and disputing with him, drove him to that issue that the learned manne sayde, we were better be without Gods lawe, then the Popes: Maister Tyndall hearing that, answered hym, I defie the Pope and all his lawes, and sayde, if God spare my lyfe ere many yeares, I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall knowe more of the scripture then thou doest.” — John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), page 570.
- Paul_Clayton 1y ago
  The Catholic Church had similar tradeoffs with Latin, though I suspect the language and style were less motivated by majesty (though bias of use by the educated might have entered early — I am ignorant of the history). The New Testament Koine (Common) Greek was similarly a lingua franca. When the once common language is no longer broadly used, the language can become a class-oriented separating factor. Even more recent translations seem to retain significant similarity in a lot of "famous" texts (e.g., the Beatitudes — people also seem to use the archaic pronunciation of "blessed" as two syllables), presumably to ease acceptance of the change. This hints that some commonality is preserved. (Some words are also jargon, so not modernizing the word is more reasonable.) Story outlines and concepts can also be preserved even though the "poetry" of earlier versions is lost in translation. Yet as contexts change even concepts may be less understandable and shared; "go to the ant thou sluggard" may be unclear not merely from language but from unfamiliarity with concepts. Aesop's "The Ant and the Grasshopper" has lasted thousands of years, but is not a fundamentally human metaphor and even the human concepts diligence and foresight can have different cultural tones. "A sluggard is someone who does not work hard." "Oh, you mean someone who works smarter not harder?" "No. It means someone who does not accomplish much." "Oh, you mean someone who is burnt out?" "No. It means someone who chooses not to do things that are profitable." "Oh, you mean someone who has recognized the futility of striving for accomplishments and has learned to be content with a simple life?" "No!"
sailorganymede 1y ago
There are plenty of internet radios like NTS which are all about curated discovery. It's worth checking out if that's your thing!
squigz 1y ago
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did. I suppose you didn't have the same cultural experience as your parents. That's how culture works - it changes over time.
lordnacho 1y ago
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did. Heh, I told my kid this today on the way to dropping him off with a friend. We were listening to The Rest is History, about the Rolling Stones. They made the point that this common cultural experience started to become a thing roughly in the 60s. When I was a kid, there were things that you just could not avoid. It was the same in many places: there was a national broadcaster, and maybe a second and third TV station. There were only so many things you could watch. Whatever TV series, music, or sports were on, you could be sure everyone else was also watching it. It started changing in the 1990s where I grew up, completely changing from the start to the end. You got a bunch of channels. You could watch news from America and other places, which maybe deserves a footnote about immigrants being able to watch something from faraway for the first time. More options everywhere, but there was still momentum. You still watched the national news on the main stations, and sports was still there too. They also tended to curate the "best" foreign shows, so you didn't have to wait to get your dose of America. Now that's finished. Everything is private now, you can watch whatever you want on your own screen (TVs got really cheap. When I was a kid, people would congratulate you when you bought a new one, like it was a car. Now I have more TVs than I can use.) You don't have to watch things at the scheduled time anymore, and you don't have to arrange your life around when the episodes come out. The kids now watch a wider variety of content. There's still "local" fads that are maybe restricted to friendship groups, instead of being national phenomena. For instance my kid and his friends ended up watching One Piece, a Japanese production. But I never ran into other kids who were into it. I also dare to say that the kids now watch lower quality content. This was already a thing when we got flooded with channels in the 1990s. There was a heck of a lot of mediocre crap on those 100 extra channels. But now it's a whole new world of terrible. Yes, I'm an old man. But it does seem like having curation would mostly bubble the good things to the top, and so when the curation went away, you got more stuff, but worse stuff. Similar to consumer products, the items at your department store tended to be reasonable, but when there's a webshop where you can buy anything at all, you have to sort through a pile of low quality stuff yourself.
- darkerside 1y ago
  Didn't our parents also think our content was objectively inferior to theirs? I would personally agree with you but it may also be that we don't understand the new content well enough to properly value it. And, I do think even for me personally that mediocre content today is much better than the mediocre content of the past. The average is higher even if the peaks are not (and those peaks are probably overestimated due to survivorship bias). Tldr, there used to be a lot of crap and we forgot about it.
TiredOfLife 1y ago
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did. Schools don't have bullies? That's the extent of my shared cultural experience as a kid.
