Personally, I think I’m pretty adventurous. I love music and my library has thousands of artists across dozens of genres like classic rock, new wave, Motown, smooth jazz, shoegaze, drum & bass, prog rock, hip hop, and more. Hitting ‘shuffle all’ is a recipe for absolute chaos.
I love finding new artists and connections between them (solo projects, supergroups, samples, etc), and every 5-10 years I discover a whole new genre and enjoy going down the rabbit hole. I have all-time favourites, but listening to the same thing for too long drives me crazy.
By contrast, my wife only ever really listens to 2 or 3 different artists and somehow never gets bored of listening to the same few albums on repeat for literal years.
Where do others fall on that spectrum? Do you feel the need to constantly seek out new music, or are you the kind of person who prefers settling into a groove long-term?
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I’m very picky in the sense that I want to enjoy a whole album, or multiple albums from one artist. I don’t care about singles. I love finding new artists but it’s exhausting to search. Most recent search netted me The Cat Empire and alt-J, but this was back in 2018 or so. Usually when I want new music I can just get new albums from artists I already like. Then, every once in a while I’m sorely disappointed like when Arctic Monkeys decided they’re an elevator rock band (2018).
i am very adventurous. my playlist regularly goes from pop to avant garde to death metal to rap to funk to jazz to classical and everything in betwren
I used to think I had very eclectic taste in music. I like old rock and progressive rock and new wave and alternative and eventually I realized my ecletic music was all sorta the same kind of thing evolving through the ages. I like the rock beat but love when it has varied or unusual instruments and were melody is important and it has meaning in the songs.
I’m rather adventurous, Classical is my main genre but I listen to a lot of Jazz, Folk, Rock, Pop, etc.
One way to compare how adventurous you are in relation to others is by tracking it.
I use Last. fm (https://www.last.fm/user/NENathaniel) which tracks everything I listen to so I can see stats on my most listened to albums/artists, as well as the total amount of artists I listen to.
I’d recommend making an account there + ListenBrainz which is a similar open-source alternative
My taste is pretty diverse and I love finding new music. Much closer to you on that axis.
I listen to everything from bluegrass to EDM to polka to doom metal to outlaw country.
I constantly seek out new music and pick it up from everywhere. Currently on a folk punk kick, before that it was Billboard Top 100 stuff from the 60’s and 70’s, before that it was hyperpop. I ask that anyone who wants to get me a gift instead make me a mix CD, I’ve got enough physical stuff.
But I listen to the new music mixed into the old music. Recently using shuffle, but before iTunes went to shit I used to have Party Shuffle pull from a dense web of smart playlists that ensured I was always listening to new favorites, old favorites, and tracks I hadn’t listened to recently in a roiling cycle. Man I miss having smart playlists.
My “favorites” alone, songs I can sing along to, are in the thousands after more than two decades of this. The floodplains of attending tracks, other songs from good albums, local music I don’t get get rid of because I wouldn’t be able to find it again, CDs that I ripped for my kids’ or from my wife’s collection, mix CDs made for me that I’m still getting around to digesting, these make up several thousand more tracks.
So if you, OP, or anyone else want a list of recent highlights, I’m down to trade a tracklist of most played from the last year.
I honestly don’t know anymore. I though I had a really diverse music taste and I especially love abnormal noises in music, but then I used musicbrainz to categorize all my music and found out the basically everything I listen to has the Avantgarde genre. I don’t know if that’s supposed to mean I’m on the far edge of adventure and listening to only the most experiential of music or if I’m so narrow in my niche that I only listen to music considered too weird to categorize.
I think, if anything, it shows an inability to limit an array of sounds into discrete “genres”
Somehow both. I have albums from when I was eleven that still hit, but I’ll also listen to stuff like post-punk, dark ambient, and witch house. Lot of game soundtracks, vaguely satanic sounding darkwave, but then suddenly I’ll retreat into Green Day’s Insomniac for a 479th time.
I’m pretty sure I learned about this from one of you guys, but for those of you looking for new artists, try Music Map.
Also check out Every Noise, though it stopped updating in 2023.
I love a lot of stuff, almost everything. I like niche stuff, foreign music is super interesting and just as varied as all our stuff. From classical to dubstep, I’m down.
I’m not a fan of super poppy songs unless they’re humorous. I don’t care for post 9/11 country music with its ethnocentric propaganda.
I have a playlist that is comprised of the most unhinged shit that still slaps.
I try to find new things to listen to, but I find that I always go back to music from 1970s-2000s. Classic rock and alternative mostly. I like rap, blues, and a tiny bit of country. I listen to a bit of electronic stuff (I don’t even know what the genres are technically called). That’s about it.
i want to find new music, but idk how so i settle onto a few albums and playlists for my locally saved music. these days i tend to listen to the radio more, but even then it’s not that diverse and i don’t/can’t find them again even if i hear something i enjoy from the radio.
I hate Spotify for many reasons and don’t use it any more, but one thing I found it did very well was recommending new music based on existing tastes. Their daily mix and discovery playlists could be a little hit and miss, but there were always at least a handful of great tracks that were new to me.
That’s the benefit of having so many subscribers I suppose - the data pool that drives their recommendation engine is unfathomably massive.
How long have you not used Spotify any longer? Because I would have agreed with your assessment in the past, but I gave up two years ago because new suggestions sounded more like promoted music than anything related to my taste.
Yeah that’s fair - it’s been a few years now and I’ve seen others say similar things, not to mention the rise of AI generated music which Spotify is apparently all too happy to push.
Why yes of course they would push it - they generate it themselves and pay themselves generously!
Check out somafm: https://somafm.com/home.html
The various channels are human-curated and occasionally live dj-ed. I’ve found several new artists I like just by listening for awhile and picking out things that strike me.
Question for you OP: where do you consume your music? Spotify? Other?
Mostly a mix of CDs, vinyl, and streaming on Apple Music.
Gotcha, thanks.
Streaming services are the best thing to ever happen to music from a consumer standpoint. You get access to a library of more music than you could listen to in a lifetime, and you’re not dependent on industry gatekeepers like in the days of radio and MTV. You don’t have to shell out money and hope you like more than two songs on the album. Because of that, I’m more adventurous with music than I’ve ever been.
