alt Hacker NewsThere's also an interesting side effect of owning limited media that streaming advocates overlook.
When you own 3 albums, you'll listen to them more often. You will put more effort into memorizing them. You'll listen to the tracks that were not designed to be radio hits by a committee but were instead the songs the band came up with on their own.
You get way more out of your investment when you invest mentally and emotionally into the full spectrum of their music.
This guy is talking about finding 20 new bands a month. He's not getting anything out of it other than a mild dopamine hit, and he thinks he's somehow cool for that?
It's like being a connoisseur of children's cereal and never having home cooked steak and eggs for breakfast. It's like bragging about your weight loss journey because you started smoking crack.
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Is that a good thing? One of the benefits to streaming for me is precisely that I don't want to get stuck being an old guy who just listens to music from when I was a teenager/young adult. 20 new bands per month is certainly excessive, but with the radio long-dead, how do you discover new music without some kind of streaming service?
"You'll listen to the tracks that were not designed to be radio hits by a committee but were instead the songs the band came up with on their own."
And amplifying that, we see more and more "built for streaming" music, which is not the sort of music I want to listen to. I have phrased that carefully; it is a personal opinion and I won't criticize anyone who discovers that actually, yes, generic AI rock that is pumped out by the hour is something they find some use for. I could see someone who wouldn't want to "listen" to that with intentionality finding it useful to code to or as background noise in their life or something. But it's not what I want, and unless the streaming services do something about it it is what is going to dominate their platforms over time.
I don't go in for super deep relationships with the musicians, reading about their histories and stuff, but I do enjoy the way that the music I like most on first listen often pales quickly and the tracks that I initially didn't like very well become my favorites.