I was thinking about this and I use different music to sort of…imitate silence? Like, I’ll listen to hiroshi yoshimura and lay on the couch in a trance. If I had no music I would just get fidgety and bored. It’s like I’m silencing something internally via music so I can actually concentrate on stillness.
I definitely use music to dictate my own moods, rather than vice versa.
Brains are weird yall
Yeah mostly I sometimes queue up an album on Bandcamp/YouTube and let 'er play. Or I seek out an individual song on said services and play it to death to wring out as much dopamine as I can get it.
I have a USB in my car stereo with a bunch of random shit thrown on it that I shuffle, but I don’t always put music on when I’m driving.
Once upon a time I was into Pandora but I fell off. And I despise Spotify.
really cool way to think of it
I sing for one of those hours if I can help it. Excellent stress relief
I sing all the time! I even sing when I am out on my walks, cause that’s where I listen to a lot of music, or find it’s quiet enough to do that. Working my way up to feeling comfortable to do that has been a big victory in my kind of social anxiety, I now don’t really care what people I pass on the sidewalk think of me too much.
was an albums exclusively person for a long time but now i feel like i’ve dipped my fingers into enough different styles that i can start to look for more general principles of quality and find syntheses
i hate that i can only pick three options i want to pick all of them
I forgot to vote for radio! FIP is amazing, still
i listen to albums i think ill like all the way through and delete all the songs that suck, then i put them in a playlist theyd thematically fit. sometimes i listen to ‘play all’ on shuffle but i end up skipping more than im listening to and its mostly just an excersize in frustration unless im zooted then all music is jesus
the ways i find music are: listen to one band on spotify and let the radio autoplay, last.fm THIS BAND SOUNDS LIKE THIS BAND, listening to compilations on bandcamp and soundcloud, hearing a song i like, and looking that band up, also going through people’s libraries on soulseek i LOVE doing that. my number one way to find music was GOING TO LIVE CONCERTS but that has been ripped from me. didn’t really realize how much of my happiness involves being an unhinged mammal in a sea of other mammals
I was doing this thing at the outset of lockdown where I’d spend about a month with an album, working chronologically through an artist’s discography, throwing it on to listen to when I was doing dishes or cooking. Back when I was wee and only had a handful of tapes, I’d really live with those albums and soak them in and it was nice to go back to that.
The prevailing factor that has shaped how I listen to music is a state of continuous hardware decay. I used to have computers; one hard drive got corrupted, while the replacement had some kind of processor issue, I think? It’s been long enough now that I’ve forgotten the details. For a while I was just using a Surface tablet, which felt like I was trying to live out of my car in terms of data accessibility. Four or five years ago I just shrugged and bought a “gaming laptop” at Best Buy. The internal storage isn’t big enough to justify trying to extract my music library from an old hard drive, nor have I bothered to install iTunes since that’s where most of my music purchases were made. Headphones are another point of failure: wired get snagged or tripped over or chewed up by cats; wireless have desync or charging issues. Thus, the only headphones I really use are super-cheap wired earbuds that are basically disposable replacements. I haven’t had a dedicated music device since the iPod shuffle, and although my smartphone could probably manage either a small library or a dedicated app, my personal routines don’t really necessitate it.
Because of all this, the main way I listen to music recreationally is via Pandora, YouTube, or (thanks to @daphaknee) last.fm. We’ve been Sirius XM subscribers ever since our trip to the New England in 2013, so I spend about 85% of my time in the car listening to satellite radio and about 15% listening to CDs, most of which I burned myself ten to fifteen years ago.
oh yeah i love being inconsistent with my tastes, ill fucking listen to one album like it’s my favorite shit from childhood and someone will be like ‘whats this’ and I’ll say ‘i don’t remember’
music snobs lose their mind with this one quick trick!
