testing the staying power - Music - Forums : Best Ever Albums

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Gender: Female
Age: 38

dihansse wrote:

I cannot set aside my general feeling that it's become more and more difficult to make really original music because everything's been done already even when you go to the extremes: louder, harder, faster, softer (a nuisance in music these days), more experimental to even atonal, etc. So although I like a lot of the new bands/albums these days it doesn't happen often anymore that I'm really blown away by new albums (or live concerts by newer artists): a feeling that I often see returning in the comments of Seth on this site.

if you're just looking in familiar rock song territory of course that's going to happen. music is way bigger than that though and there are people pushing things forward into fresh territory and offering new experiences. but the thing is is that nobody is just looking for a new experience, they're looking for ones that they like. which is fair! but that means that personal taste cannot be an indicator of whether music as a whole is continuing to offer new experiences. I'm lucky right now, there's a lot of activity with that happening in areas I'm interested in. Eventually this will probably dry up, and maybe my interests will not expand into any of the other different ways people go about pushing things forward. I'm kind of counting on it actually so that I can spend more time exploring the past more! but that won't mean that the contemporary music doesn't have anything new to it, it'll just be that I don't care about it.

like this Ben Vida album on my 2014 list, it was written as weird experimental poetry, just phonemes put on the page with cool typography. these are then used as scores for small pieces performed by vocalists, and fed into elaborate modular synthesizer systems with the input of the voice triggering the output. And it offers an experience that is very specific and peculiar, like the grammar of it feels somewhat related to some less accessible stuff made by Vida and others, but there's like a directness to it that gives it access to expressing things that I have not heard in previous stuff. everything has not been done.

if you're not interested in what's going on right now, that's fair. but it also means you are unqualified to talk about it's merits or lack thereof.

craola
crayon master

Location: pdx

Tap wrote:

if you're not interested in what's going on right now, that's fair. but it also means you are unqualified to talk about it's merits or lack thereof.

i have to agree with this. i have plenty of friends that complain on the state of music today, but when i recommend them music from a variety of scenes that i find new and exciting, they've not heard any of it. still, they revert to backhanding the times as redundant and unspectacular. it baffles me a bit.

in fairness, there is so much access to so many artists that it can be overwhelming, and if you're relying on mainstream outlets for recommendations, you're likely going to be disappointed.

i frequently stumble on something or another on bandcamp that blows me out of the water but has absolutely no traction (three or four downloads, no press, etc.) the music industry has blow'd up. it's tedious sometimes to find new things you like. but i think there's usually something there. there's just so much great music. so many creative people. and it's easier and more affordable than ever to produce and release the goodies.
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RoundTheBend
I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

dihansse wrote:

sethmadsen wrote:

dihansse, is that the streaming service? That's cool they kept that idea alive.

Apple Music as a streaming service indeed still has many of the features of the old itunes and I keep on using it although sometimes they're a bit of a nuisance: ex they still support ratings on songs except you can't see them anymore on iphones/ipads, only on a computer while this is for me an essential feature to make my playlists. So when I listen to tracks on the train or in the car I can't see or change the scores any more.

I'm however still holding on to Apple because it still offers me a combination of three things; my old CD collection I imported on Itunes, albums/tracks I bought on Itunes in the past and now also tracks that I put in my playlist via Apple Music, the streaming service and sometimes it's difficult to separate the three with only the annoyance that albums I put in my playlist are from time to time withdrawn from Apple Music (recently Teenage Snuff Film from Roland S. Howard).

When I'm looking for albums I generally find about 99% of them on Apple Music. When I search them on Spotify I usually don't find them either so I presume they have about the same catalogue. Sometimes I do find those albums missing in Apple music on Itunes where you can still buy music per piece. Generally I never do that anymore and if I want to listen to an album I generally look for them on Youtube where I generally do find them. Funilly enough I have this mostly with prog albums of the seventies genre Caravan, King Crimson and the likes.

When I make a statistic and if I can believe Apple at the moment I have:
- 17.335 tracks which are matched which should mean I have Imported them from my own CD's but for which Apple was able to match them with their own catalogue
- 3.972 tracks which are uploaded: this should mean tracks I uploaded from CD's but for which Apple wasn't capable of matching them with their own catalogue
- 12.250 tracks I have bought (via Itunes)
- 4.250 tracks I have put in my playlist via Apple Music

Maybe a long answer to your short question Seth but I just wanted to do this so I found this to be a good occasion Cool

Thanks actually. I'm still debating on staying with Spotify or not. I downloaded Apple music to my phone and read an interesting article where Apple might become a legit music company (ironic given the history, right) in the sense that it's "marketplace" actually pays musicians a decent cut (I can't remember what, but WAY more than any other streaming service).

But then I forgot my login info and gave up... haha. I have like 90GB (12k songs?) in iTunes still. Do you have to pay to make that available on the cloud? I guess I can find out myself.

