> a proportion of the listeners don't recognize they are listening to slop
this is perhaps the crux of the matter!
Very few people in my social circle whose taste in music I share. The majority of them don't even have a "taste" and content with whatever their car-radio pumps out.
Does that drive me mad? Mildly.
Appreciating and recognizing great music is a deeply personal experience.
Like appreciating different culinary tastes that requires training and exposure (ideally from a young age), it's also hard work (the older and more settled our tastes get).
Most people are stupid. What an unexpected discovery! Considering the fact that the crux of the problem is that people love slop and always have, does the fact that slop has become AI-generated change anything?
Different topic: any recommended ways to search for new music? I usually just wait to somehow stumble upon something.
I think "stupid" may be overstating it a bit. I think it's more that people only have a limited mental bandwidth and can only focus on a limited amount of categories of life. Person A may think person B is stupid for not caring about the quality of background music. But person B might think person A is stupid for ordering a $5 glass of the house wine at a restaurant instead of some special French vintage. And person C might be aghast that that both A and B have standard factory tires on their cars instead of high performance low-profile racing tires.
I love reading up on my fav musicians and have a listen at what their influences are and/or other fans recommend.
Or, in 2012, I torrented the then whole discog of a British duo called Autechre that I liked a track from on the soundtrack of the film 'Pi'.
12 years later, I have several vinyls, bought every release on multiple [streaming] services/shops, have been to one concert in '16... still cannot get enough and listen to their new releases all the time.
Funny to think about it this way, how a handful of beats in a movie can open you up to a world unseen, just gotta follow the tracks...
That one is my favorite, but there are lots of similar online radio stations out there that post track-lists of the sets. I use them for music discovery and I like it a lot. I find shows by people I like, listen regularly, when I hear things that jump out at me I'll look at the track-list and make notes, go to discogs, bandcamp, find other artists on the same label that released the thing I went searching for. So semi passively listening to a dj set and taking occasional notes leads to hours of exploration and frequent discoveries.
rateyourmusic.com has great yearly charts and genre charts and the best granular genre tags on the internet. If you like an album or artist, going through the charts related to their genre tags very often finds me a lot of great music.
The second thing that has proven indispensable for me are recommendations from "peers" on private music torrent trackers. I found a few people where I know that if they recommend something, even if it's a genre I don't listen to frequently, chances are I will like this as well. This spawned a lot of fun music adventures.
I listen to radio quite a lot. There are commercial-free stations that play whatever they believe is good music.
My favourites are:
- Concertzender and all its theme channels. The main channel has a lot of classical during the day, but jazz, world music and electronic in the evening/weekend. I got deep into folk music thanks to their music. On Sunday evening there is even two hours with techno and adjecent music. Discovered a lot through that as well. The station is Dutch, but talk is minimal.
- FIP. A bit more main stream music, but also unexpected songs and generally very enjoyable programming. It's in French, but talk is usually minimal as well.
Tracking down people involved in an album is a good one for me. Find the producer of a favorite tune and search out more of their work, or check if the bassist plays in other bands or has a solo project. Lots of fun and sometimes unexpected results.
> Most people are stupid. What an unexpected discovery
seems a very reductionist take of what I actually said. but let me phrase it better using this request of yours:
> Different topic: any recommended ways to search for new music?
it's not different but directly related to my point:
The "pain" and boredom, of sitting through countless hours of "what looks like slop", is what it takes to appreciate music.
I rarely "stumble" over great new content by accident, either because of a friend (or an algorithm) recommending it. It's hard work learning to love music. This work is exactly what makes it special. I wouldn't feel comfortable using the word "love" in the same sentence as "music" if it wasn't also a massive pain.
Maybe I'm old but I recall times when I dedicated entire Saturday mornings going on a "hunt" at HMV, browsing for what was new.
Even I found something promising I still wasn't in love. Often realized there was only 2 out of 16 songs I really wanted to hear. But the 2 songs initially interesting quickly turn out to be short affairs. It's the 14 other tunes that require multiple listens that I end up appreciating for decades.
Streaming digital media changed that "hunt", for better or worse. The pain is still there. What changed is everyone thinking all good music must come not only gratis but also "effortless". Some app or magic gadget that will one day take the pain out of finding good content. If it only knows my taste well enough. It doesn't work like that.
Albert Camus, "we gotta imagine Sisyphus happy" and all that.
>I rarely "stumble" over great new content by accident, either because of a friend (or an algorithm) recommending it.
It's a bit funny because I feel that might be the difference between a child and an adult and how they consume content. or perhaps the difference between pre-internet and post internet.
Children do indeed stereotypically "watch anything you put in front of them". But they will still develop favorites and find things they dont like. For my millenial generation, Something like Spongebob wasn't just something that stuck because of the nostalgia of 10 year olds. The humor was simply very witty or very surreal, or just very funnny and managed to even scale to adult humor you'd miss until you re-watched it later (I'll spare you the entire video essay of "there will Never Ever be another cartoon like Spongebob Squarepants")
But all that shifted in adulthood. I'm anenthusiast who will keep tabs on media news, vibes of the people on social media and what they find, group to like-minded friends who give recommendaions, etc. The last time I simply "stumbled" into some unexpected piece of media was... well, kind of Puss and Boots 2. But that was simply because I liked the first film and then the sequel decided to deliver one of the best, tightly paced stories in over 15 years. Before that would have probably been Roblox way back in 2010, over a decade before it became this empire of gaming (and the talk of child exploitation and harassment).
>Streaming digital media changed that "hunt", for better or worse. The pain is still there. What changed is everyone thinking all good music must come not only gratis but also "effortless". Some app or magic gadget that will one day take the pain out of finding good content. If it only knows my taste well enough. It doesn't work like that.
indeed. I mostly agree and have some small reservations. All that old media was already vetted through multiple rounds of pitches and had some budget thrown at it for it to launch. The internet definitely changed that aspect to where I could technically pick up Audacity today and publish a song on Spotify next week. It truly is "effortless" in that sense if shipping is your goal.
But I think any craftman in any domain knows that there's a difference between shipping something and shipping a GOOD something. That's something many would never understand, as they never put that kind of effort into something. Or maybe understand in one industry but gets blinded by when they look at another.
>Considering the fact that the crux of the problem is that people love slop and always have, does the fact that slop has become AI-generated change anything?
It changes everything. "Sellouts" are still humans. AI isn't. This is just going to further spiral the idea of coporate needing human labor, which will cause extremely large questions about society that no one in power wants to answer.
“The majority of them don’t even have taste” - by your definition of taste perhaps? :-) just sounds condescending - taste is whatever they like, not what you decide is good to like.
Taste is preferring something over something else. If they listen to any music without any preference (but I doubt it), they effectively do not have a taste.
this is perhaps the crux of the matter!
Very few people in my social circle whose taste in music I share. The majority of them don't even have a "taste" and content with whatever their car-radio pumps out.
Does that drive me mad? Mildly.
Appreciating and recognizing great music is a deeply personal experience.
Like appreciating different culinary tastes that requires training and exposure (ideally from a young age), it's also hard work (the older and more settled our tastes get).