Interesting, but I wonder if further analysis would reveal sub-populations of people with very different patterns. I write about music and spend a lot of time on line with fellow writers as well as streamers and musicians. They are all over the map in age, but one thing is clear: a lot of us in our 50s and 60s are listening mostly to new music. These days I would say 95% of my listening time is on artists I had not heard of 10 years ago. My old, cherished vinyl collection hasn't been touched for a long time, though I will stream an old favorite now and then if it is relevant to a story I am writing. Is it possible that people who are more engaged with music than just passively listening are also more likely to seek out new stuff? That would be an interesting analysis.
I wanted to express my agreement that musical engagement aside from passive listening (reviewing, discussing, building compilations a'la Nick Hornby) created in me a great deal more adventurous listening, than just listening for pleasure.
Like the author (but a lot older) I won an iPod from work, and while I was still listening to new music, this ability to have so much music anywhere I went, and the curation of what I would put on that 80gigs, restarted a much more engaged time. As the 2000s progressed and social media (from chat groups around since the early 90s to My Space to the horrors of Facebook) provided opportunity to engage others and socialize musical taste in a way that I'd missed since college (85-89) it blew up my listening and vastly expanded my breadth of artists and styles. This continued for a decade or so... but gradually faded.
Then certain websites dedicated to '80s alternative and my formative HS/college days connected me again with the cohort that, like me, shared a passion for that era... and while not new music, much of what I learned was new to me (never heard of the Close Lobsters or The Mock Turtles when I was young, but totally love them now).
This spurred me back to spending time with music that continues to this day... making playlists (for myself or my wife) and diving in deeply to artists catalogs in a way I'd onliy skimmed before (spending weeks with the albums of JAMC before seeing them in concert gave me an entirely new perspective on them). But it still goes in waves. I'll go weeks listening to the standards (My personal Top 1000 Songs of the '80s), only to find a conversation with my wife or an odd reference sending me into new spaces and new sounds.
But it is always some sort of social or activity based engagement that pushes me to more deep and adventurous listening. It is not natural... it is work... but work I generally love.
re: Band-Maid... I will say that that I dig their songs being concise, blistering and to the point. Shredding often (nearly always?) overstays its welcome... but these songs and solos are tight... actually leave you wanting more. Nice to hear metal that isn't an endurance test for the listener.
Not into metal, but that was fun. Great energy and skill... I just find metal never reaches me emotionally. I can have an intellectual fascination with the skill and virtuosity, but it is with a detachment of appreciating a great feat of engineering. Impressive as the Golden Gate bridge is, I'm not moved by it.
(Also, would be interested to get your take on the difference between "hard rock" and "metal"... the former I love, the latter... not so much.)
I take the genre definitions with more than a grain of salt. To me, Metal is a subcategory of Rock. Metal is more structured, and is heavily influenced by classical music--hence the emphasis on virtuosity. The bar to being credible as a classical musician is extremely high, while the bar to being successful in rock is pretty low. Springsteen can barely play the guitar but his songwriting appeals to a lot of people. Metal is more like classical in that way. Personally, I find some of the long technical excursions thrilling, and if well written they can be very emotional. We agree on shredding for its own sake--I find it boring, and worse than boring if if doesn't serve the song.
No question that the internet and online interactions have made huge changes to the way we can and do engage with, well, just about anything! For me the huge breakthrough was discovering the ocean of popular music outside the US/UK market which most of us grew up thinking of as the entire musical universe. Now I would say 90% of the music I listen to (and write about) comes from other parts of the world. But as you said, it takes work. Work I find very worthwhile!
