[devonsolomon]

The thing I miss most, and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects.

My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.

The result was pure joy: my music taste would develop in all weird and wonderful directions, my favorite songs would be the one I hit back on to listen again while I moved through an album, songs that friends skipped over and didn’t know at all; bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa.

(I’ve got a song still stuck in my head from a Canadian indie band that made its way onto my iPod via via and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band. I love this that I’ve never found them!)

I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.

I don’t listen to any AI generated music consciously, but given the music experience today I probably wouldn’t notice as these playlists, like a boiling frog, slowly became AI music dominated.

I bought a record player as my protest, and it gives me immense joy to find obscure records and play them through; but it’s really not the same thing, and I miss what we had.

[smugglerFlynn]

  > I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.

I don't think algorithms are to blame (bear with me).

It's that the word "discovery" internet platforms have started using for this kind of experience is very misleading.

What real discovery means:

  - Spending more time and attention when selecting next artist
  - Reflecting on what you like about the song/album, and why
  - Taking time to curate your collection
  - Exchanging thoughts with other people, and reflecting on their opinions

Platforms are selling you efficiency, in reality the've compressed above steps to minutes or even seconds.

This is not unique to music platforms by the way. Instagram spoon feeds you reels so you never actually reflect on anything - you don't have time for reflection, because content is coming. Instagram will say they've solved "content discovery" for you, which is good, right?

LLMs spoon feed you tons of data, leaving no room for reflection.

It is logical if you think about it: these platforms do solve accessibility, but they don't solve discovery, deep reflection or retrospection of the user. Why bother marketing things they _don't_ solve? So they oversell accessibility solution like they've solved everything else, while in reality their product teams spend literal zero time addressing the important things.

Unless you consciously prompt yourself to reflect and think (which takes x10 more time than just browsing content) you are missing out.

I've spent good 20 minutes reflecting while writing this comment. Could have been written by LLM based on a short prompt, right? But I write on HN not because I want for everyone to see my thoughts published out there - I write precisely because I want to _reflect on my own thoughts_.

I need help reflecting, not writing or discovering.

[bee_rider]

I think I agree with this.

A possibly interesting quirk of it is that this is a fairly intellectualized description (specifically):

> - Spending more time and attention when selecting next artist

> - Reflecting on what you like about the song/album, and why

> - Taking time to curate your collection

> - Exchanging thoughts with other people, and reflecting on their opinions

Of a process that at the time could have been summed up as “chit-chatting with your friends and picking the next song.” I wonder what it costs us, that these sort of process have become something we have to actively reflect on and make an effort. In the past this didn’t feel at all effortful, it was just fun and the easiest way to get music.

This isn’t intended as a criticism of your line of thought, I think you’ve accurately described a good process. Just a thought about how the accurate current description somehow doesn’t quite match the feeling of the past.

[smugglerFlynn]

Same thing happened with remote work. Things that were simple by-products of a face to face communication now need to be dissected and studied, and then carefully added back in, in order for remote environments not to suck. All the small talk, emotional check-ins, etc.

[doginasuit]

I agree, a focus on efficiency, immediacy, and quantity has lead us to a barren experience of discovery. Music streaming certainly has its virtues, it is a shame that they haven't made the discovery process better.

I wonder what it would look like to have a feature that elicited reflection, perhaps purely for its own sake but maybe also to help feed further discovery. You could have a player that didn't immediately start playing the next track but presented an interface where you could write notes or react to the song in a variety of ways. That reflection could deepen your appreciation for the song or help you put into words what you find missing. It would also be a much richer feedback for the system to understand what you are looking for and find the next song. We now have all these fancy tools and vector databases for a nuanced and meaningful search based on text content.

What I find most tiring about the status quo is that you have to skip through a bunch of tracks to find something that resonates. It seems mentally taxing and I can't help but think I may actually like a lot of these songs if I was in the right frame of mind to hear them.

[trinsic2]

The idea of how algorithms and scrolling get in the way of contemplation is an intriguing idea.

I had some other similar ideas come up in that past that are similar to this concept.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45217545

https://aeon.co/essays/tech-vexed-how-digital-life-threatens...

[PaulHoule]

At a verbal level LLMs are great: questions like "tell me about hip hop artists similar to MF doom" or "is there anything new like jefferson starship?" can be the start of great conversations. They will talk your ear off about what is going on with tracks like "Dangerous" off the Yes Union Album.

[socalgal2]

I haven't had much luck with LLMs. I can guess it works with famous artists but lots of other things work with famous artists. I asked it to find more tracks like "Hey Baby" (Deadmaus, Mellifresh) and they completely failed to even come close. I couldn't even get a similar vibe.

[PaulHoule]

I asked Google's AI mode "a friend of mine likes "hey baby" by (deadmus/mellifresh) and wants to find similar tracks" and mainly suggested other deadmau5 and Melleefresh tracks (corrected our spelling) -- did recommended "Internet Friends" by Knife Part and "Exceeder" by Mason. I thought the first was a direct hit, the second is a little different but "sick" in a good way... It starts a little slow but the groove gets great once I get in.

[socalgal2]

Thanks but neither of those fit the criteria I was looking for. In particular the both the same style/energy of music and the explicit suggestive lyrics. Those recommendations fit the first, not the 2nd. And yes, I gave the LLM those criteria. Maybe one of them is better than another.

[kipchak]

For the lyrics/vocals, the closest I can think of is Brat by MoxiFloxi though the genre isn't quite a match, the lyrics/vibe is sort of their "thing". Maybe one of the Benny Bassani Satisfaction remixes or Halogen - U Got also that but they're further.