deleted 1y ago
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bflesch 1y ago
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did. You observe correctly but the conclusion is incorrect. You fail to take into account that year-, location- and interest-based cohorts of kids tend to follow the same influencers, and thereby consume the same content. The problem for outside observers is that without the platform's data we cannot identify the cohorts and thereby cannot distinguish between the groups. This logic follows a set-based approach to social media analytics called social set analysis pioneered by a research group at which I later did my PhD.
- giggyhack 1y ago
  I've had this conversation with my friends before about how valuable it would be to understand our different perspectives if we could swap/share our full "algorithmic experience" from our apps. What conclusions did your research find?
rsynnott 1y ago
> But what's missing is a shared cultural experience. In the 90s, everyone at my school knew those 40 songs that the local stations played. They might know other stuff too, but you couldn't avoid those top songs. It's not the same today. And it's the same problem for visual media. We all knew the top movies at the theater, because it was the only place to see new movies. And we all knew the top TV shows because they were only on four major networks. I mean, there's certainly greater diversity (particularly for music, stuff outside of the mainstream always existed, of course, but the barrier to entry was far higher then than now), but there's still a large shared _core_ of content.
jzb 1y ago
"Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did." I think this is two claims -- AFAICT kids do have a shared cultural experience, but it is true it's not like yours, or mine. The Spotify playlists are one way they find new music, TikTok being another, movies/TV shows, or word of mouth. What some folks may have found useful about radio playing gatekeeper and music directors choosing 40 songs per week (they didn't) others of us found stifling. I grew up in the 70s and 80s in a small town on outskirts of St. Louis. We could get a few classic rock/AOR stations (KSHE, KSD) and starting in the early 80s there was "hit radio" KHTR which almost quite literally followed the 40 songs per week model... There's tons of music I didn't* discover in the early 80s, such as The Smiths, that I only happened on later because of strong gatekeeping via radio. In the 90s we got KPNT ("the point") which was alternative rock and more adventurous than KHTR, and by then I also had a car and access to the good record stores in St. Louis. I amassed a large CD collection and stopped listening to the radio almost entirely excepting some college radio, and kept up with new music via Rolling Stone, Spin, etc. Even bought some albums based entirely on their reviews without having heard them at all. All of that long and rambly comment to say... I like music discovery today far more than I did in my youth, 20s, and early 30s. I skim Bandcamp regularly for new music, watch questions about music on Ask Metafilter, and have found YouTube Music's algorithm to be decent. (e.g., pick a song, make it a "radio" station and add songs I haven't heard before but like to my library.) It is true that I rarely find folks to discuss music with because I am not listening to mainstream music much. That part sucks -- but few people my age seem to care about music deeply. * Almost certainly the music director for your local station was subscribed to a service that provided a weekly list of songs to program, rather than choosing them themselves. I worked part-time in radio while in college, taking weekend and evening/midnight-6 a.m. shifts, in Washington MO and Kirksville MO. KSLQ (adult contemporary), KRXL (classic rock/AOR), KTUF (country) and KIRX (talk, sports) were all largely getting program direction from national syndicated programming. The local music director might have used some discretion in choosing / filtering out some songs, but they were likely getting the direction from a service.
DontchaKnowit 1y ago
Disagree. Eberyone is on the same websites, seeing the same memes, listening to the same music. Its just not from a radio. The curation process happens via social media consumption where the most popular sthff floats to the top. There is absolutely still a shared cultural experience, youre just not hip to it.
perching_aix 1y ago
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did. Of course they do. The music director is now the recommendation algorithm of each platform (as mentioned), and so what you'll find is that like-minded people have very similar recommendations in their feeds. There are also meta profiles on these platforms who instead of making their own content, "curate" and reshare content within (or from out of) the platform. And what disparities do arise, people undo them organically by sharing content with each other in different channels anyways. This is how things go "viral". It's actually kind of scary how people can convince themselves into ideas like yours here. One would think you live in a different world or something. This is the same world where memes and viral social media posts are everyday news topics. It's where blockbuster movies and TV shows continue to exist, where GTA6's release will cause a billion dollar revenue loss to the economy in lost workhours, and so on.
iNic 1y ago
Music YouTubers are the curation now. Anthony Fantano is most famous in this scene but there are many others