I think that would be a great analysis!... My wife and I certainly have a comfort zone but it kind of centers around the 90's rather than the era we graduated HS (77-79). I think maybe because it was when we started raising our kids and there was always music in the house. That being said we also seek out "newer" music... not always cutting edge new but definitely outside our comfort zone. Coldplay, Walk off the Earth, Cold War Kids, Death Cab for Cutie and similiar... we have also always had a very good stereo system in the house and it gets used... I'll stop short of saying "audiophile" as I detest the term lol
I have a friend who is an entrepreneur. He is always looking for the next big thing. But he told me flat out "I don't listen to any music that came out after my 20's." I don't even know how to make sense of that disparity. Meanwhile, your experience has parallels with mine---my son and I introduce each other to new stuff all the time!
At 50, I find myself seeking out new and novel listening experiences more than ever and my music collection grows by leaps and bounds. I've tried to understand why I seem to buck the trend and all I can think of is that I got into college radio back in high school. The local college had a station and it expanded my musical world tremendously. I enrolled there and joined the station as a DJ, which only increased my hunger to know more about every artist and genre. To this day, I still feel that same joy in discovery and there's barely a genre that doesn't hold some interest for me. Take from that what you will!
this made me think about how younger generations are socialized into a digital music world where skipping and playlists are normalized, whereas Gen X, Millennials, and older had t a more physical relationship with music and word of mouth was so much more part of how we learned about music. There was a real desire to find something new, know it first, and share it first, With everything available there's this idea that there's a better song somewhere so truly listening doesn't happen as deeply
Thanks for the interesting article, Daniel. It's curious how different listening patterns can be. I'm 37 and also work as a software developer, where I listen to a fair share of music during work. Far be it from me to think that I do not have a musical comfort zone, but for me, Spotify's recommendation engine uncovered a wealth of music I would otherwise never have encountered. Apart from that I regularly force myself to listen to music from critic's best-of lists, in order to broaden my perspective. I'd like to think that I have what I would call a 'flat' listening profile - lots of plays, but distributed over a large number of different artists and tracks - compared to a 'peaky' listening profile, where there are a number of outliers that get disproportionately more listens than everything else. My teenage daughter, for instance, has one of those.
I have a last.fm account where I can look back at my music consumption of the last circa 20 years. I recommend everyone who loves data and statistics to create one as well.
I would love to know if people who listen to music exclusively on physical media and non-streaming digital music players are more or less adventurous than streamers, but obviously there's no [simple] way to find out.
There's some interesting data here, to be sure, but I am not sure I can agree with the conclusions. For starters, I would not characterize Accuradio as "Pandora's channels and Spotify's editorial playlist curation had a baby." Lower weekly average listening time by teenagers is just as likely related to Accuradio being a legacy streaming platform. I would be interested in knowing what percentage of total listeners are under 29. Accuradio doesn't currently support a mobile client for Android. Per the Playstore the mobile client is available only on "an older version of Android" which might further skew overall listenship to older, office workers listening via a browser. I noticed that track skipping was not possible on an Edge browser (it did work in Chrome) which could easily further reduce skip-through rates for older cohorts. Seems like data that contradicted the initial hypothesis, whether it was higher skip rates by young people, higher like rates by young people were always explained away in support of the initial hypothesis. I'm not convinced I could draw the same conclusions based on what I see here.
My wife and I are probably outside the norm... at 64 and 65 we go to at least 7-8 concerts a year including at least one that we travel pretty far for. (Red Rocks this year) Our casual listening is centered around the 90's far more than the 70's and 80's we grew up in. We actively seek out new music also, while redicovering some older musicians that we didn't necessraily care for in our youth. (Van Morrison, Peter Gabriel, Stones etc) Recent concerts. JJ Gray/Mofro, Switchfoot (2x), BHTM with Wallflowers (redRocks), Joe Bonamassa, Seether, Collective Soul, 3DD, Sammy Hagar, Walk Off The Earth, Lindsey Stirling, Smashing Pumpkins (2x) .... this year we are cutting back some... just saw the new LZ movie which was great... although we didn't run home and play Stairway to Heaven lol... we have ticks to ColdPlay and still planning after that.
