I personally love my collection (records, CD, digital) and enjoy sharing the experience with friends. I don’t use streaming unless you count soma fm at work. Sure, I’ll use YouTube to listen to some albums I don’t own, but if I truly like it I’ll buy or download it, usually on bandcamp or direct from artist if I can.
For me, I don’t believe the human brain was ever made for this level of stimulation (we shouldn’t really have 24/7 access to social media either. Go back to the “family PC” model). People have very little connection to music anymore becuase there’s too much and its too easy to access. I can barely remember all the members names in my favorite bands or all their albums. There’s little chance anyone even knows the artists of the millions of songs they’re streaming, or the story behind them.
One of the primary appeals of early streaming platforms (first via MySpace and then later through services like Napster and Pandora) was the opportunity to explore outside your normie musical tastes. For folks who weren’t living in some major metroplex with an active indie music scene, this was a reliable way to find new music and get outside whatever your parents had on repeat in the car on the way to school.
The modern scene has exploited a desire for “newness” in the abstract and stuffed everyone’s feeds with AI slop. But there is still a demand for media broadcasts outside the ClearChannel “Top 3 Pop Songs on a Loop” and Oldie “Mandatory Metallica” stations that go beyond what you have already listened to.
How do you fill your local collection if you aren’t listening to stuff outside your local collection?
I’m always finding new music. I just dont do it using “recommended playlists”.
I got tired of hearing the same stuff from the 80s 90s and early 2000s so I just subscribed to spotify for a few months to explore some new music without ads.
I’ve tried to get back into cds but it’s the old there’s two tracks I like on this one, so switch. I believe in listening to albums in their entirety unless you absolutely can’t stand a song. Streaming is just to convenient and the old way is to limited. Plus it’s far cheaper.
I havent found much modern new music I’ve loved, there’s a few here and there. But I have rediscovered bands I completely forgotten about on streaming or was unaware of from way back then that I now enjoy.
Also some bands who I never cared for their radio single so I just dismissed them and didn’t give them a chance like sum41 and Volbeat. Recently listened to all of princes albums in full for the first time.
Before there was AI slop there was auto-tuned slop.
There’s a certain authenticity that comes from learning to actually play an instrument (including vocals) uniquely - imperfectly, rather than digitally perfect synthesis of perfectly timed notes from a composition score.
And it ultimately flopped. The market became saturated with a product that people associated with flat, tinny, overly-electronic music. People scrambled to get away from it, and we got a mini-folk revival with lots of acoustics and more traditional instrumentals as a result.
In the same way, we’re seeing a scramble to get away from AI music saturation. I don’t think it’ll ever go away (any more than auto-tune did). But it creates a demand for something distinctively not-AI as a result.