withzombies 1y ago

When we were kids, just knowing music that wasn't on the radio made you "into music". Things were very different! The internet has really allowed music choices to be much more personal and I think it's a good thing. We have such a wide variety of music available to us now. I've had some luck finding some TikTok creators who curate specific "vibes" and publish Spotify playlists. I think that's just how it's done now.

jedberg 1y ago
I love the variety for sure, I just miss the curation and the shared culture. It's harder to find people in person who know the same music and TV that you do.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  Every silver lining has its cloud. Shared cultural touchstones came hand in hand with tastemakers and gatekeepers. We’re more directly connected to the movers and shakers than ever before, but it’s largely parasocial interaction, mediated by platforms and gated by subscriptions. We’re increasingly disintermediated with respect to creators so that we can be separated and reconstituted into our profit-bearing parts. We’re old wine poured into new wineskins.
- bobthepanda 1y ago
  Is it hard because of the media landscape or is it hard because you are older? As someone who is still listening to today’s pop acts and whatnot, there are still tons of people you can talk to in person who probably listen to similar music, concerts are well-attended, etc. If anything the definition of popular has broadened to include new stuff like KPop, Latin pop, Afrobeats, etc. and I don’t have an issue finding people who like that music in person.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  This has always been an issue though. I am 30 years old, and I could remember back to elementary school. I remember us bullying a girl for liking songs such a Linkin Park among other songs we (they) considered emo. For the record, I love Linkin Park now, but all the bullies never bothered to listen, and we did not know English either. Talk to people, ask them about it, introduce them to new music and movies, listen to these songs together, or watch the movie together. That is what I do with my girlfriend. She does not have the same taste in music at all as I do. There is an overlap, since I like songs from classical to rock, but yeah.

ta12653421 1y ago

i like how you frame "shared cultural experience" which was mainly scarcity and lack of access due to less distribution channels as nowadays :-)

jedberg 1y ago
This is completely true. But there is something to be said for expert curation. Someone who spends their whole life studying these things so I don't have to.
- defrost 1y ago
  > but the next thing I ask is "how do you find new music". > expert curation. Someone who spends their whole life studying these things For a long time I followed the Peel sessions (1967 - 2004) which was BBC DJ / Commonwealth new music and industry audience sized level of shared curation experience. That was richer in information and breadth and more niche an experience than the larger broader scale appeal of the UK's Top of the Pops, Australia's Countdown, the USofA's later MTV curated new music offerings. Curated or not, now or in the 1960's, 70's, later there is and has always been a sizable amount of industry capture and strong influence in bringing artist's to audiences / markets. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Peel_Sessions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Peel_Sessions

rout39574 1y ago

Jerry Pournelle wrote about this, I think I recall reading in USENET; how with the burgeoning availability of media, the role of the editor, the curator, would become critical. He thought well and deeply about the challenges of the growing net.

acomjean 1y ago

I always think it would be useful for radio stations to keep logs of their playlists. I do check out mit radios list from time to time. It’s somewhat useful to know the names of the shows that play music you like.. https://track-blaster.com/wmbr/ https://track-blaster.com/wmbr/

jedberg 1y ago
Most do now. Most radio stations have a "now playing" window on their website, where you can see the last few songs played. If you dig in, it's a JSON with the last 10 or so songs. If you grab that JSON every 30 minutes, you'll get a full playlist.

curun1r 1y ago

> But what's missing is a shared cultural experience This is my problem with the proliferation of streaming platforms when it comes to movies and TV. We’ve arguably got more and better content than we’ve ever had. But I find myself far less motivated to watch it. I used to watch content anticipating the conversations I’d have with friends and colleagues. Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it’s 30 seconds of, “Have you seen …?” “No, have you seen …?” “No.” Until we give up and talk about something else. It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.

iknowstuff 1y ago
there are definitely still cultural experiences like that around release time. The last of us is huge right now.
- jedberg 1y ago
  > The last of us Never seen it. Not even sure what it's about.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    They're much more limited though. Heard of the series, but it's not Must see Thursday because I'm not in an office and know I can pretty much tune in whenever I want.
  - iknowstuff 1y ago
    Ok?
- cpburns2009 1y ago
  Isn't that an old video game? Was it recently remastered like Oblivion?
  - matheusmoreira 1y ago

baxtr 1y ago

I am not sure if I agree. I feel like social media trough its amplification has lead to a global sync in topics and experiences. I’d argue a kid growing up India or China shares much more culturally today with a western Kid than 30 years ago. Take the news for example. Last weeks it was tariffs. The entire world was talking about the same thing. To the contrary I feel like we are living more and more in the same global reality going from one headline to the next every week.