I feel really fucking guilty not being able to listen to podcasts. like i wouldn’t give a shit if i didnt post here but podcasts get in the way of music or actual conversation which are the only two things i care about!
like i listened to like five podcasts from here that people specifically told me to but i hear them and im like ‘yeah thats a room of my friends hanging out that im not in’ and tune it out and do something else. podcasts are alien to me, but i promise i tried.
I have spent most of my work weeks during the pandemic listening to channels on youtube that do full album rips of city pop and jazz albums.
My router has USB ports, and I’ve been ripping music to those, then using foobar2000 on my phone to stream that to Bluetooth speakers and it works surprisingly well.
I still need to buy a shelf deep enough to accommodate my stereo so I can listen to stuff in a more reasonable manner. But buying furniture is such a commitment…
I chose albums in the poll not realising it was multiple choice. I do primarily do that but i also spend a lot of time clicking through singles on youtube, which is a terrible way to listen to music but i dont wanna get spotify or anything.
I really hate how with some music that’s not bandcamp-core these days you literally cannot buy it. If u can’t find a nice rip of it ur best option is to is fucken youtube to mp3 each individual track and fuck around with metadata so it doesnt just scatter into 50 corners upon arriving on ur phone’s music app.
I listen to music almost constantly. Driving to work? Obviously. Every desk job I’ve had I have had a radio at my desk to listen to the radio while I work. After years of satellite in the car it is kind of amazing how excruciating it feels to sit through radio commercials now. When I worked retail we had music piped in - I cannot imagine having to get through the days there without it. When I’m home I have a big playlist I started on youtube easily ten + years ago that I keep adding songs to and will usually have that playing in the background when I’m making dinner. Other times there is a specific song in mind that I want to hear and I will pull that up on youtube and then go from there picking other songs, either from the recommendations or whatever comes to mind. I only recently downloaded Spotify to use when taking walks to get a bit of variety from listening to XM on my phone but I rarely use it outside of that.
I’ve never gotten into podcasts. I’m not in the car long enough usually to listen on my commute and I don’t get great service/have wireless headphones/insert other excuse here to stream from my phone while I’m at work. Honestly I need the beat of music to really keep me going if I’m work, and it’s more mindless so it doesn’t distract me from what I’m doing. I’d lose track of what is going on in a podcast if I tried to listen while working. One of my favorite youtube channels also releases it as a podcast but I will never listen to the podcast version. I think I’m just too tied into youtube at this point, idk.
I will always find people like Jason, who almost seems like he could take or leave music, very strange to me. My mom was also that way. She never listened to the radio or cds very often, but she did have enough songs she really liked that we had a mix tape of those playing for her while she was in hospice. My dad, on the other hand, listened to the same set of songs from the 70s constantly while I was growing up and still does to this day. I think the music industry to him died out after like 1975. I remember my mom was so happy when they got a new car and got satellite because it meant she didn’t have to listen to that same set of songs anytime they went anywhere. They found the 40s and 50s radio show channel and never looked back.
yeah my brain explodes if i don’t have constant auditory stimuli, i listen to music so much. also albums only, babeyyyyyyy. i just like the fact that its an explicitly planned experience (except for when they very obviously aren’t) - sequencing is an art and i love it
a few months ago i started keeping a spreadsheet of every album i’ve listened to in an active way, which is frankly Not That Many because i’m constantly doing things, but i like to take time once in a while and actually just listen and pay attention to an album and soak it in. i also have a literal 1000-artist backlog to do this with so i’ll be dead before i ever finish that one. because also im neurotic and have to listen to their entire discography (excluding singles, which aren’t real) from back to front
because everyone here has great taste i go through the music threads very very periodically and put everything that’s recommended into a big playlist and listen to that, all of a discography if someone talks about a band instead of a song or an album. there’s also some repositories on soundcloud/bandcamp/youtube for old misc vinyl transfers that i listen to sometimes, like the thing lain linked above
i think that’s the prevailing feeling for a lot of people who are into podcasts, it’s just it’s the best they’ve got