This "hardened Gen-Xer" begrudgingly uses Spotify for the purpose of finding new (or new to me) music, but I *never* use playlists except for ones I create on my own. I usually self-DJ or listen to whole albums. But I'm also an amateur musician so I may be predisposed to seeking out different sounds, exploring back catalogs, finding out what's new etc. If my "wrapped" is correct (I have questions...) I listened to more than 1000 different artists last year? So many rabbit holes...
Hardened Gen-Xer here, but on Apple Music, not spotify... mainly because I can upload my entire personal collection and listen to that via streaming, rather than listen to what Apple offers. I'm not a musician, though. My Apple Replay 2024 showed 521 different artists, down from a high of 2022 and 917 artists. I know the past couple of years I've had less rabbit holes, but they've been deeper rabbit holes. Spending longer on the catalog of a band, rather than jumping to other artists. Not sure why, but it is often driven by the concerts I'm going to. l
This is very interesting to me. I’m 45 and while I do have some usual favorites, I am always seeking out new and interesting music. I wonder if being musical and playing instruments since childhood plays into that at all. I can’t imagine not listening to new things.
I have always been the gormand, not the gormet. I love listening to music and getting deeply into it, but I couldn't play an instrument or read sheet music to save my life. I've always been jealous of people who can speak the musical language. I can listen and understand and even appreciate, but I can't speak it... I can't make music and am in awe of those who can. I do wonder how much music, like sports, is shaped by what you can play. I am much more engaged in being the audience for sports I've actually played (however badly). Is that the same for musicians?
Interesting, but I wonder if further analysis would reveal sub-populations of people with very different patterns. I write about music and spend a lot of time on line with fellow writers as well as streamers and musicians. They are all over the map in age, but one thing is clear: a lot of us in our 50s and 60s are listening mostly to new music. These days I would say 95% of my listening time is on artists I had not heard of 10 years ago. My old, cherished vinyl collection hasn't been touched for a long time, though I will stream an old favorite now and then if it is relevant to a story I am writing. Is it possible that people who are more engaged with music than just passively listening are also more likely to seek out new stuff? That would be an interesting analysis.
I wanted to express my agreement that musical engagement aside from passive listening (reviewing, discussing, building compilations a'la Nick Hornby) created in me a great deal more adventurous listening, than just listening for pleasure.
Like the author (but a lot older) I won an iPod from work, and while I was still listening to new music, this ability to have so much music anywhere I went, and the curation of what I would put on that 80gigs, restarted a much more engaged time. As the 2000s progressed and social media (from chat groups around since the early 90s to My Space to the horrors of Facebook) provided opportunity to engage others and socialize musical taste in a way that I'd missed since college (85-89) it blew up my listening and vastly expanded my breadth of artists and styles. This continued for a decade or so... but gradually faded.
Then certain websites dedicated to '80s alternative and my formative HS/college days connected me again with the cohort that, like me, shared a passion for that era... and while not new music, much of what I learned was new to me (never heard of the Close Lobsters or The Mock Turtles when I was young, but totally love them now).
This spurred me back to spending time with music that continues to this day... making playlists (for myself or my wife) and diving in deeply to artists catalogs in a way I'd onliy skimmed before (spending weeks with the albums of JAMC before seeing them in concert gave me an entirely new perspective on them). But it still goes in waves. I'll go weeks listening to the standards (My personal Top 1000 Songs of the '80s), only to find a conversation with my wife or an odd reference sending me into new spaces and new sounds.
But it is always some sort of social or activity based engagement that pushes me to more deep and adventurous listening. It is not natural... it is work... but work I generally love.
If you want to check out one of my prize discoveries, here is a review: https://zapatosjam.substack.com/p/some-say-they-are-saving-rock-n-roll
re: Band-Maid... I will say that that I dig their songs being concise, blistering and to the point. Shredding often (nearly always?) overstays its welcome... but these songs and solos are tight... actually leave you wanting more. Nice to hear metal that isn't an endurance test for the listener.
