discogs is the shit. fuck spotify, and their corporate plants in every other “personalized” playlist they generate. at least you have something to show for your money 25 years later and a company can’t decide to arbitrarily stop offering the music etc.
It’s 1999 and I’m standing in a music store listening to a few new albums I might buy, while talking with the other audio nerds about upcoming releases and musicians I haven’t even heard of before.
I kinda miss it. Like Libraries, but I get to buy and keep whatever I enjoy.
Discovery of new music is so much easier now with Spotify/YouTube/etc. In the past you had a slim-to-none chance of coming across a band/artist/album outside your local scene, no matter what the genre. Back then you kind of had to be “in the know” for that to happen.
Spotify maybe, I’ve never used it. And Google Play music used to be the best for this, but YouTube music has me stuck in a loop of my last 10 or 20 songs and I hate it.
If I’m listening to some techno, and I change gears to old school country/bluegrass for awhile, then, YouTube will never ever recommend techno to me again. Not unless I manually remember some of my favorite songs, search for them, and retrain it that I like techno. But then of course country slowly dies. God forbid I mix in hard rock, punk rock, or rap. It just confuses it more.
And it’s not just a genre problem, even within a genre of repeats the same dozen or two songs every time I open the app.
It’s not just me, I have a family plan and my brothers have both separately complained to me about the algorithms being worse than Google Play music, which is what we used to use.
I literally created a playlist called YouTube music sucks, where I save my most liked songs, so I can reseed the algorithm when I want a change of tunes. I need the playlist because I have a terrible memory and can’t remember all the songs I’ve liked.
Why don’t I change? Because I’m cheap, and it’s bundled with YouTube premium for the whole family. And it has no right to be as bad as it is. I keep thinking they’re gonna fix it, but I guess maybe people like being spoon fed their last 20 liked songs?
Spotify is really good with recommendations. I think they use different algorithms for the different personal playlists: the Release Radar seems to use my followed artists and all my playlists, while Discover Weekly uses my recent listening history.
So much this! I don’t use Spotify, I buy all my music on Bandcamp. Sometimes I buy an album after just hearing the first song because I find it interesting, but then after a few more listens I realize that the album is not what I thought it was. However, I’m already committed because I paid for it, and it now sits at the top of my collection, so I continue to listen to it. Sometimes it turns out I find qualities in the music that I didn’t notice at the first listen, and I learn to like it. Sometimes not, and I ditch it.
This was also the way I discovered music before Spotify even existed, I just never changed my habits (I just used other services than Bandcamp back then). I think more people should try turning off the algorithmic entertainment faucet that is Spotify and try committing a bit more to the music that they listen to. Also, a lot more money goes to the artists this way, Spotify is basically stealing from the artists.
I have 170 albums in my Bandcamp collection. I have a lot more on my mp3 collection which I have bought via other means. Each album is maybe $10 on average, so that is around $1700. I have used Bandcamp for around 8 years after 7digital closed their EU store and eMusic became trash. So that’s around $17 per month. Not a lot of money in my book, music means a lot to me!
Alternate take - spend 3 minutes downloading a 3 minute song. Buy the album. The rest of the album blows. You just worked for two hours to pay for it in your minimum wage after school casual job
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