Comment by ErroneousBosh
6 hours ago
> 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.