Evolution of My Personal Music Discovery
Its fascinating to reflect on how my music taste has changed over the years. Bands and artists I've liked. And, singles I've played over and over. Some stuff I've continued to like since I was little kid, like #1 below, and some artists I've discontinued to listen to, like the artist in #7 below.
Even more fascinating, is how I discovered new music in different stages of my life. Yesterday, I was tracing the evolution of my personal music discovery. It's pretty interesting evolution. I'll start from the beginning and work to the present.
When I was really little, I remember my dad playing a lot of Beatles, Beach Boys, Doo-wop, gospel and Motown in our house. My sister and I would sing along and dance in our pajamas.
My mom would infrequently play radio in the car. The only music she really introduced me to was "multiplication table rap" on cassette. My dad mostly listened to AM radio in the car so lots of sports talk and news.
Elementary years. I remember listening to radio & CDs in my friends' parents cars. Nothing special, but I thought it was cool that their parents listened to radio (smooth jazz, rock, oldies, easy listening) in the car.
4th grade. I got an alarm/clock radio in like 4th and I started listening to local radio stations. Only received a few stations clearly since my alarm/clock radio was so cheap.
6th grade. Got a Sony Discman and immediately went to a music store in the mall and bought my first CDs: The Fugees and Dave Matthews. I don't remember why I bought those two CDs, but I did. Must have heard them spinning on the radio or something.
7th grade. Got a stereo for Christmas. Recorded songs off the radio to cassettes (Always missed the first few seconds of songs). Also, I bought more CDs based on good songs I heard on radio.
8th grade. Bought more CDs based on seeing cool music videos on MTV, radio and what my friends were spinning on their Discmans.
Limp Bizkit and other aggressive, rap-rock hybrid bands were popular during this time on mainstream media. Unfortunately, I was very impressionable by what was playing on mainstream media and partook.
9th/10th grade. Most people didn't use this method: My friend and I started going around to people in my small high school and borrowing their CD collections for one night and burning all their interesting CDs to CD-Rs.
This really worked out well as some of my fellow students had really good CD collections. They also had a lot of crap. I quickly built up a massive collection of CD-Rs which were all recently thrown away.
Ah, good times.
In high school, Napster and p2p sites were taking off. Shawn Fanning was my hero. I spent countless nights downloading music at 128k or so.
Due to Napster and p2p, I found that I wasn't restricted by my one CD purchase per month budget or by my fellow students CD collections anymore. I starting doing more proactive music discovery.
I mostly used Amazon.com's product recommendation technology to find band's that were similar to band's I already liked. I would rely on a few 30-second clips by a particular artist to decide if I wanted to stay up all night downloading their album off Napster.
I also subscribed to magazine's like Rolling Stone, Spin and New Music Monthly. At the time, I thought those magazines had the best taste ever and I would always download artists they gave four stars to or who they said was an up and coming artist to watch.
Freshman year at college. We had a campus intranet and most people shared music they had on their hard drives with everyone on the intranet.
During my freshman year, I went crazy filling up my computer's hard drive with all kinds of stuff I didn't really need or could possibly listen to.
This is also about the time I got my first iPod. So, I would download music from my school's intranet and than transfer music I liked to my iPod (I've never really bought songs off iTunes unless someone gives me a gift certificate).
Sophomore year at college. I stopped using p2p sites and my college's intranet and started reading music blogs and Pitchfork.
This is about the time Hype Machine and Elbo.ws were created. I've never really used them to discover new music, I only use them to search and find mp3s I already know I want to download. Isn't that how most people use them?
I also messed around with Pandora a little bit.
Junior & senior year at college. The Internet became my only source for finding new music.
I stopped subscribing to music magazines. I stopped listening to the radio and I stopped watching music on television.
I started using music blogs. Tons of them. It's easy: Read blurb, stream song from blog and than "right-click, save as" if you like it.
Also, looking up bands and artists on their MySpace pages lets you find new artists they are friends with.
Post-college. I've tapered down my music blog consumption and now I'm waiting for something to come along that helps me evolve my music discovery to the next level.
Yes, social music sites are starting to pop up all over the place like Imeem and Last.fm but they aren't taking me to the next level yet.
Do you know about something I don't? Holler.
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