|
I get what you're saying about openness, but I also think there's an immense matter of time involved. Music was an obsession for me from the age of 12, and I had time to be open for all of it. Thanks to a paper route, I bought my first turntable around then and my second a few months later. I was DJing parties within a year. I listened to music _constantly_. It was ALL new to me. It was the early 90s at the time so that was all new to me, and all of the 80s music was relatively new to me. Everything before that was new to me. I had entire days to listen to all of it all the time: While I was on the train to / from school, while I was on lunch break at school, while I was on my paper route or eventually whatever other mindless teenage job I was doing, while I was failing miserably at understanding BASIC, while I was in my room drawing, writing, doing home work, or literally just sitting and listening to music - as a full-on activity. And then the internet was just starting to get popular. Sure, it took an hour to download a wav file via modem, but it wasn't unheard of to download a few songs overnight (pre-mp3) from various sources. And then the next day we would talk about the new music, and I'd play it for my friends and they'd play what they found recently, and we'd talk some more, and then we'd head to the record store to find the best of it and more, and talk to people at the record store about it, and then pass it on to others and play the music at parties and so on. I don't have anywhere near that much time on my hands now. I don't have that many people to talk about music with, nor do I have the time or inclination to talk about it with them. I'm very fortunate to be working full-time right now, but I sure would love to take a couple months off to catch up on the last 10 years worth of music. It's pretty damn easy to be open to new music when you have the time to listen to everything and build a nuanced opinion. On a completely related note, if I were a musician, I would do everything I can to release music far and wide right now. A lot of the world suddenly has nothing but time to consume music. |
Gnoosic is a band recommender - a quick & dirty way to get a few new bands to check out (Google & DDG point right to it).