Comment by tombert
8 hours ago
This is part of why I hate TikTok so much.
I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music.
A lot of time when I do the autoplay of YouTube Music, if I don't like the song in the first 15-20 seconds, I skip it to something else. I eventually realized that a lot of songs that I end up really liking require you listening to the entire song to come together. The inability to skip to the next song on SiriusXM forces me to listen to the song, and I've found a ton of songs that I likely would have otherwise skipped with anything else.
I feel like with TikTok, we're effectively training ourselves to ignore things that don't immediately grab our attention.
Maybe this is just my "Old Man Yells At Cloud" moment though.
Check out KEXP and SomaFM. KEXP in particular is a great way to discover new music that you might not normally listen to.
https://www.kexp.org/
https://somafm.com/
I'd say streaming radio in general is low profile in how it lets you discover new things. I use the search/directory built into foobar2000 or apps like radiodroid, but there are sites like https://www.radio-browser.info/ for the web. It's an interesting and low cost way to find things you wouldn't otherwise be exposed to and likely curated by whoever is running the station. What really stood out to me is how different countries or regions have their own tastes, or at least are likely to be playing something different to local broadcasts.
The problem I have with streaming radio is that it seems to be caught rehashing rather than discovering.
For example, I like SOMA's Underground 80s, but I also want to hear new artists in the same vein. I haven't found any streaming stations that are actively good at curating like this.
Where are the streaming stations that play Smiths and Smithereens but also play Blossoms and Johnny Marr's new stuff, for example?
1 reply →
> I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music.
No, I think you're right.
I'm old enough to have swapped pirated cassettes of whatever was doing the rounds in high school. I remain convinced that Appetite for Destruction can only be listened to the way it was intended to be heard, if it's been copied onto a ratty old TDK D90 that's been getting bashed around in your schoolbag for months by your mate's big brother who has the CD and a decent stereo.
There's a lot of stuff I listened to that I probably wouldn't have if I'd had the selection that's available on streaming services. When you got a new tape, that was Your New Tape, and you listened to it over and over because you hadn't heard it a thousand times yet. Don't like it? Meh, play it anyway, because you haven't heard it a thousand times yet.
I got into so much music that's remained important to me because of a chance tape swap.
Maybe Spotify et al needs instead of unskippable adverts, unskippable tunes that are way outside your usual range of tastes. "Here have some 10,000 Maniacs before you go back to that R'n'B playlist!"
Yeah, similar for me; when I was a teenager I would buy a CD specifically I liked a single on the radio and put it in my car. I would be too lazy to take it out and listen to something else, so I'd listen to that CD dozens and dozens of times, and I would grow to appreciate the non-single songs a lot, very often more than the song I even bought the CD for.
The non-singles are generally a lot less "radio-friendly", almost by definition, so a lot of artists were more willing to try stuff that is a little less immediately-appealing, and there are a bunch of albums I have basically memorized now because of that.
With Spotify and YouTube Music, there's an infinite number of songs to choose from and as a result you never have the same excuse to listen to the same songs over and over again. I'm not necessarily saying it's "worse", just that I miss the way it used to be.