I've just put it off because Spotify accomplishes 90% of what I want (I have a beef with their quality sometimes... even as a premium member playing it from my computer (no limitation on bandwidth) I get mediocre quality compared to my rip to iTunes. BUT... I now longer spend hours managing my music.

Anyway... glad that works out for you so well!

RoundTheBend
I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

craola wrote:

i have to agree with this. i have plenty of friends that complain on the state of music today, but when i recommend them music from a variety of scenes that i find new and exciting, they've not heard any of it. still, they revert to backhanding the times as redundant and unspectacular. it baffles me a bit.

in fairness, there is so much access to so many artists that it can be overwhelming, and if you're relying on mainstream outlets for recommendations, you're likely going to be disappointed.

i frequently stumble on something or another on bandcamp that blows me out of the water but has absolutely no traction (three or four downloads, no press, etc.) the music industry has blow'd up. it's tedious sometimes to find new things you like. but i think there's usually something there. there's just so much great music. so many creative people. and it's easier and more affordable than ever to produce and release the goodies.

I'm totally guilty of this. I mean I've probably listened to 400 albums in the 2010s... but still have that ill informed opinion. I suppose I'm not looking in the right place.

Bandcamp and soundcloud seem so tidious... it feels like I rarely find anything of interest there... but then again neither do I anywhere else.

I guess I have these two questions for the both of you:

1) How much time do you have to invest before you find something interesting?
2) Do you find more interesting things faster due to "knowing where to look now"?

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Gender: Female
Age: 38

I should note that I've heard plenty of stuff from the 2010s, but I don't think I'd be in the position to make any claims about the state of music as a whole being weak if none of the things I heard did it for me, because there are plenty of things outside of my scope of interest. Like I don't think it's possible to have a position of authority like that, there's just too much going on. But since I do know there are interesting things going on in my scope of interest, I will always push back hard on claims that there is nothing new under the sun, because that is a quote from the old testament. people have been wrong about that shit for thousands of years, it's ridiculous.

but yeah now I'm at the point where I can easily find something in my interests, like even if you forget all of the things I know about right now and haven't gotten around to yet, bam lets do a fresh start. start the clock. load up bandcamp app, check the fan activity feed for user accounts that I follow. bam, I can see that Drew Daniel from Matmos bought this
http://trenteoiseaux.bandcamp.com/album...lie-origin I have no idea who or what this is but it's electroacoustic and this dude tends to know his stuff in that department. will this album change my life? probably not, tho it could, I have found albums of that calibur this way. but it will probably be interesting. that took like a minute.

edit: holy shit I scrolled down a little more and this thing Dan Snaith just bought sounds INCREDIBLE from just a snippet, I think some of you all might actually dig this one too
http://atomicolor.bandcamp.com/album/ps...ue-bater-a

RoundTheBend
I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

RE: Old Testament... hahahaa

Also that's cool man - so sounds like I need to spend more time building the right feeds and what have you instead of just randomly searching. I mean I guess what I'm asking is how did you know he was good or not? You stumbled upon him months/years ago, followed, and because you followed you know it's probably worthy of your time?

RoundTheBend
I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

Furthermore I usually try and stray away from authoritative stand points, but probably use the wrong semantics all the time. And then also furthermore, I get frustrated after 400 albums and really only 20 of them are amazing.

I also realize that's likely always been the case. I just didn't have access to 400 albums 20 years ago when I first really got into buying my own music. When you actually have to fork out $5 to $20 for an album, you start getting REAL selective.

The interwebs gone did done changed things. And I'm learning I guess.

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Gender: Female
Age: 38

building the feed on bandcamp took a bit, I had been using it for over a year just buying things that I'd heard about elsewhere. But I began to notice on album pages, they show the profile pics of people who bought the album, and I noticed I was seeing the same pics on things I was buying or interested in. so I realize eventually you can click on those pics, and it takes you to the user's fan page, where you can see everything they have bought, and if you have a bandcamp account, you can click follow on them. so now in the feed section on the bandcamp site, that gets populated with activity from users you follow. so over time I'd follow a bunch of accounts that I'd see frequently (which included musicians I've respected for a very long time like Daniel and Snaith, which is a nice little ego boost for sure), and now I have my feed page throwing out more music than I could ever keep up with. And a lot of it is stuff I don't really care about but it turns up some gems for sure.

RoundTheBend
I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

cool mate - thanks for the tip.

I mostly used it for local music I like... the Provo scene.... hahaha. Kind of laughable, but actually kind of growing and getting better and better.

When I originally searched by genre or what have you I did that for like 30 minutes and got bored of it and never came back.

TimeLion

Looking for innovation in the 2010s while restricting yourself to rock music is like looking for a serial killer while restricting yourself to bingo parlors.