smackeyacky 1y ago
Not just headlines being shared, but culture is still being shared. Sure the shared cultural experience of being limited to a handful of TV channels is gone, but it's been replaced by a handful of streaming services. The world has shared the Marvel Cinematic Universe and 800lb sisters and Taylor Swift.
- deleted 1y ago
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- BlueTemplar 1y ago
  > 800lb sisters First time I hear of these. I now wish I had not looked them up (I did not think it would be so literal). (I also now realise that I cannot even remember how Taylor Swift sounds like, despite hearing about her quite frequently...)
- anton-c 1y ago
  Seeing Taylor swift mentioned is weird to me cuz nobody I know listens to her. We had like, 10 international popstars thru my youth with the Disney ones too(not that anyone listened to those that I knew). When I was young you couldn't NOT know the song "semi-charmed life" by third eye blind, or 50 other songs. Nowadays idk if that's the case. Then again, I'm not sure how much would be lost if my whole middle school didn't know the song "shake that Laffy taffy".
kranke155 1y ago
Nope you’re wrong. Actually media has become hyperlocal. The whole world was talking about tariffs? Nope. They were talking whatever they saw on their personalised feed.

crm9125 1y ago

I think kids nowadays likely still have a shared cultural experience like we did when we were young. We're just, separated from that experience. Just like our parents were when we were young. Maybe they can't (or don't want to, out of fear of being embarrassed or feeling uncool/uncertain perhaps) explain to you how they find things, but when they are hanging out with their friends and are talking about similar interests, discovering they know about similar things, and sharing things they know about that their friends don't yet/learning similar things from their friends, that's where the magic happens.

kaonwarb 1y ago
Anyone with, say, a fifth grader in the US can compare notes with parents elsewhere in the country. If your experience is at all like mine you'll be startled at the (odd to me!) shared culture. Especially if they spend time online.
darkwater 1y ago
This. When we become adults we tend to forget how it worked when we were children. Plus, you think you remember but you what you remember has been already filtered by the adult's mind.
Nasrudith 1y ago
Reminds me of a dynamic I heard about with the rise of music backlog availability. Instead of just 80's kids listening to 80's music you would see a wider array of eras that kids would see more internet era kids having a more diverse amount of preferred eras. Because they have more of a choice now.

tonyhart7 1y ago

"Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did." they did, they just have different algos for that. I found italian brainrot meme and what surprising it was so popular for kids, like tens of millions of views seems like Trends are more personalize now, what popular song that adult like is different with younger audience like its like having different Trends that live on bubble

DavidPiper 1y ago
You kinda just disagreed with yourself. Every kid having their own tailored algorithm means there is no shared cultural experience by design. A shared cultural experience means there are people in it who don't like it or don't engage with it, even though they are aware of it, and they can engage with their peers about it. Tailored algorithms means maximal enjoyment and engagement at all times, but it's engagement with the software, not engagement with peers.
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  "A shared cultural experience means there are people in it who don't like it or don't engage with it" You just disagreed with yourself, the kids on america can relate to kids that live on middle east and asia if this not shared cultural experience, then idk what else is because original post mention that most people on his hometown aware of song that got played, not every hometown on america have same experience
  - DavidPiper 1y ago
    Hmm I take your logical point. I think I disagree with the premises though. > the kids on america can relate to kids that live on middle east and asia ... if this not shared cultural experience, then idk what else is This sounds like parasocial connection standing in for shared cultural experience to me, but I don't really know because I'm quite distant from that kind of connection anyway.
    - tonyhart7 1y ago

Cheetah26 1y ago

Gianmarco Soresi discussed this on an episode of his podcast. He says how there used to be a number of nationally known comedians who could make jokes that appealed to everyone's shared cultural experience, but now that's effectively impossible because a) culture isn't tied to geography / location, and b) niches are much more prevalent. I loved the example that huge venues can now often be sold out for artists you've never heard of. On one hand it's not neccessarily a bad thing since individuals are getting more of what truly appeals to them, but I also think that the result could be increasing the barrier to connect with others because it decreases the chances that you'll have interests in common.