[ValdikSS]

That's covered by What.cd's Gazelle "spider web of similar artists"

https://litter.catbox.moe/od8vcq.png

[melville23]

This is a great way to do it, especially when the LLM can actually get to know you. I've been working on a project that combines a persistent music expert LLM session with social listening, and gives the LLM access to YouTube so that it can find things and play them for you immediately. I've got it tuned pretty well now and I've made it available to the public at https://tunistry.com/

[chriscyber]

LLMs give more serendipitous music recommendations than spotify.

[erayack]

Yeah, this is the part I miss too. Not really the downloading, more the weird little rituals around finding stuff and talking about it. What do you think a modern version of that would look like without just becoming another feed?

[devonsolomon]

I fear there’s no coming back. When convenience destroys a culture, I’m not sure you’re ever able to get ever get the heart of it back. Especially when it was the network effects that made it special. I’ve read the recommendations in the comments of this, none of them really hit the same.

[smugglerFlynn]

Modern version needs to be community focused, not platform focused. This could look like "old instagram" or "old reddit": people sharing findings with friends / small groups of like minded people.

We are seemingly unable to create something like that from scratch; these communities get born when good enough platform quality + hype/fashion + network effect all 'click' together once in a few decades. The problem is: every single time such community-based platform ever appeared, we've started tweaking the _platform_ and have (unintentionally?) destroyed the community in the process.

Today we are so advanced in managing technology, but so backwards in helping communities grow. People really need to stop treating communities as "user bases". Instagram or Reddit are not bringing any value on their own. Their value is driven by communities. Paradoxically, every other platform feature they introduce chips away at the community.

(Side rant: It is almost like platforms intentionally try to convert social side of user experience into something akin to 'television'. 10 years back I was mostly reading Instagram posts of my friends and looking at the photos they made, today I mostly see 'content creators' in the feed, and all the meaningful interaction with friends was reduced to seeing their 'likes' floating around the screen, plus forwarding more content to them.)

[JohnBooty]

    My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships

Hey! You can bring this back in 2026! In a fit of random inspiration (possibly inspired by a glass of wine or two) I began a new practice.

If I'm hanging out with somebody who's passionate about music, I pull up Spotify (or Apple Music, whatever) and create a blank playlist. I hand them my phone and ask them to add some tracks for me.

Here's the trick that makes it work... I give them strict instructions not to pick something they think I'LL like. I just want some tracks or albums that THEY are passionate about.

I've had a lot of fun doing this! People are also generally touched that you want to know what kind of music they feel strongly about. It's a fun way to build connections.

[myself248]

I love this idea!

Yeeeeears ago, I was in the middle of some late-night hacking session, hanging with friends on IRC, and I had shared my screen via VNC so they could watch/help. (ISTR I had found the UART port on some piece of embedded hardware and we were muddling our way through U-boot incantations or something.)

At some point, I tabbed over to Winamp to change the music, which everyone saw, and one of the crew was like "oh hey you have artist X on your playlist, do you like artist Y?", and I admitted that I had not heard of artist Y. Seconds later there was a DCC file transfer.

Artist Y fit the mood perfectly. This was great.

This evolved into spawning Winamp on a second box that could be separately VNC'd into, where anyone could upload and play music they thought was appropriate for the session, without interrupting the main console. And someone installed a Shoutcast server on it too, so everyone could listen.

After a little while this was our little Friday-night routine, regardless of whatever other hacking was happening. The collaborative deejay stage -- we popped a Notepad on the Winamp box to track who was playing and who was up next, though ephemeral chat remained on IRC -- defined a brief era of my internet experience.

Many years later, I ran across a Spotify plugin called Jqbx that did basically the same thing. It was short-lived, but there seem to be several work-alikes. Sadly the community disbanded, but now it's got me thinking...

[nekooooo]

turntable.fm was this, but for normies

[burningChrome]

>> Here's the trick that makes it work... I give them strict instructions not to pick something they think I'LL like. I just want some tracks or albums that THEY are passionate about.

This is exactly how I used to find music in the 80's when I was growing up. I had two guys I hung out with that were music aficionados. Both had older siblings who were really into music and so by proxy they would inherit their siblings music and musical tastes. I would hand over blank cassette tapes for them to put the stuff they were listening to. My god, the amount of music I amassed in junior high and high school was mind boggling.

This is a great updated version of this, thank you for this!

[diseasedyak]

This is a fantastic idea, and I'm going to start doing this immediately!

[mjrbrennan]

This is a cool idea! Hope whoever gives me the blank playlist is prepared to listen to a lot of Bob Dylan :P

[port11]

Okay, a bit of devil’s advocate but how much of that network effect was caused by being young?

I’m making an assumption, true, but a lot of us that grew up with ripped CDs were teenagers or young adults back then. Sharing music was inherently part of what we did because we were young and that was an activity we shared.

And as to Spotify: why do we keep complaining about these platforms but also keep patronising them? They deleted my account when I moved countries, so I deleted their app. We’re done. Years ago. Now I get music from the library when my kid goes there to pick up books. There’s Bandcamp, Qobuz, what have you. Look at local festivals with weird bands (how I discovered Constantinople and Huun-Huur-Tu). iPod hacks have never been easier! Let’s shake it up a bit :)

[dbspin]

To counter this - if you were around in the blog music era, being young had little to do with the network effect. Shitty pop music was in the ascendent culturally at the time, and the huge indie revival of the late 2000s and early 2010s happened primarily online. Hypemachine and the hundreds of mp3 blogs pushed novelty, obscurity, cross genre experiments, lost records etc. I'd finished college by this point, but dove right back into music and broadened my tastes considerably.

