Don't give up on music discovery
Algorithms can quickly figure out what you already like, but they will rarely show you something surprising
If you will allow me to do my best Don Quixote impression, I’d like to tilt against some windmills today and try to convince you to actively seek out new music.
I want to start with a very interesting post from Daniel Parris:
It is one of those wonderful articles that tells you things you suspected were true but had no way of checking yourself, while providing new interesting angles on the subject that you wouldn’t otherwise have considered.
It’s worth reading the whole piece, but the quick gloss is that people get nostalgic about music very quickly, with most people still listening to the music of their early to mid teens more than anything else. And curiosity for new music seems to fall off a cliff at some point in the 20s or possibly early 30s.
Open-earedness refers to an individual's desire and ability to listen and consider different sounds and musical styling. Research has shown that adolescents exhibit higher levels of open-earedness, with a greater willingness to explore and appreciate diverse musical genres. During these years of sonic exploration, music gets wrapped up in the emotion and identity formation of youth; as a result, the songs of our childhood prove wildly influential over our lifelong music tastes.[…]
Indeed, YouGov survey data indicates a strong bias toward music from our teenage years, a phenomenon that is consistent across generations. Every cohort believes that music was "better back in my day."[…]
Survey research from European streaming service Deezer indicates that music discovery peaks at 24, with survey respondents reporting increased variety in their music rotation during this time. However, after this age, our ability to keep up with music trends typically declines, with respondents reporting significantly lower levels of discovery in their early thirties. Ultimately, the Deezer study pinpoints 31 as the age when musical tastes start to stagnate.
But the point that resonated the most personally with me was this: “Spotify data indicates that parents stray from the mainstream at an accelerated rate compared to empty nesters—a sort of "parent tax" on one's cultural relevancy.”
Boy howdy has that been true for me. Part of it is simple math. There are just a finite number of hours in the day, and parenthood takes up many of those hours. It’s not like I don’t listen to music at all anymore. In fact, I love having music on around the house when playing with the kiddos. But old favorites get a lot more play in that context, partly because I want them to hear stuff that matters a lot to me, but also partly because listening to new music requires attention. I can throw on Wildflowers and sing along to every word without really noticing while doing something else. I can’t go seek out new stuff.
Now that they’re getting a little bit older, I am finding it possible to carve out a bit more time again. And I’m hoping that writing here will motivate me to do a bit more of that as well. Because my own relationship with new music actually has a lot to do with writing online.
Technology can make music discovery so much better (if you want it to) or so much worse (if you let it)
I started a music blog in 2006, not quite at the founding of the music blog era but early enough that I got in while things were still on the ground floor. It was a cool time. The internet still felt like a mostly positive invention. ‘Social media’ was still in its infancy, so most of the actual content was still being produced in (moderately) old-fashioned ways. We were all digging down different rabbit holes for interesting and unexplored music, and then sharing what we found through hyperlinks. I don’t want to overly romanticize things. It wasn’t perfect. But it was pretty great, at least for a little while.
Before long, though, aggregators came along. The most popular was The Hype Machine, which I’m surprised to learn still exists, albeit in a different form. Through the aggregation mechanism, it quickly became clear that a significant portion of music blog ‘readers’ only wanted the MP3s and were happy to divebomb in to find what they wanted and then immediately get out.
And look, I get it. Like everyone else in the world, I hate online recipes because they put 3000 words between you and the thing you actually want. But it was still a little depressing to realize that a lot of people regarded my blog more as a data repository for songfiles than as a location for reading music criticism.
But all that was nothing to the change that came with the rise of streaming.
The sudden ubiquity of Spotify made the ‘mp3’ part of music blogging feel instantly quaint. Out of nowhere, the limiting factor on what you could listen to had nothing to do with whether you could acquire a song; it was exclusively a question of whether you encountered the song in the first place.
I was a holdout (still am). I like owning my music. I like being able to organize my music the way I want. And because I love the musicians who make the music, I want to pay them for their services (seriously, Spotify is terrible for artists, especially indie artists). But even grumpy old me has to acknowledge that it’s been an incredible boon for discovery to have everything immediately at your fingertips.
Except…it hasn’t been. At least not for most people.
Check out the data in that post I linked above. Despite the incredible smörgåsbord of options available to us, most people are still hanging out in their own personal little musical cocoons.
Part of that is just human nature: we really do like stability over exposure to new things. Psychologists who study behavioral patterns see ‘openness to experience’ as a key marker for personality types, and generally regard it as relatively fixed. People can try to encourage themselves to be more open to new things, but there’s a baseline level that seems to be pretty locked in for each individual. As Parris notes in the post: “The pervasive nature of music paralysis across generations suggests that the phenomenon's roots go beyond technology, likely stemming from developmental factors. “
To some extent, humans are what they are, and each new incredible advance in technology just tends to give us newer and more powerful ways to stay the same. So maybe trying to fight this is like trying to look 25 forever. The body ages, and so does the mind. As we get older, it gets more comfortable to settle into what we know.
But I don’t want to concede to this reality entirely. And I don’t want to let the technological factors off the hook either. Yes, every generation adopts a hazy nostalgia for the music of their youth. But there really is something different going on in the present climate, with people consuming more and more music via companies who have an active and methodical interest in aiding our decrepitude.
After all, the foundation of streaming recommendation systems is the assumption that people do not want to hear anything new or surprising. And to be fair, they have good reason for making this assumption. Spotify is a multi-billion dollar company. They have more data than the human mind can comprehend. And they know what keeps people listening. Namely, “even if we say we want to listen to something new, we always return to what’s familiar.” They supply us with ‘the same’ because that’s what works for them.
But the motive of the listener is not—at least it shouldn’t be—the same as the motive of the company. When you throw on a playlist, you may indeed want comfort and the already-known. But maybe you haven’t really thought about it at all, and might actually enjoy running into something a bit off the beaten path. And it’s even possible that you want to find new things, but lack a clear way to do it, since your streaming service is working at cross purposes.
It’s worth seeking out music
Music criticism is full of snobbery, which is not a great feature of the genre. I certainly don’t want to come across as telling people that their personal tastes are insufficiently refined. That’s not the issue at all. Comfort food is great, and comfort music is even better. It’s normal and good to go back to the same stuff again and again.
But there’s a difference between enjoying your comfort foods and only eating the ones you already know. Art can serve many purposes. One of them can be to simply help us pass the time pleasantly. But I also think we should expect more of our art sometimes, and expect more of ourselves as well. Art should enlighten. It should inspire.
I think of the old Kurt Vonnegut quote: “I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'.”
Obviously, I’m not asking every artist to try to match The Beatles. But I think there are a lot of musicians out there right now in the winter of 2025 making new and exciting music, stuff which makes me appreciate being alive, who deserve more attention than they’re getting, and which people would love listening to if only they could escape their own personal musical microclimates that the streaming giants have cultivated for them.
I may post another time about some of the ways you can go about mindfully discovering new music. But I certainly think that finding people with distinct tastes who you can trust to curate a little bit is a great start.
To that end, my loose goal is to try and post something new once a week here. I don’t want to try to recreate my music blog (which does still exist, mostly as an archive) but when I have new music that seems interesting, and which can plausibly give me something useful to talk about, I’ll try to share it. Hopefully folks will find something good in there.