kjkjadksj 1y ago

Interesting you mentioned movies because I think movies are resurgent now where it seems like everyone is seeing all the new releases. I can hardly book imax anymore because they book up a month in advance and are booked up a month out and then they pull it from the imax theater to make room for the next thing to be fully booked out a month out. There is serious demand it seems to keep up with the latest movies especially when it is offered in higher fidelity like imax and 70mm releases.

throwaway2037 1y ago

I am confused. Spotify and Netflix both have recommendation engines that include a wide variety of factors, including popularity with other users and "closeness" to your favourite musical styles. I assume these are AI/ML models of some sort. Essentially, these automated engines have replaced the music director from 1990s radio stations.

jedberg 1y ago
That's precisely the problem. Everyone gets a different experience. No shared cultural experience. Until recently, everyone in the same village/town/city/country had the same experience, and could talk about it.
msla 1y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkfpi2H8tOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkfpi2H8tOE That's "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson. It's 8:21 and quotes both the Tao Te Ching and the US Postal Service. It peaked at number two on the UK Singles Chart in 1981. Why? Because John Peel curated a radio show on BBC Radio 1 and happened to like it. That's the advantage of human curation: Every so often you get a John Peel in the booth and hear something so off-the-wall no well-written algorithm would ever mix it in with everything else you listen to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Superman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Superman
Barrin92 1y ago
> Essentially, these automated engines have replaced the music director from 1990s radio stations. They haven't. A nearest neighbor pseudo random walk from one viral song to the next doesn't replace a music director who could give you thematically, aesthetically or conceptually coherent selections of music. There's an interesting observation about this at the individual album level, the death of the concept album. Albums that tell coherent two hour long narratives are effectively dead because the almighty algorithm favors the exact opposite. Disjointed, catchy , viral, hook centric music that's short enough to fit over a TikTok clip. The medium is the message, thinking the Spotify algorithm replaces a music director is like thinking the Youtube short algorithm replaces a film director.

kilroy123 1y ago

Yes, I agree. I think we're at the point where tastes are more important than ever and how to differentiate in this new AI slop world. No fancy algorithm or AI tool will replace human curation with good tastes (or what you think is good taste) I dig this for music curation: https://ghostly.com/ https://ghostly.com/ If anyone has other similar links I'd love to see them.

verisimi 1y ago

> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did. I tend to think that humans historically have had very isolated, independent experiences. It is only recently with mass media that we all share a collective experience. I take your point that kids today are not having a shared one-directional (tv to person) experience. However, they are sharing apps, with that data being intermediated. It is uni-directional too, so more immersive. I tend to see technology, and the direction of travel, as highly collectivising rather less of a shared cultural experience. Everyone is endlessly exposed to exciting ideas and content that are not self-generated. So, collectivised thinking UP, independent thinking DOWN.

b0ner_t0ner 1y ago

> When I was a teen in the 90s, I got new music from the radio. The music director picked 40ish songs a week and that's what we listened to. Those Top 40 singles were spoon-fed to you by Clear Channel within a very limited selection from the Top 5 major record labels.

chgs 1y ago
And? That doesn’t change the shared cultural experience. Decades had “sounds”, disco was a thing in the 70s because everyone heard it. Today there’s no shared cultural zeitgeist. You might find communities on reddit etc, but they aren’t local.

chrismorgan 1y ago

Among those that read and study the Bible: A hundred years ago, everyone used the King James Version of the Bible.¹ Poorly though it reflected the common language², it was a shared experience, and things like memorisation and making and recognising scriptural allusions were straightforward, because everyone used the same words. Now, a wide variety of Bible translations are in common use, some more accurate than the KJV, some more loose paraphrases, all more understandable. There are some big advantages in this variety and modernity—but we have lost something. The shared experience had a virtue of its own, quite a significant one. —⁂— ¹ OK, by a hundred years ago the RV and ASV were used in some areas, but it was mostly as a distant extra to the KJV, not replacing it. ² I understand that some of it was already becoming archaic, or at least overly formal, when it was published, such as thee/thou (singular you). The fact is, it was “appointed to be read in Churches”, and they wanted it to sound impressive. Compare it with Tyndale’s translation almost a hundred years earlier, and Tyndale’s generally reads much more easily—because Tyndale wanted uneducated people to be able to understand the Bible.³ ³ “And sone after Maister Tyndall happened to be in the companie of a learned man, and in communing and disputing with him, drove him to that issue that the learned manne sayde, we were better be without Gods lawe, then the Popes: Maister Tyndall hearing that, answered hym, I defie the Pope and all his lawes, and sayde, if God spare my lyfe ere many yeares, I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall knowe more of the scripture then thou doest.” — John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), page 570.