Not into metal, but that was fun. Great energy and skill... I just find metal never reaches me emotionally. I can have an intellectual fascination with the skill and virtuosity, but it is with a detachment of appreciating a great feat of engineering. Impressive as the Golden Gate bridge is, I'm not moved by it.
(Also, would be interested to get your take on the difference between "hard rock" and "metal"... the former I love, the latter... not so much.)
I take the genre definitions with more than a grain of salt. To me, Metal is a subcategory of Rock. Metal is more structured, and is heavily influenced by classical music--hence the emphasis on virtuosity. The bar to being credible as a classical musician is extremely high, while the bar to being successful in rock is pretty low. Springsteen can barely play the guitar but his songwriting appeals to a lot of people. Metal is more like classical in that way. Personally, I find some of the long technical excursions thrilling, and if well written they can be very emotional. We agree on shredding for its own sake--I find it boring, and worse than boring if if doesn't serve the song.
No question that the internet and online interactions have made huge changes to the way we can and do engage with, well, just about anything! For me the huge breakthrough was discovering the ocean of popular music outside the US/UK market which most of us grew up thinking of as the entire musical universe. Now I would say 90% of the music I listen to (and write about) comes from other parts of the world. But as you said, it takes work. Work I find very worthwhile!
I think that would be a great analysis!... My wife and I certainly have a comfort zone but it kind of centers around the 90's rather than the era we graduated HS (77-79). I think maybe because it was when we started raising our kids and there was always music in the house. That being said we also seek out "newer" music... not always cutting edge new but definitely outside our comfort zone. Coldplay, Walk off the Earth, Cold War Kids, Death Cab for Cutie and similiar... we have also always had a very good stereo system in the house and it gets used... I'll stop short of saying "audiophile" as I detest the term lol
I have a friend who is an entrepreneur. He is always looking for the next big thing. But he told me flat out "I don't listen to any music that came out after my 20's." I don't even know how to make sense of that disparity. Meanwhile, your experience has parallels with mine---my son and I introduce each other to new stuff all the time!
At 50, I find myself seeking out new and novel listening experiences more than ever and my music collection grows by leaps and bounds. I've tried to understand why I seem to buck the trend and all I can think of is that I got into college radio back in high school. The local college had a station and it expanded my musical world tremendously. I enrolled there and joined the station as a DJ, which only increased my hunger to know more about every artist and genre. To this day, I still feel that same joy in discovery and there's barely a genre that doesn't hold some interest for me. Take from that what you will!
this made me think about how younger generations are socialized into a digital music world where skipping and playlists are normalized, whereas Gen X, Millennials, and older had t a more physical relationship with music and word of mouth was so much more part of how we learned about music. There was a real desire to find something new, know it first, and share it first, With everything available there's this idea that there's a better song somewhere so truly listening doesn't happen as deeply
Thanks for the interesting article, Daniel. It's curious how different listening patterns can be. I'm 37 and also work as a software developer, where I listen to a fair share of music during work. Far be it from me to think that I do not have a musical comfort zone, but for me, Spotify's recommendation engine uncovered a wealth of music I would otherwise never have encountered. Apart from that I regularly force myself to listen to music from critic's best-of lists, in order to broaden my perspective. I'd like to think that I have what I would call a 'flat' listening profile - lots of plays, but distributed over a large number of different artists and tracks - compared to a 'peaky' listening profile, where there are a number of outliers that get disproportionately more listens than everything else. My teenage daughter, for instance, has one of those.
I have a last.fm account where I can look back at my music consumption of the last circa 20 years. I recommend everyone who loves data and statistics to create one as well.
I would love to know if people who listen to music exclusively on physical media and non-streaming digital music players are more or less adventurous than streamers, but obviously there's no [simple] way to find out.