Discoverability and usability in general is godawful on bandcamp. Always has been, and shows no signs of improving. Never heard of Qobuz. What made the mp3 blog era so unique was exactly the network effect referenced above. The curators had audiences, they were aggregated from larger platforms and both deeply specific and hyper erudite. There was a whole culture around this online, and waves of excitement around certain artists, which would spill into 'in the know' circles offline.

Googling who's playing at local festivals or using some random app isn't and can't remotely be the same thing. I could see a music based social network taking off in the future. Currently there's nothing with the buy in, and the existing platforms are way too financially invested in pushing major labels, AI etc to become real recommendation and sharing engines.

[PaulHoule]

Music is tough. People like music which is a lot like what they're familiar with but just a little bit different. Musicians are always suing each other because it's hard to write a song which doesn't sound dangerously like an existing song, which is why Taylor Swift is generous with writing credits. It's a big problem for LLM generated music, regardless of the training data.

Myself I have gone through phases in my adult life where I tried hard to expand my musical interests. Like around the time my son was born I was really into obscure psychedelia, both vintage and contemporary and also prog rock and other rock B-sides from the 1970s. Then later I got into the british 1980s music I missed. Then it was Ingsoc and then the Super Furry Animals, lately Tyler the Creator. One thing that's driven it is that I make these cards

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115939341268444811

and don't want them to show my age!

[properbrew]

The card idea is absolutely great. I'm totally going to do the same. There's a number of songs in my playlist that I _really_ enjoy that I would make cards for.

Thank you for the inspiration for a weekend project!

[port11]

It’s true I didn’t grow up with that at all. When music blog were popular I’d have been in university exclusively listening to what I already liked.

Bandcamp is indeed really bad at suggesting things you’ll like…

To your last point: it’s weird how Bandsintown or Last.fm didn’t figure this out. Last.fm has so much potential but just isn’t… interested?

One advantage of the offline scene is that I see a lot more local artists, all knowing each other and playing together. There seems to be some camaraderie/support for each other going on.

[dbspin]

Agreed. Last FM is one of the great lost opportunities of web 2.0 (up there with the early location based social networks). The website still exists, and I still use it (despite painfully poor integration into iOS, requiring the third party paid client Marvis to synch). They offer unclear value subscription to access all your data, and at this point, most dedicated music geeks have probably moved to OSS / local solutions integrating musicbrainz datasets.

There is a world in which lastfm is the one of the most popular social networks, tiktok before tiktok (which started as music.ly) if you like. There's another in which it developed into a Tidal like successful boutique streaming platform. Instead it's a half forgotten not really working nonsense.

My favourite lastfm story, is that back when it was somewhat popular (at least indie popular), someone commented on my lastfm profile to say they'd been in Tokyo and been approached by the members of a hyper niche Swedish band (Strip Squad) because one of the members had heard their music being played in a park. The guy playing them had found them because of my lastfm. Lastfm at the time actively suggested connecting with other users who had similar psychographic taste.

I'm all in favour of supporting local music scenes. Just personally I don't enjoy gigs, never have really. Sound is bad, always too loud, vibes are too alcohol based (at least here in Ireland), they're pricey etc. I'd actually love it if there was more of a 'listening cafe' Japanese style venue / scene here. There's a popular bar that poses as one, but it has a terrible, wildly over loud sound system in a box room with a loud open bar next door.

[runarberg]

Does Bandcamp still do their Bandcamp weekly and their regular article? Personally I never signed up for any streaming service (apart from Bandcamp; but I don‘t use their suggestion algorithm) so I can’t judge what is good or bad about it. But I feel like their regular articles and their Bandcamp weekly show was excellent at music discovery. I stopped listening and reading it a while ago, as I get plenty good music discovery on my local radio station (KEXP) as well as the national radio of where I grew up (RÚV in Iceland).

[kylestratis]

They actually do a lot for discovery. Bandcamp weekly, notifications when labels you've bought from release something from another artist, playlists, and they have genre-focused blogs as well.

People just like saying something doesn't exist when they just didn't bother to look at their emails.

[dbspin]

So I've been a bandcamp user since close to the dawn of the service. The issues I commented on above don't relate to their curation emails but the poverty of the interface itself. Bandcamp has been widely and roundly, not to mention accurately criticised for it's technical / UX failures for a long time. It also has no social features whatsoever. Unfortunately a curated email isn't a replacement for proper recommendations based on similar users listening (as lastfm used to to, see above anecdote), content based recommendations, or genuine social recommendations. Not to mention the fact that half the writing staff were fired several years ago, and the quality of their curation fell off a cliff after that point.

The app and site are awful, and even finding stuff you've bought to play or download can be a nightmare if you own a lot of material. To site a specific example - I bought a back catalogue of sound effects records for work reasons. They have many dozens of individual releases - which makes navigating my other purchased records much more difficult.

Bandcamp also only allow you to 'uncover' the download links for tracks or albums one at a time, presumably to save bandwidth costs. I could go on and on.

It's a hypothetically great service that's absolutely crippled by not having been improved for a decade.

[hylaride]

The problem with subscription music is that the streaming platforms have no incentive to get you to discover new music - you're already paying either way.

Before Apple Music, when it was just the iTunes Store, Apple introduced iTunes Genius and it was scary good at recommending music; it worked so well I shudder to think what I spent in total buying $1 songs off of it.

But apple's music "play similar songs" just seems to take the same artists and pump their other album filler songs.

[port11]

My counterpoint is that if you’re always listening to the same stuff, your collection feels stale and you’re less likely to listen to more music.

Maybe that’s actually advantageous to the streaming services, but one big reason I cancelled them was that I wasn’t getting anything new.