Paul_Clayton 1y ago
The Catholic Church had similar tradeoffs with Latin, though I suspect the language and style were less motivated by majesty (though bias of use by the educated might have entered early — I am ignorant of the history). The New Testament Koine (Common) Greek was similarly a lingua franca. When the once common language is no longer broadly used, the language can become a class-oriented separating factor. Even more recent translations seem to retain significant similarity in a lot of "famous" texts (e.g., the Beatitudes — people also seem to use the archaic pronunciation of "blessed" as two syllables), presumably to ease acceptance of the change. This hints that some commonality is preserved. (Some words are also jargon, so not modernizing the word is more reasonable.) Story outlines and concepts can also be preserved even though the "poetry" of earlier versions is lost in translation. Yet as contexts change even concepts may be less understandable and shared; "go to the ant thou sluggard" may be unclear not merely from language but from unfamiliarity with concepts. Aesop's "The Ant and the Grasshopper" has lasted thousands of years, but is not a fundamentally human metaphor and even the human concepts diligence and foresight can have different cultural tones. "A sluggard is someone who does not work hard." "Oh, you mean someone who works smarter not harder?" "No. It means someone who does not accomplish much." "Oh, you mean someone who is burnt out?" "No. It means someone who chooses not to do things that are profitable." "Oh, you mean someone who has recognized the futility of striving for accomplishments and has learned to be content with a simple life?" "No!"

sailorganymede 1y ago

There are plenty of internet radios like NTS which are all about curated discovery. It's worth checking out if that's your thing!

squigz 1y ago

> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did. I suppose you didn't have the same cultural experience as your parents. That's how culture works - it changes over time.

lordnacho 1y ago

> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did. Heh, I told my kid this today on the way to dropping him off with a friend. We were listening to The Rest is History, about the Rolling Stones. They made the point that this common cultural experience started to become a thing roughly in the 60s. When I was a kid, there were things that you just could not avoid. It was the same in many places: there was a national broadcaster, and maybe a second and third TV station. There were only so many things you could watch. Whatever TV series, music, or sports were on, you could be sure everyone else was also watching it. It started changing in the 1990s where I grew up, completely changing from the start to the end. You got a bunch of channels. You could watch news from America and other places, which maybe deserves a footnote about immigrants being able to watch something from faraway for the first time. More options everywhere, but there was still momentum. You still watched the national news on the main stations, and sports was still there too. They also tended to curate the "best" foreign shows, so you didn't have to wait to get your dose of America. Now that's finished. Everything is private now, you can watch whatever you want on your own screen (TVs got really cheap. When I was a kid, people would congratulate you when you bought a new one, like it was a car. Now I have more TVs than I can use.) You don't have to watch things at the scheduled time anymore, and you don't have to arrange your life around when the episodes come out. The kids now watch a wider variety of content. There's still "local" fads that are maybe restricted to friendship groups, instead of being national phenomena. For instance my kid and his friends ended up watching One Piece, a Japanese production. But I never ran into other kids who were into it. I also dare to say that the kids now watch lower quality content. This was already a thing when we got flooded with channels in the 1990s. There was a heck of a lot of mediocre crap on those 100 extra channels. But now it's a whole new world of terrible. Yes, I'm an old man. But it does seem like having curation would mostly bubble the good things to the top, and so when the curation went away, you got more stuff, but worse stuff. Similar to consumer products, the items at your department store tended to be reasonable, but when there's a webshop where you can buy anything at all, you have to sort through a pile of low quality stuff yourself.

darkerside 1y ago
Didn't our parents also think our content was objectively inferior to theirs? I would personally agree with you but it may also be that we don't understand the new content well enough to properly value it. And, I do think even for me personally that mediocre content today is much better than the mediocre content of the past. The average is higher even if the peaks are not (and those peaks are probably overestimated due to survivorship bias). Tldr, there used to be a lot of crap and we forgot about it.

