Agree. And Roon helps with discovery. I find following artists the most useful: listen to a favorite artist, impressed by the bassist, what else has he done, who else has he played with, what else has those artists done. Easy, very useful, and open-ended because enough artists are open-minded and do a lot of different stuff.
Much more useful than the Genres. And I don’t want curators at Spotify, or the statistics of the mass market, to steer what I listen to.
A few years ago, Spotify published statistics on what their customers do, broken down by demographics, including age. They said that older people are less willing to take risks. By “take risks” they explicitly said they meant listening to the latest pop hit. What is adventurous about listening to Taylor Swift? That’s as conformist as it gets!
So true! IMO Taylor Swift or other mainstream pop artists like her have nothing to do with “modern” music. There’s nothing modern about the stuff these people release. As I pointed out above, “modern” means much more than “relatively recent”. As I see it, a modern artist is one trying to explore new unfamiliar paths…
Very interesting indeed. Made me think of the effect of streaming, actually equally restrictive and expansive. Restrictive because of what the video cited, i.e., quick listen to opening bars and if not liked, move on to something else, not giving the subtleties of music and your brain’s ability to appreciate it any time to work. Expansive because if one doesn’t do this, one can learn a world full of interesting new music and, at the same time, keep one’s brain alive with the ability to receive and process entirely varied phenomena. This was an excellent video–thanks for sharing.
Jim Heckman
I always appreciate music recommendations on this forum, and have gotten onto some very good music through it. So to toss in a recommendation: Emily Pinkerton’s album “Rounder Songs: An Appalachian Song Cycle for Voice, Banjo and NOW Ensemble”. I bought the CD, a little miffed at its 27 minute length and full price, but that melted upon hearing the music. The title subtext is descriptive, the ensemble being a sort of chamber group. And sound quality is good. Cheers, and keep those music suggestions coming.
Jim Heckman
While I completely agree that modern POP music is as bad as the video says (that is the story of the video anyway), modern music can be very nice. I buy a lot of modern music. The OP (or mods) should change the thread title even if the video title just says ‘music’, as if all music today is POP.
[quote=“Nyquist, post:24, topic:45655, full:true”]
… The majority of top 100 music of old times was as simplistic and bad as it is today but it simply has been forgotten, only the better stuff survives the passage of time… True, radio and MTV is terrible but that are not very good sources. There are thousands of Indie labels out there that don’t compete in the loudness war, that don’t let all the songs be written by two guys and that don’t produce everything to be flat and easily consumable…There is a lot more interesting music today then there was 30-40 years ago… Top 100 still is crap and allways will be crap but they all will be forgotten in 50 years, after all the guy is talking about the 60’s so put it in the right perspective.
Thanks Nyquist for these comments, I have subsampled it above, hoping not to alias them;-), for a few additional thoughts building on yours.
On the comparison to the “good old times of pop music”:
The overall quantity of music available today has certainly grown since production tools have been democratized and are much more easily accessible and way cheaper than they were back then when it was essentially a “pro” business. Not sure though that the genuinely good material grew in the same proportions.
The mere and even greater facility with which one accesses recorded material and reproduction means today, plays in favor of a diminishing exposure to live events for a majority of music listeners,
More urban life, denser cities, smaller living places, multitude of small audio sources all make for more ambient noise today, a favorable context for listening compressed audio, and a unfavorable one for timbric and possibly even melodic diversity and richness,
Yet the impact of visual medias is much more profound today than it was at these times with prevalent radio and crappy television images. We are in the digital image era now, before digital sound. That alone might explain why, while Internet might have built more possibilities for better audio artists to produce more interesting material, those might remain largely unexplored if they are audio-only or poorly imaged.
In that sense, the monopoly of MTV might have substituted for by YouTube, that although cleverly designed for its limited audio bandwidth, could in no way substitute to real high quality stereo or multichannel played on a discerning system,
The differences mentioned earlier might help reinforce the infortunate domination of nice image and average sound over no image and more compelling sound. Incidentally, video examples were posted as examples of good new stuff in this post.
And finally:
It would be great to use this thread positively to share with others not only one counter-example here and there, but whatever clues or pointers to more authentic modern music sources. Labels, websites,…
As for virtually any information today, the problem is not to access any content. It is to access the authentic one.
1 Like
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
56
I do most of that , I no longer have a turntable and I stream from Tidal
Age doesn’t necessarily mean Luddite ! I finally retired as A Microsoft developer , hardly a stuck in the mud occupation.
I use Roon primarily for the snippets of artist bios reviews etc. I used to be JRiver plus Wikipedia, Roon sort of merges them and throws in streaming.
I don’t wish I was young again or I would be working and not listening. I just wish my hearing was 50 years younger.
Think what we could have done with today’s income and experience when we were 20 …WOW
