[Glice]

So I've had one of my evenings of trying to keep up with what's going on on soundcloud. I've found quite a few things that've piqued my interest. This is me in music binge mood. As there's a shitload of stuff on there, I've been very much listening to a bit, getting an idea of what they're doing, scanning through tracks. Trying to get through a load of stuff and bookmarking all the stuff that's potentially interesting, which I'll listen to properly tomorrow. I say 'transient' because it's perfectly possible, what with the internet and all, to do this for days on end - just a constant state of 'stuff I haven't heard before'.

Within this binge, I'm constantly aware - and not at all bothered by the fact that - what piques my interest will probably be stuff that fits into something like 'pre-conceived' (but by no means entirely present-to-consciousness) 'likes' of mine. This is potentially quite limiting, but again, I'm not bothered by that. I don't listen to myspazz because it's got a million bands that really 'aren't my sort of thing at all'. I don't listen to a lot of DJ sets/ dance music on soundcloud because I'm more interested in listening to established DJs - so something like Dubstepforums or Rinse.FM is ideal for that. DJs of most stripes tend to limit themselves to a few sorts of music, and specialise in that. They do that so I don't have to.

So the first 'how to listen to music', in terms of approach to finding 'new' stuff, is the (transient) binge - you listen to a cuntload of things and filter through them later (if you want) or just keep pushing through. I mention DJs because they seem more on the fetish side of things - they listen to one or two sorts of music and act as a kind of editor for their listeners.

Earlier this year, I was restricting my listening fairly heavily - trying to listen to mostly classical stuff, or Dubstep when I was writing/ reading. Part of the reason for that was academic - I wanted to get a better sense of the transition from early to baroque to classical (etc) - but in terms of 'how to listen' I was making a fetish of a few narrow areas of music and trying to explore them in a little more depth. So spending a day listening exclusively to one composer, often the same record 3 or 4 times a day, following the score where possible. This seems a much more fetishised way of listening - trying to explore a limited area, focussing on a minimal field, getting up to speed on biography and composition. I don't think that sort of thing gets you necessarily any closer to the music or composer, but it's something that interests me.

Yeah, so, basically, I'm interested in whether people think the new media available to us has very much changed how we listen to music. I know there's always been a million bands that you don't get a chance to listen to, but the access to that was extremely limited. I hate sounding like an old fucker - especially with so many people here who simply weren't about in the era of buying a record and forcing yourself to like it because you wouldn't be able to hear another record until you'd saved up for one. But you'd listen very differently.

Just as an aside to that, I reckon that the new media has been just as good for the post-25 generation as it has for those born into the internet era - in that I know a lot of people who, classically, would've just given up on music when mortgages, cars and kids come along because music simply stops being a priority.

I mean, obviously we listen to music differently, and I think very few people invested in it never download (and that's a very different issue), but I'm wondering if people are consciously aware of their decisions and personal relationships to exploring music. How do we find new music? How do we listen? I'm not really interested in qualitative distinctions ('it's better to sit and really concentrate') but just how people cope with the baffling enormity of coping with quite how much music is out there.

tl;dr - last sentence is probably most important.

NB - I would apologise for the self-indulgent post, but you lot are some of the most hatefully self-obsessed cunts I've ever had the misfortune to sit and read the bleating, ameliorated tosscuntery of.