TiredOfLife 1y ago

> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did. Schools don't have bullies? That's the extent of my shared cultural experience as a kid.

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bflesch 1y ago

> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did. You observe correctly but the conclusion is incorrect. You fail to take into account that year-, location- and interest-based cohorts of kids tend to follow the same influencers, and thereby consume the same content. The problem for outside observers is that without the platform's data we cannot identify the cohorts and thereby cannot distinguish between the groups. This logic follows a set-based approach to social media analytics called social set analysis pioneered by a research group at which I later did my PhD.

giggyhack 1y ago
I've had this conversation with my friends before about how valuable it would be to understand our different perspectives if we could swap/share our full "algorithmic experience" from our apps. What conclusions did your research find?

rsynnott 1y ago

> But what's missing is a shared cultural experience. In the 90s, everyone at my school knew those 40 songs that the local stations played. They might know other stuff too, but you couldn't avoid those top songs. It's not the same today. And it's the same problem for visual media. We all knew the top movies at the theater, because it was the only place to see new movies. And we all knew the top TV shows because they were only on four major networks. I mean, there's certainly greater diversity (particularly for music, stuff outside of the mainstream always existed, of course, but the barrier to entry was far higher then than now), but there's still a large shared _core_ of content.

jzb 1y ago

"Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did." I think this is two claims -- AFAICT kids do have a shared cultural experience, but it is true it's not like yours, or mine. The Spotify playlists are one way they find new music, TikTok being another, movies/TV shows, or word of mouth. What some folks may have found useful about radio playing gatekeeper and music directors choosing 40 songs per week (they didn't) others of us found stifling. I grew up in the 70s and 80s in a small town on outskirts of St. Louis. We could get a few classic rock/AOR stations (KSHE, KSD) and starting in the early 80s there was "hit radio" KHTR which almost quite literally followed the 40 songs per week model... There's tons of music I didn't* discover in the early 80s, such as The Smiths, that I only happened on later because of strong gatekeeping via radio. In the 90s we got KPNT ("the point") which was alternative rock and more adventurous than KHTR, and by then I also had a car and access to the good record stores in St. Louis. I amassed a large CD collection and stopped listening to the radio almost entirely excepting some college radio, and kept up with new music via Rolling Stone, Spin, etc. Even bought some albums based entirely on their reviews without having heard them at all. All of that long and rambly comment to say... I like music discovery today far more than I did in my youth, 20s, and early 30s. I skim Bandcamp regularly for new music, watch questions about music on Ask Metafilter, and have found YouTube Music's algorithm to be decent. (e.g., pick a song, make it a "radio" station and add songs I haven't heard before but like to my library.) It is true that I rarely find folks to discuss music with because I am not listening to mainstream music much. That part sucks -- but few people my age seem to care about music deeply. * Almost certainly the music director for your local station was subscribed to a service that provided a weekly list of songs to program, rather than choosing them themselves. I worked part-time in radio while in college, taking weekend and evening/midnight-6 a.m. shifts, in Washington MO and Kirksville MO. KSLQ (adult contemporary), KRXL (classic rock/AOR), KTUF (country) and KIRX (talk, sports) were all largely getting program direction from national syndicated programming. The local music director might have used some discretion in choosing / filtering out some songs, but they were likely getting the direction from a service.

DontchaKnowit 1y ago

Disagree. Eberyone is on the same websites, seeing the same memes, listening to the same music. Its just not from a radio. The curation process happens via social media consumption where the most popular sthff floats to the top. There is absolutely still a shared cultural experience, youre just not hip to it.

perching_aix 1y ago

> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did. Of course they do. The music director is now the recommendation algorithm of each platform (as mentioned), and so what you'll find is that like-minded people have very similar recommendations in their feeds. There are also meta profiles on these platforms who instead of making their own content, "curate" and reshare content within (or from out of) the platform. And what disparities do arise, people undo them organically by sharing content with each other in different channels anyways. This is how things go "viral". It's actually kind of scary how people can convince themselves into ideas like yours here. One would think you live in a different world or something. This is the same world where memes and viral social media posts are everyday news topics. It's where blockbuster movies and TV shows continue to exist, where GTA6's release will cause a billion dollar revenue loss to the economy in lost workhours, and so on.

iNic 1y ago

Music YouTubers are the curation now. Anthony Fantano is most famous in this scene but there are many others