You don't sound like an asshole, but you do sound oblivious.
There are tens of millions of songs released every week. It's literally impossible to find new music you like without recommendations.
In the past, people would get recommendations from people they know. Now we have the help of algorithms. They're not perfect, but most people will find hundreds of songs from random artists they never would have listened to and their friends/family probably have never heard of.
There's no manual way to do that without spending an enormous amount of time on it (which I say as someone who did that in the 90s/00s).
> It's literally impossible to find new music you like without recommendations.
As another old fogey, at least old enough to have been active in the filesharing scene, that filesharing has got me so much music stored on disk that it would take nearly a year to listen to every recording if they were played back-to-back 24/7. With such an embarrassment of riches, what need is there for continual recommendations for new music? Sure, I occasionally add new music if I come across some interesting mention of an artist in a book or article, but I have a hard time understanding why some other old fogeys feel that a discovery algorithm is essential.
Back in the Napster days, my "algorithm" was to stumble around somewhat randomly until I found something cool. Then I could look at that peer's collection and download other things that seemed interesting. Usually, it was possible to go deep and get full albums.
After they killed Napster, my discovery ended up on BitTorrent, which often optimized for the complete discography of artists. This could leave quite a backlog but it was interesting nonetheless.
Now I use Apple music, primarily for the albums and the depth of the catalog. I was an early Spotify user but they lost me when they were serving other people music through my connection in the early days, I didn't appreciate that.
When they started monetizing, I also didn't like the way that they took in tons of money from people who liked exclusively small artists and paid it out to mostly the top acts from big labels. Sure, they all do that now, but Spotify started it. At the time, iTunes still had you paying by the song.
It's hard to stay into new music as I get older. A lot of times I already know what I want to hear, and I'm not a constant soundtrack type. But I do make an effort to prowl around the catalog a little and also listen to college radio. Those experiences haven't failed me yet.
By that logic, what need is there of new books, paintings, movies, TV, or ideas? You can't possibly consume all the good ones already available to you.
You may be surprised to learn that some people just enjoy exploring new and recent music. Music and culture change, so you can't just find everything you might want in a historical catalog.
>By that logic, what need is there of new books, paintings, movies, TV, or ideas?
you may legimatey not need them based on your goals for the medium. For books, I tend to only read technical textbooks these days, so sure. I'm not looking for any fiction or biographies.
Likewise, I really haven't bothered curating a playlist since Google Play Music shut down, I was barely adding new songs to my playlist by then anyway.
>You may be surprised to learn that some people just enjoy exploring new and recent music.
Sounds rough with the current landscape, especially if they feel stuck to Spotify. But if there's one thing I learned from exploring new and recent adult media, it's that the truly great stuff isn't found on Pornhub. You gotta search deep and discover your kinks through "word of mouth". Really teaches you to properly "research" when billion dollar corporations are too scared to touch your medium to begin with, and most forums forbid even talking about such stuff.
and how to rummage through spam. My god, is there so much spam when you hit a niche adult theme and you just end up with weird russsian websites. Corporate propaganda shilling can't even phase me anymore
> You may be surprised to learn that some people just enjoy exploring new and recent music.
I never said otherwise. I just believe that most old-fogey listeners are going to divide their time between exploring new music and dealing with the backlog they quickly accumulate from that exploration, and therefore an algorithm that pumps out recommendations nonstop is not essential.
>There are tens of millions of songs released every week. It's literally impossible to find new music you like without recommendations.
how many forms of white noise do you really need? It's not really a "genre" people listen to for leisure. It's either for sleep or study. You're not intensely listening for lyrics nor rhythm nor anything other genres argue about, you don't care how the "artist" got the sounds.
This. Old fogey over here too, and I would have stopped listening to any new music 15 years ago had it not been for streaming and recommendation algorithms.
I find it funny that you think FM radio isn’t also run by an algorithm. It is really rare to find a traditional DJ who gets to play whatever new music they want. Maybe from a college radio station, but not from most major market stations.
depends on the station. And someone at this point still listening to FM radio and commenting on the internet probably isn't listening to any of the few remaining major stations.
To paraphrase up thread: If FM stations were the only way to discover new music, I would've given up on new music a long time ago. Absolutely can't stand radio or television advertising; I'd much rather listen to nails on a chalkboard.
If that is true, then most of those releases are inaccessible to most listeners. For example, Spotify only adds around 100k "songs" per day and that includes remasters and mixes of an existing song, no matter how small the change is. For someone who truly wants to pick from all those ten million songs, there isn't even a service that would let them listen to the songs, let alone find them and recommend them.
There are tens of millions of songs released every week. It's literally impossible to find new music you like without recommendations.
In the past, people would get recommendations from people they know. Now we have the help of algorithms. They're not perfect, but most people will find hundreds of songs from random artists they never would have listened to and their friends/family probably have never heard of.
There's no manual way to do that without spending an enormous amount of time on it (which I say as someone who did that in the 90s/00s).