(Instead, Radar FM in Portugal is where I started tuning into to learn about new stuff.)

[desecratedbody]

I forget why exactly I did this, but years ago I deleted Spotify for something related to offline playlists. I kept my music offline, and I'm guessing they messed that up. Plus, they would randomly re/move songs or whole albums, which I know isn't entirely their fault, but the poor UX surrounding these occurrences was annoying enough to help drive me away.

I've tried going back a few times, but it just isn't worth the money.

[Aurornis]

Reading this is weird because those network effects and friend group sharing experiences are exactly how my music lover friends use Spotify.

They share playlists instead of the files. They make friends of friends through playlist recommendations.

I was at a get together a few years ago where someone met a friend of mine and exclaimed, “Oh you’re _____ of the _____ playlist series! Those are amazing!” and then they talked about music and concerts for the next hour.

I don’t think piracy was as key to your experience and joy of music. It was the way you acquired the music, but your enjoyment and the social networks came from the novelty of it all and likely your age at the time. It was all new and fun and you still enjoyed it all.

Your story quickly shifted from being about piracy to complaining about music these days:

> and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.

I think you’ve just fallen out of love with music in general. Piracy had nothing to do with it other than being the means to an end at the time of your honeymoon phase.

I remember substantially similar stories from older generations trying to explain how online piracy had ruined music discovery because the real fun was from their younger days of trading bootleg tapes, mix tapes from friends, and going to concerts. The cycle continues.

[CTDOCodebases]

I think algorithmic music discovery is overrated.

Back in the day I used to use Audioscrobler which was an audio plugin for Winamp which was basically a recommender system for music. I discovered some interesting music through that but nowhere near the amount of music I later discovered through hypem which was a music blog aggregator.

[hypercube33]

Winamp is where I fell in love with last.fm. It wasn't as fun as going to a lan party and raiding the file server of all of the music to explore it or later, Napster checking out what music the person you were downloading a song from had that seemed interesting but it was super good at finding new similar music and side fun fact that my wife and some lady in Russia are the only close matches to me in music taste on there still. pretty wild. CBS ruined last.fm

[piker]

Does anyone in 2026 rate algorithmic discovery for music? Or is it widely perceived to be the engagement-reinforcement mechanism that it is?

[driverdan]

It works well until it doesn't. I've been a Spotify user for at least 15 years (wild to say that). I've discovered a ton of bands I've become a long term fan of.

But also their algorithmic playlists have gotten worse and worse. They overfit user data. They all recommend the same singles over and over and over. I've found they also don't make sense, recommending music that doesn't even belong in the playlist.

I've switched to user created playlists more often than the algo ones, although a lot of user playlists are just saved copies of Spotify generated recommendations.

[PaulHoule]

There are many different "algorithms". YouTube has an algorithm that gets a very high hit rate because it plays music you've already proven that you like. That's good and bad.

I listen to the "Deep Cuts" recommender on Plexamp a lot, it uncovers a lot of good music that I haven't heard before out of my large collection, I've got no idea how it works.

One funny thing about it is that I do not play it through the speakers at home because my family tends to find anything selected by a recommender really provocative, not necessarily in a bad way, but the last thing I want to do is answer questions about music I didn't select myself. I mean I can play through a Charlie XCX or Tyler the Creator or rock-opera phase Kinks album and nobody says anything about it but if they do I have a good story to tell about it, but it's too annoying to get hassled about some UB40 track I never heard before that's between a BTO and Olivia Newton-John track.

(Generally I find that recommender selected content is "provocative", like if anyone is looking over my shoulder, they are very unlikely to see what I am actually interested in and working on but instead they want to ask me questions about things on my screen that I'm either just a little warm or totally cold to)

[skeaker]

Not sure about rating them against each other but I've had plenty of success with YouTube Music. Once it learns your taste well enough it starts giving you some real deep cuts. I've found songs I like with it that had less than ten thousand views on several occasions. Notably it has never played AI-generated music for me which is a big plus too. Google can be awful but their algorithm undeniably works.

[red-iron-pine]

spotify has brought me some gems. more hits then misses, generally.

definitely engagement bait and they lean hard on popular (both pop, and just well loved / common) music.

no idea if the "payolla" system is still in effect like with radio but it feels like it sometimes.

[RugnirViking]

It really depends, but in general I quite like it. I still sit through my Spotify weekly every week, moving the songs that I like into playlists. I regularly find new artists I like, thankfully I don't see much ai slop yet - the bands I find have tour dates and proper web presence. I've been to see some. But I wonder if it's a function of my niches or what?

I don't tend to let songs autoplay outside of playlists unless I'm commuting, and it usually just picks artists and songs I already know anyways.

Occasionally if I want to find more like an artists I go onto the song radio on Spotify but just read the song titles and artist names, it's not worth setting aside a couple hours for the possibility of two gems.

If I had one complaint or thing I wish I could change about my listening habits it's that I wish I spent more time listening to albums in order. I think something is lost by skipping straight to the best tracks - the dessert as it were, you've got to take the time so it's all the sweeter when it comes.

[cobbzilla]

Similar experience and I would never trade it in a lifetime.

For the “me” today, new music discovery is all about live radio. and I don’t mean pop/satellite/corporate programmed radio. I mean radio where a human still cares.

I mostly use radio.garden (sometimes TuneIn) and find crazy local stations around the world.

K-Pop from Seoul, Parisian hiphop, live EDM from clubs in Ibiza, weird/fun island music from the remote pacific, random college radio. It’s all out there, live, amazing!

when I hear something I like, I “shazam” it, then add it to my library later. and I’m always smiling when shazam can’t find any match.

[gaudystead]

Can I offer you a SomaFM[0] in these trying times?