There's some interesting data here, to be sure, but I am not sure I can agree with the conclusions. For starters, I would not characterize Accuradio as "Pandora's channels and Spotify's editorial playlist curation had a baby." Lower weekly average listening time by teenagers is just as likely related to Accuradio being a legacy streaming platform. I would be interested in knowing what percentage of total listeners are under 29. Accuradio doesn't currently support a mobile client for Android. Per the Playstore the mobile client is available only on "an older version of Android" which might further skew overall listenship to older, office workers listening via a browser. I noticed that track skipping was not possible on an Edge browser (it did work in Chrome) which could easily further reduce skip-through rates for older cohorts. Seems like data that contradicted the initial hypothesis, whether it was higher skip rates by young people, higher like rates by young people were always explained away in support of the initial hypothesis. I'm not convinced I could draw the same conclusions based on what I see here.
My wife and I are probably outside the norm... at 64 and 65 we go to at least 7-8 concerts a year including at least one that we travel pretty far for. (Red Rocks this year) Our casual listening is centered around the 90's far more than the 70's and 80's we grew up in. We actively seek out new music also, while redicovering some older musicians that we didn't necessraily care for in our youth. (Van Morrison, Peter Gabriel, Stones etc) Recent concerts. JJ Gray/Mofro, Switchfoot (2x), BHTM with Wallflowers (redRocks), Joe Bonamassa, Seether, Collective Soul, 3DD, Sammy Hagar, Walk Off The Earth, Lindsey Stirling, Smashing Pumpkins (2x) .... this year we are cutting back some... just saw the new LZ movie which was great... although we didn't run home and play Stairway to Heaven lol... we have ticks to ColdPlay and still planning after that.
I discovered JJ Gray and Mofro several years ago and wondered why I (nor any of my friends) had not discovered them much sooner!??
Now, JJ seems to be on all of our playlists!
There's much more out there yet to be discovered... just where do you look?
AI generated "suggestions" don't work, atleast not for me, because it cannot understand emotion, ie, the songs that "make you feel."
It's a lot of hit and miss using streaming services as they only suggest "similar" songs.
Good luck on your quests everyone.
This "hardened Gen-Xer" begrudgingly uses Spotify for the purpose of finding new (or new to me) music, but I *never* use playlists except for ones I create on my own. I usually self-DJ or listen to whole albums. But I'm also an amateur musician so I may be predisposed to seeking out different sounds, exploring back catalogs, finding out what's new etc. If my "wrapped" is correct (I have questions...) I listened to more than 1000 different artists last year? So many rabbit holes...
Hardened Gen-Xer here, but on Apple Music, not spotify... mainly because I can upload my entire personal collection and listen to that via streaming, rather than listen to what Apple offers. I'm not a musician, though. My Apple Replay 2024 showed 521 different artists, down from a high of 2022 and 917 artists. I know the past couple of years I've had less rabbit holes, but they've been deeper rabbit holes. Spending longer on the catalog of a band, rather than jumping to other artists. Not sure why, but it is often driven by the concerts I'm going to. l
'Wrapped'. Yes. We all have questions. 😁
Enjoyed this, thanks for sharing!
Here is the translatiion:
https://substack.com/profile/172879528-salvador-lorca/note/c-92203926
I’m obsessed with listening habits, too! Amazing insights!
My music taste have become more minimal, more rhythmic then melodic. And darker
This is very interesting to me. I’m 45 and while I do have some usual favorites, I am always seeking out new and interesting music. I wonder if being musical and playing instruments since childhood plays into that at all. I can’t imagine not listening to new things.
I have always been the gormand, not the gormet. I love listening to music and getting deeply into it, but I couldn't play an instrument or read sheet music to save my life. I've always been jealous of people who can speak the musical language. I can listen and understand and even appreciate, but I can't speak it... I can't make music and am in awe of those who can. I do wonder how much music, like sports, is shaped by what you can play. I am much more engaged in being the audience for sports I've actually played (however badly). Is that the same for musicians?
Great read! I can relate very well to this.