Becoming a pop culture dinosaur

[DCI Harry Batt]

Oh god yes,. turn autoplay off, everywhere, always.

[Uncle Ethan]

I don't think you read the bit about me being too lazy to create playlists. Also, can you do playlists on a free account? If not, how much is a subscription?

Sorry, yes I did! We have a family subscription for about $18 (Aus) per month.

Apologies that should have read Sorry, no I didn't. My brain was in reverse last night.

[Fussbudget]

I wish I got a useful Discover Weekly. Instead, I get a list of stuff that's appeared on previous Discovers umpteen times or that I already own in one form or another, the amount of anything that I've never heard before is vanishingly small. Part of this is no doubt a massive music collection that I've built up over 30+ years that Spotify doesn't have access to.

Yes I guess for it to work best you need to do almost all your listening on Spotify

[scratchmonkey]

I've stopped using Spotify as I know the money for my Premium account would be better spent directly on artists. It's an incredible service, but one which ultimately rips off artists.

I attempt to justify my paying for Spotify by buying albums and merch for the artists I like, usually on Bandcamp or on their individual sites. This has gotten a lot easier now that I have the stereo setup as I can buy vinyl to support an artist and to expand my collection.

ETA: And every once in a while there's something on a streaming service that justifies the expense, for example Kraftwerk sometime in the last two years released the German-language originals on streaming services.

[Various Artist]

I seem to be with DCI Harry Batt on just about everything to do with Spotify.

In essence, there's two completely different ways to use it:

– At one end, you can use it as a virtual radio: with very little conscious input, simply leave it to autoplay playlists from musical areas aligned (with variable accuracy) to your theoretical tastes, broadly the same as tuning the dial into your station of choice.

– At the other, you can use it as a virtual CD player: it's perfectly possible to totally ignore the playlisting and algorithm functions, and just treat it as a limitless multi-changer where the added magic is that you can cue up albums you've never actually possessed. This is what I do, pretty much exclusively.

Then between those two there's also a whole continuum in which you can locate your ideal 'sweet spot', by following the if-you-liked-that-you'll-like-this recommendations to a greater or lesser degree.

Because the first of those is Spotify's primary raison d'ętre, the setup treats albums like playlists by default – yes, it does grate that when you load it up and first go to listen to an album it inevitably has 'shuffle' (and 'repeat all') engaged as standard, and there seems no method of permanently disabling this 'feature' so it will have reengaged whenever you load the app up again. However one fairly quickly gets into the habit of quickly tapping the relevant 'buttons' to disengage them when pressing play on the first album of a session, so it's no big deal.

[blameless]

Thanks for that VA - that certainly seems to mirror my experience of Spotify, glad to see I'm not imagining things.

[hobbes]

The secret of spotify if you want to play an album in order is don't hit the big green play button.
Just click on the first track of the album and it'll play in order from there.

[Various Artist]

Ah! Is that a fact? It might explain why sometimes it doesn't seem to automatically want to shuffle things even though it mostly does.

[Jah Womble]

That is indeed a handy hack…

[Various Artist]

I feel like I was always a little bit of a pop culture dinosaur, even when we dinosaurs ruled the earth: a Mesozoic adolescent going "Actually, I'm not really into quite a lot of this contemporary Cretaceous dance music, rap or New Jack Swing, to be honest I can see the merits of that Jurassic pop and rock from half a geological era ago", even while simultaneously disparaging some of the Triassic stuff my parents grew up on.

I touched on this on the old Britpop thread: how that musical period suited me just fine as a teenager, since its revival of pop-rock and indie-rock that chimed with my already-formed tastes meant I temporarily found the mainstream swinging my way. What's funny to me, and ironic, is that during the lengthy 'tail' to this era where there was still a great mixture of stuff in the charts for numerous years, I used to congratulate myself on still keeping up with the weekly Top 40 countdowns at the grand old age of 25 or 26, laughing at how I was still down with this stuff while older people used to grow out of it so readily as soon as the scene moved on... never realising of course how young I still was in the grand scheme of things.

There was a bit of a schism that formed when I left the country for a couple of years not long afterward, but I only appear to have given up entirely on new music sometime circa 2013, which is quite easy to pinpoint by going through a list of UK Number One singles and realising where the names largely cease to be anything I could put a tune to. It's basically since the charts fully entered what I think of as the 'ft.' era; as noted, I was never a fan of the dancier or rap or r'n'b ends of the pop spectrum (where the featured-artist-on-each-other's records thing is common) yet in recent times those have fully merged with and taken over what I used to consider the pop centre ground; seemingly in sync with this the Top 40 is routinely clogged with incestuous 'Act A ft. Act B' and 'Act B ft. Act A & Act C' credits.

Great individual songs will always break through occasionally, of course, but in general it's moved away from sounds that appeal to me; and that's fine, that's what's supposed to happen with pop music after all. For me, the ongoing realisation of how much is out there from previous decades – or centuries, for that matter – to try to start catching up with, having of course been ignorant of it during the period when I was the one going "Urrgh, what is that old stuff they're listening to?" trumps any supposed need to keep scrabbling around trying to pan gold from the ever-rushing stream of new music.

Regardless, I'd long been on a continuing outward drift that took me from Radio 1 to Radio 2 starting when I was only 22, and now 20 or so years later towards the more distant shores of Radio 3. I've been gravitating for a considerable while towards more ambient, neo-classical, lyric-devoid (or, at least, unintelligible-to-me) music that didn't demand a single interpretation or specific engagement from the listener – whether it be stuff by Brian Eno or the Orb, Sigur Rós or Sibelius. In the last year or two that's led me to the happy discovery of shows like Night Tracks, which describes itself as an "an adventurous, immersive soundtrack for late-night listening, from classical to contemporary and everything in between", which immediately sounded very me. I just hook my phone up wirelessly to my little Bluetooth speaker and play episodes using the BBC Sounds app, where handily the tracklisting information for each episode includes direct links to all available tracks on Spotify (and Amazon Music). So when I hear something that particularly grabs me, I can hop straight to it in Spotify and stream/download the whole of the artist's album – if it comes from one – to listen to it 'in situ', as it were. If I like it enough I'll then add it to my wishlist of albums to physically get on CD, and either way I'll also tend to click through to the artist's discography to check out more of their albums. Sometimes, indeed, I'll see some similar artist then linked to and might click onwards to see what they're all about too, either on Spotify or while reading reviews on Amazon or Allmusic, and so it goes on.

[WOM]

I'm amazed at how much new - and old - music I get turned on to while watching TV shows with my Shazam ready at hand. Good Girls is particularly rich for amazing tracks.

[diggedy derek]

I May Destroy You was absolute dynamite for that.

[Jon]

I May Destroy You was absolute dynamite for that.

Yes - another good use of Spotify. All the tracks from I May Destroy You are on a Spotify playlist.