They're entirely listener supported and the music they play is - to my knowledge - entirely human curated. I've found many tracks and artists new to me, with some artists not even having a presence (or a very small one) on Spotify.

Their curation is so good that they've become a significant resource I go to when seeking out new music. It feels like a warm hug from people who probably were also users of what.cd back in the day. Some of the humans who make up their team are the ones who play the music at DEF CON each year, so I take that as a good endorsement that they are well equipped to have good taste and be fellow music nerds - a compliment of the highest regard.

They're worth your time (and money, should you choose to donate).

[0] https://somafm.com/

[cobbzilla]

+1 good call out. Definitely I love some SomaFM stations!

[red-iron-pine]

love me some SomaFM. even paid for their deliberately overpriced tshirt and stickers to support them + occasional donations.

[flir]

radio.garden (and many others) got neutered in the UK courts by Sony. Offensive, short-sighted, Balkanizing decision.

I haven't bought a Sony product since the rootkit debacle. My only regret is that there's not a "boycott++" mode for the damage they did with that decision.

[BaseBaal]

Add the following line to ublock origin in "My filters" & make sure the "Enable my custom filters" option box is checked to get around this:

https://radio.garden/api/geo

[flir]

!!!!!!

Made. My. Day.

[cobbzilla]

> radio.garden (and many others) got neutered in the UK courts by Sony

Do tell more, I’m very curious— am I unaffected in the US? I haven’t noticed a big change in the past several years. What happened?

[flir]

Can't find a good summary link. Maybe this one https://www.rpclegal.com/thinking/entertainment/court-of-app... is a good starting point.

radio.garden feels like spinning an AM radio dial late at night (which is how I discovered John Peel as a youngling). It's a lovely thing, verging on art, and should be treasured.

[Folcon]

It seems that radio stations outside the UK cannot be listened to, can you listen to any stations outside your country?

[cobbzilla]

yes definitely, don’t even need a VPN. I can stream/listen from anywhere in the world on radio.garden

I’m sorry the UK cripples your streaming. That really sucks.

[erayack]

Live radio has that someone is actually there feeling that playlists never really have

[kylestratis]

This has never gone away though, you just chose to stop doing it. I go to local shows pretty frequently, have made tons of friends (in bands and not) in the process, found new bands - some that produce an EP and breakup, others who chug along locally for years, others who tour nationally regularly but stay playing intimate shows here at home.

I've discovered so much wonderful music and even better people this way, it flummoxes me when people act like you can't go to a show or a record store or even use Soulseek and find new music.

[jml78]

I can explain it. I graduated college, got a job, got married, had kids. Going to shows just didn’t happen.

Now I am getting back into it with my teenager.

On the flip side, I was part of an irc group back in the day where with permission of local bands, I would take their cds and get them released by music piracy groups. I would rip and release them. It got more ears on their music. This was all in the heavy metal scene.

[marysol5]

Yeah their complaint seems to be "I don't socialise with my friends enough" rather than some platform specific change

[cdrnsf]

As someone with a tattoo of a clickwheel iPod, I can't help but endorse this.

All of my favorite recommendations and artists have come from friends I know in real life, online or both. Zines, blogs and other music communities are all wonderful sources as well. last.fm's trove of recommendations are still accurate and I hope it holds on.

I have different friends who I ask for recommendations from different genres and then end up in exploring further once they've opened the door.

Everything I listen to is from MP3s streamed through Navidrome living in an S3 bucket. My larger library is in another bucket and mirrored elsewhere. I collect some records but opt for the convenience of listening digitally and that listening consists of whole albums, never playlists (and never anything AI generated).

[andai]

> bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa.

I've been thinking lately about the effect I'm having on the world.

Most people who read or watch something never subscribe. Most people who subscribe never comment.

Your work can be changing the lives of dozens of people but you still feel like you're shouting into a void.

Of the people whose work has changed my life I have reached out to approximately none of them.

And I often do try to make an effort to reach out! But for the most part I, too appreciate things invisibly.

--

P.S. You can just email people, regardless of how legendary they are, and a surprising number of them actually do reply!

[Forgeties79]

A year or so ago I emailed a composer just to tell him how much I enjoyed his arrangements of a great OST. He sent a very kind, thorough response and mentioned that feeling of “shouting into the void.@ He said once he releases a record he doesn’t really tour so he never gets to speak to people or see the emotional response, so the occasional message means a lot.

[user_7832]

+1. A friend's pendrive full of songs was how I actually bothered to get "into" many artists that until then I didn't really care about.

Somewhat related re: discovery, it was also fun to download what was available rather than what you wanted. I got iridescent (linkin park) instead of some other track I was searching for (probably what I've done), and I learnt Dire Straits also had a song called "So far away", only after downloading it. (I was looking for the avenged sevenfold's track of the same name.)

[xethos]

> and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band

Shoulda posted what you remember (and ideally male / female vocalist) as a post-script. The throwaway comment could be your way back

[devonsolomon]

I selfishly wanted to but: 1. It’s a little besides the point 2. I didn’t want to embarrass myself with how badly I remember it.

Anyway, here’s my shot: Male singer + (from other comment) It was pretty alt-grungy (something like TV on The Radio or Blockparty at the time). Lyric I remember is from a song starting with something along the lines of: throw away your newspaper/ no more bad news today.

[brailsafe]

Agreed, plenty of Canadian's lurking here, even Dang himself.

