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manymanyhaha wrote:So much great music out there, so much not so great music out there too. Y'all's responses above have me realizing we are all going through the same problem.

Yeah, I try to listen "properly" (as opposed to passively) to stuff, but I have so much stuff that it's difficult. (Who knows when I'll get around to getting through all that Krautrock/new age/electronic weirdness I downloaded from blogs, like seven years ago?)

To be honest, most stuff I listen to, and almost all of the stuff I I move to the front of the queue is music by people I know, which turns out to be a lot of stuff, especially this year when people have more time to just be sitting around recording. When you add in digs through things for research/classic fave itch-scratching it's tough to find much newness from outside my zone.

I shouldn't have used the word "problem" because this is actually a great problem to have. When I was a much younger music fan, I would voraciously spend on records because that was the only way you heard new shit. Either that or if your friends bought something but back then, I was spending more on records than anyone I knew. Now, I could spend just about all day every day listening to new stuff that I like and never spend a dime. Though I do purchase stuff but the motivation for purchasing is the exact opposite: I used to purchase to hear new shit and now I purchase because I've heard it and feel like I should be contributing something.

I have a gigantic backlog, so I don't actively try to find even more new music... But I find music about half and half through recommendations from friends, and from the hermeneutic circle of reading wikipedia & similar sources to find out how the music I already enjoy is interconnected. The former mostly yields new bands (hey, have you heard the new..?), the latter old music (oh, in this documentary Joe Boyd says Nick Drake wanted the strings to sound like Delius, I haven't really ever listened to Delius, hmm...).

Also, this:

Heraclitus Akimbo wrote:To be honest, most stuff I listen to, and almost all of the stuff I I move to the front of the queue is music by people I know, which turns out to be a lot of stuff, especially this year when people have more time to just be sitting around recording. When you add in digs through things for research/classic fave itch-scratching it's tough to find much newness from outside my zone.

The same with books, actually. At the front of my queue, besides books relevant-right-now to school or work, is books written by people I know.

manymanyhaha wrote:I shouldn't have used the word "problem" because this is actually a great problem to have. When I was a much younger music fan, I would voraciously spend on records because that was the only way you heard new shit. Either that or if your friends bought something but back then, I was spending more on records than anyone I knew. Now, I could spend just about all day every day listening to new stuff that I like and never spend a dime. Though I do purchase stuff but the motivation for purchasing is the exact opposite: I used to purchase to hear new shit and now I purchase because I've heard it and feel like I should be contributing something.

Yeah. I feel you. Though I am young enough I was never buying loads haha. But yeah the change from "buy to hear" to "buy to support" is a big thing. Though of course there's still some people running stuff on bandcamp you have to buy to hear which is always an extra incentive...

These days its mostly Spotify, youtube, Instagram, and word of mouth. The shit I really dig I'll pickup a cd or record

i miss the aQ mailing list so much!

Other Music also had a decent one.

One way of managing music overload is I tend to make playlists. I'll listen a couple of times through the whole bunch, and anything that doesn't stick gets deleted. So the list gradually gets smaller. Then eventually I'll put the stuff I really like into an AOTY list. And then I try and nerd on that. Like I used to in the old days.

smort.