[eddyg]

If you’re gonna capitalize the “D” you should also capitalize the “G” (since it’s the first letter of his last name…)

[PaulHoule]

One strategy is to look at the records on pitchfork's top 100 lists, say

https://www.albumoftheyear.org/ratings/1-pitchfork-highest-r...

and listen to the discography of those artists. You will find some stuff you liked there. I had another round of adventures when I plugged in a Sony 300 disc CD changer into my home theater and loaded it exclusively with DTS Music CDs

https://www.albumoftheyear.org/ratings/1-pitchfork-highest-r...

through an SPIDF connector. There were a lot of bands I already knew like Kraftwerk and Deep Purple and Don Fagan and Bjork but there were a lot of 5.1 mixes around 2000 made by musicians who cared about sound and I'd say anything like that is worth a listen.

[philamonster]

Exactly this. There were even curated collections on Oink/what.cd of these lists which is where I obtained a large portion of my collection. Those days were the end of the era for me. I still had access to an FTP-ish site that was an offshoot of Something Awful Forums but that decayed probably 10-12 years ago.

I still have a turntable/cd-changer in my living room which is used monthly at least, but it is mostly a social thing (kids, friends etc). For mobile digital, I had been using Subsonic and subsequent forks since 2010 but self-hosting is too much work with real work and life taking a front seat, still have iSub on my phone with around 4k songs cached which is all I listen to in the car, no paid streaming services at all for over 2 years now. There is a 5k song limit for my car but the plan is to dump my whole collection into multiple USB sticks and rotate as I see fit.

I'm constantly reminded of those past days when certain songs roll through of my youth (90's, 2000's) and the who, when and where of it all. I also get to pass it on to my kids as they discover this musical past in real-time next to me which makes it even sweeter.

[Tallain]

The death of what.cd was also the end of an era for me. I know "replacements" have popped up but the real value of what wasn't in the piracy, it was in the community. It was the best on the internet and nothing has taken its place since.

[sailfast]

These deep dives are fun, but it’s a lot more fun to have a conversation with someone about this sort of deep dive, get to know their taste and trust their next rec is probably going to be good.

I miss the community around music sites more than the content. Curation and passion was top notch and fun. Nobody was angling for ad dollars or revenue. They just did it to build the community.

[baliex]

I made a thing for this https://dailyalbum.art/

12 random albums every day, picked from a list of curated lists that I've curated over the years; some of which are pitchfork lists

I'm an active Spotify user, with increasing tendencies to find a more sustainable alternative, but the inertia is real

[brailsafe]

> My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.

I've been intentionally doing this with my music streaming service. If I hear a song I like or someone in one of many friend groups recommends something, I'll add it to my liked songs, and eventually get around to listening to it. Sometimes I'll find a gem and go into their discography further. I can't agree with never getting this feeling back; there's also a resurgence in popularity for physical media and offline music players, so it might be quite common again soon.

[renegat0x0]

I created my own database of favourite music, to be able to share what I like:

- https://rumca-js.github.io/music

- https://rumca-js.github.io/movies

Interface is clunky, but gets the job done for me.

[Electricniko]

> I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band.

In the last couple of months, I've found that Gemini has actually become really good at finding those missing songs and obscure albums. It might take a few minutes of going back and forth and false leads, but I've found very obscure songs from the 80s and 90s that I've been searching for for decades without success. It helps if you give it everything you remember about the song, style, maybe who it sounded like or other bands that may have been around at the time.

[embedding-shape]

> I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like.

I've mostly been using my own playlists + radio to play music in Spotify and discover music. Recently though, I've started navigating and listening more by the label, and also listening through full albums instead of just picking some songs. Spotify seems to work fine for this, what exact issues are you encountering when listening by albums?

Mostly I find them via the "release radar" today, click on the album title/cover, play first track with shuffle and repeat all off, then listen until it ends. I don't think you need anything else than this :)

Back in my day we used DC++ for music sharing. DC++ was like a decentralized social network + piracy client, with the content shared by users who congregated in self-hosted servers, and it was always interesting to browse people's (sometimes very mixed) music tastes.

[AlecSchueler]

Don't forget the "label:" search in Spotify

[canadiantim]

How does your Canadian indie band song go? I’m intimately familiar with a looot of Canadian indie music, could help ya find it

[moostii]

The result increased the likelihood of irl performance attendance.

I don't really know what my friends listen to these days.

[mvdtnz]

Most of my friend nowadays (40-42 year old group) either don't listen to music at all or just put on pop radio at work and pay no attention. And almost all of them are weirdly proud of their lack of interest in music and wear it like a bizarre badge of honour. Sucks being the only one left who is interested in music.

[drdec]

I wonder if the real difference is that everyone has earbuds versus playing through a speaker

[account42]

We had earbuds in in early 2000s too, just not the wireless kind.

[drdec]

An important part of my observation is that everyone is using them, not just that they are available

[myself248]

And Bluetooth still doesn't have a good "headphone splitter" function to plug in 2 or more sets of headphones, does it?

[dkga]

I miss that network discovery as well, as well as the quasi-random element to it. Nowadays I get my kicks by searching for, say, Albanian rock (I don‘t speak Albanian), whatever was trending in Indonesia (I am not from there), who is the national poet/singer of France (I am not French), what was playing on Peruvian radios in 1985 when I born, etc.

Edit: it‘s also a great way to meet other countries/cultures, not only other great music. For example, this is how I got acquainted with the beautiful Wolof language from Senegal and even with traditional regional music in Brazil (where I am actually from) I would have never been exposed to otherwise.

[jrowen]

I used ourTunes in the dorms, people just sharing their entire iTunes with the network. I've always been more of a solo digger, but I never liked Spotify. I have specific dance/electronic tastes so I browse and purchase music on sites like bandcamp or beatport, though actually these days it's strictly junodownload.

I do wonder though how much of what you describe, or some form of it, is still happening in dorm rooms. As we get older we just do less of that kind of stuff. I still connect with a large circle of friends through music, and discuss different artists and such, mostly at events.

[ghaff]

There's probably some truth in that although, if you didn't have to collect a large volume of music whether purchased or copied in some form, I'm not sure the incentives are there to get started in any serious way. It is also true that, for me at least, I purchase very little music these days and basically don't pirate at all.

[jrowen]

That is a good point. I’m not old enough to care too much about physical media but I do take pride in “my collection” which I would guess is less prevalent in Gen Z. Everything is on demand in the cloud now.

[tikhonj]

I've had the opposite experience, where Spotify (and, to a lesser extent, YouTube) has been a great way to find different music that I enjoy. The Discover Weekly playlist in particular has been surprisingly good at surfacing music that I enjoy but would have never encountered on my own.

This is handy for me because my taste in music runs pretty different from most of my friends.

I don't know how much of this comes from using Spotify in a different way, and how much is Spotify's algorithm adapting to my weird preferences.

[amelius]

I miss the sharing of mixtapes (or even mix-CDs, later when burning them was possible).

Right now if I want to share music with someone, I first have to check which streaming service they are on ...

[bitwize]

I made a mix CD for my wife for her birthday last year. It was my interpretation of Cereal Killer's "Greatest Zukes Album", featuring "great artists that asphyxiated on their own vomit" that was mentioned in the 1995 movie Hackers. So to qualify for inclusion, the artist had to either have died of drug or alcohol overdose before September 1995 (when Hackers came out) or be a band one of whose principal members died in such a fashion. It was great fun to make and my wife still listens to it.

[picofarad]

That's not available in stores!

[Affric]

I still have the last cd I was ever given. Incredible mix.

[digs-fm]

> My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on.

That's precisely the reason I'm building Digs[1]. If you like listening to whole albums and discovering things via friends, you might like it!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862

[volkl48]

> I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this

I rarely say this, but you're using it wrong.

There are a number of good ways to utilize Spotify for music discovery that aren't "pray to the auto-play algorithm". The best resource IMO is artist pages.

- Artist pages:

- Artist Playlists - Many artists, especially smaller ones, curate their own playlists. I've found many good, new to me artists through what other small bands I like recommend on their playlists. If I hear a track I like on it then I click through to that artist and dive into their stuff.

- Discovered on - sometimes you'll find interesting user-curated playlists in here.

- Fans also like - I suppose it's "an algorithm" as well, but it's a deterministic one, and in most genres you're going to find other real bands there of similar popularity levels.

- Live Events: Pick your area, see who's playing. I'm not sure why but at least in North America it seems to be pretty much the most comprehensive nationwide concert listing at this point (better than BandsInTown, the remnants of Songkick, etc), and has a lot of little bar-tier shows that don't make it on most other live music trackers. (Some cities with a strong local scene have some kind of good local resource but they're only for that metro area + may only be for a specific set of genres.). I find a lot of the little shows I attend through this now.

- Playlists - not the ones algo-generated by Spotify, search for something and go down to the user-curated ones. Still have to check them over a bit to see that you're not getting AI slop, but there's a lot of gems.

But ultimately, you are never going to find + fall in love with much if you are just acting in a purely passive way. If you hear a song you like, you need to....actually hit like on that song, click on the artist, and explore that artist's discography.

[afzalive]

Instead of solving difficult, unsolvable problems, the goal of the tech industry has become to replace these sub-cultures with a subscription or social media. In doing so, first they offer convenience for cheap, once they've replaced the sub-culture, they ramp up their prices to profit.

[r3trohack3r]

I know the feeling and similarly miss it

I built audile to fill the gap for myself: https://audile.blankenship.io/

It’s not perfect, but it’s still delightful for me. It randomly (Math.random on the catalog) kicks out an album from Deezer’s library.

[monkeywork]

>(I’ve got a song still stuck in my head from a Canadian indie band that made its way onto my iPod via via and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band. I love this that I’ve never found them!)

what were the lyrics you recall?

[devonsolomon]

It was pretty alt-grungy (something like TV on The Radio or Blockparty at the time). Lyric I remember is from a song starting with something along the lines of: throw away your newspaper/ no more bad news today.

[tonylemesmer]

music-map.com is a wonderful music discovery tool I still use from time to time. Not just listing similarity but also weighted similarity. Its a fun tool!

[0] https://www.music-map.com/

[trinsic2]

We get what we invest in. My feeling is there are other services to invest in like Bandcamp where at least you get an option to download a copy of the music. If people invest in Spotify with out thinking about the consequences then the the world we live in is exactly what we deserve. This same thing is happening with other form of art. Until people start making conscious decisions for world they want to create, the dark times will prevail.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"There's this whole world where people exist just to show up in the middle and take a big chunk of the money from something they had no part in creating."

This world is called "Silicon Valley"

Using a middleman, a so-called "tech" company, is not the same as trading music peer-to-peer

Historically, before the public internet, we traded music in-person or via postal mail

When I first accessed Oink I looked for the type of stuff that I liked to trade before the public internet existed: live, rare and unreleased material, e.g., outtakes. Old music

It passed the test. It was there

Today, there are bits and pieces of this stuff on YouTube but it's not the same

For this type of material, Spotify is a joke

This article should have discussed user-controlled peer-to-peer networking versus so-called "tech" company middleman

[thirtygeo]

"(I’ve got a song still stuck in my head from a Canadian indie band that made its way onto my iPod via via and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band. I love this that I’ve never found them!)"

Try the HN hive mind! Can you remember a year, +/-?

I'm hoping it will turn out to be Metric or The Murder Plans or The Constantines or.... Some other great 2000s Canadian indie act I can bond with a stranger over :D

[devonsolomon]

I probably should have just included it in the post, because now I’m replying the same thing hoping someone finds it…

I don’t think it’s BSS unless there are EPs from before what’s on Spotify. It was more punk rock than BSS, I think.

From the other comment TLDR… Male singer; Something like Blockparty/ TV on The Radio, song lyric was (maybe) something about throwing away your newspaper / no bad news today

[thirtygeo]

New Pornographers - The Fake Headlines?

"I wrote the news today in a tent outside the midway rides. And as my money flew, singing to their pockets, You could only know your shame knowing what the good ones do."

[devonsolomon]

Not it unfortunately.

[wk_end]

The Constantines are amazing!

[thirtygeo]

They once asked me if they could buy mushrooms from me, at a gig they played for a friend's art night.. I was not able to help them out

[_whiteCaps_]

My bet is Broken Social Scene.

[foco_tubi]

Either BSS or one of the plethora of related bands

[pjc50]

I've had an essay brewing in my head with the title "special internet for cool people", about the greatness of this era and why it's so difficult to bring back. TLDR that the gatekeeping was actually essential; piracy stops working once everybody does it.

[marysol5]

Have you thought about sharing Spotify playlists with your friends?

I mean you can find other peoples shared playlists too. You have more ability to do what you describe now, than you did then

[21asdffdsa12]

People like you where so important as discovery medium - especially when they where amplifiers - for example creating soundtracks for movies.

[ubermonkey]

>My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.

I feel that for sure, but as a kid who grew up in the rural US South, the fact that as a middle-aged person I can read a mention of some random act and listen to it right now is still a staggeringly great experience.

We mostly discover new music from about 15 to 25 or 30, right? It's pretty normal for that to slow down as the concerns of adulthood kinda get in the way of keeping up with whomever is hot now.

Then I subscribed to AppleMusic, and I did so almost exclusively to avoid having to cable-sync music anymore. Turns out, my wife was just using a free Spotify account instead of downloading music to her phone b/c she saw it as too much hassle, and she wasn't wrong. The modest monthly fee was, to me, a way to buy a sync-free existence.

But then the whole "all you can eat" thing hit, and the way it hit the most was in encouraging me to listen widely again. I read a profile of Phoebe Bridgers early in the pandemic, for example. I'm a middle-aged dude, so I'm absolutely not her core demo. I read it b/c it was in The New Yorker, and generally those profiles are worth reading even if you have no idea who the person is, and no real connection to their work. But the author made her work sound interesting.

If it had been twenty years prior, I might've thought "huh, I should check her out," and then forgotten about it. If I was REALLY motivated I'd have put a note in my Palm Pilot that I'd probably neglect to consult the next time I was in a record store. But because it was 2020, I could just pull up her album on my phone and listen as soon as I finished the profile.

That's AMAZING.

>I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums,

I am 100% an album bigot. I admit that sometimes when driving, when I know I won't be able to curate actively, I may ask my phone to play a "station" based on a song whose vibe I like in that moment. This, too, has lead to discovery, but and it usually works at least ok for keeping my ears happy.

But at home, doing intentional listening? It's albums.

>I bought a record player as my protest

I'm 56. I feel like, most of the time in the US, people who were a couple years older than I am DEFINITELY had records growing up, and people who were a couple years younger ABSOLUTELY DID NOT. (There's weight on the scale either way for the presence of music-fan parents or hip older siblings.)

I didn't. When I first heard a song I definitely wanted to have, it was about 1982, and I bought it on a cassette. By the mid-80s when I was well into my teens, CD was already on the horizon and getting cheaper fast, so I bought cassettes sparingly -- I didn't want to buy "The Queen is Dead" on cassette and then have to REbuy on CD a few years later.

CD had completely taken over my music by 1988 or 1989.

But then the dot-com crash happened, and money was TIGHT. A former roommate had abandoned a turntable at my house. Thrift shops had records for like $1 or $2. My girlfriend (who is now my wife) could make a pretty great Saturday afternoon out of cheap tacos and a $5 budget at the used record store.

Now, if I buy physical music, it's probably on vinyl. It doesn't sound better than hi-res digital or CD, but it's more FUN to pull out a record and drop the needle. It's more intentional. And while they're harder to find now than they were 20 years ago, used record bins still have treasures.

[myself248]

> We mostly discover new music from about 15 to 25 or 30, right? It's pretty normal for that to slow down as the concerns of adulthood kinda get in the way of keeping up with whomever is hot now.

Maybe, I guess? I still listen to some of the stuff from that era, but I've gotten wonderfully addicted to a music trivia game called Whatsamusic, which introduces me to a ton of music played by whoever's in the round. But only 30 seconds at a time (it's fairly fast-paced), so when I hear something that's intriguing enough to want to hear the rest of the track, I go add it to a "check this out later" playlist elsewhere. (I could also bookmark it in the game.)

My tastes have exploded in the 2 years since I found the game. There's so much good stuff out there! And playing with hosts that pick good themes ("Songs that're a good source of protein" was a recent favorite. The first play was "Maneater" and it went downhill from there.), you can't help but find more.

[crazygringo]

> and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects.

You must not be using Spotify the way I do.

I access my friends' playlists and they access mine. Spotify lets you do exactly what you're describing, only faster and easier.

For a lot of people, they use Spotify specifically because of the network effects, because that's where people can find their playlists. Because everyone's culturally bought-in to the idea that Spotify is where you share that.

> I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this

It literally was built for this. If you aren't using shared playlists, then you have only yourself to blame. Not Spotify.