I've wanted to start this item for months, but I've never been able to organize my thoughts sufficiently on the subject, so I'll just toss out a formless mess. For years I've been fascinated by the question: how do we find the music we like? How do we filter out the marketing messages from stuff we know we aren't going to like? The thoughts became more explicit when Chuck D of Public Enemy was quoted on his vision of the Internet-fueled future of music, when the five major labels would be surrounded by thousands and thousands of little upstarts. This got me to thinking -- suppose each of those thousands of upstarts wanted to send you a promotional piece of e-mail every month? Aieee! For better or worse, one of the functions of the major label corporations is to erect a filter screening out a huge number of artists, and to guide their buyers towards satisfying purchases. As the labels lose control, how will those functions be performed for the mass audience? How will they be performed for we elite snobs in the Music conference? :)22 responses total.
Well most of the music in my collection of a couple hundred tapes and CDs was either picked up through hearing friends music, borrowing from the library or more recently Napster downloads of freinds recomendations, or music I see reviewed in interesting places (like the Grex music conf). For me the millions the record companies spend to promote their latest one hit wonders is wasted as I don't listen to any top 40 music of any genre. Thus the argument the big lables act as a filter doesn't work for me. I think the more germaine question is, will muscians be able to make music full time and support themselves if the big labels collapse? Honestly, I don't know the answer to that one but I think it's an experiment that should be tried because my best guess is that digital music making cds obsolete in the long run would lead to a greater variety of music from around the world being available.
... but no, when you say you "don't listen to any top 40 music of any genre," you've just described a filter. So the major labels are providing a filter for you -- just not the way they intended...
Sophistry will get you nowhere. :-)
Recommendations of friends, and reviews that pushed my buttons, have provided me with most of my folk/pop favorites. I discovered Suzanne Vega and the McGarrigle sisters from reading reviews that compared them to the Roches. (I would listen to anything that was compared to the Roches. Strangely, I've never seen a review of the Indigo Girls comparing them to the Roches, though they sound a lot more like them than either of the other two do.) In turn, I discovered the Roches through the recommendation of a friend, who'd heard their record played in a store. I discovered Steeleye Span through a cover version of their arrangement of "Gaudete" performed by a filk group at Mythcon. So you never can tell where favorites will come from. Most of my favorite classical composers were discovered in a systematic hunt through the Schwann catalog I was engaged in through most of my teenage years, when I had very little else to do. I listened to everybody, and discovered some very strong tastes. That was long before any of those "If you like A, try B" classical guidebooks came out. Recommendation lists, e-mail lists, and the plethora of reviews and sound clips (even legal ones!) available online are a powerful tool that can counteract the stifling effect of letting too many thousand flowers bloom. The one thing I can't recommend are those web sites that claim to tell you your tastes by comparing your known likes & dislikes with other people's. A great idea, but if there's a single such site (for music, books, movies, or anything else) which has reached a critical mass where the recommendations are of any use whatever, I haven't found it.
I've found a few of the artists I listen to a lot from seeing them on a local station that shows foreign language programming.. seeing a clip of Kasia Kowalska lead me to a whole bunch of good Polish artists.. I've also found some Greek and Armenian music that way.. Most of what I listen to I first found through several CCM video shows though. Other than that there's the radio.. although I don't listen to it all that much, once in a while I'll find something new that way. I've found a couple of things in those listening things at Borders too. So far recommendations from the several email lists I'm on haven't worked out for me.. the few CDs I bought based only on recommendations were pretty awful, and the one I bought based on people on one of the lists putting it down severely was fabulous.. go figure..
OK, but I'm looking for more discussion of filters, negative input, rejection: how do you set up your mental system so you aren't inundated?
By limiting the source's of one's input. I no longer read folk music magazines, never got into web sites, and limit my discussion-list trolling to this rather quiet site. Twice a year I go to Down Home and buy half a dozen CDs, and that's about it for me and folk music.
*waaaaaaaaaah!*
Whoa. That's kind of scary. Well. How do I limit myself? I tend to read reviews in spurts (I'll be in the bookstore and see that Folk Roots is there, or Dirty Linen, and then go scan reviews, but mostly those don't affect me...). Some reviews that mention new things by people I know I like do give me heads up notice, but that's about it, review-wise. I tend to hear something (either because someone (and you two know who you are! grin) pushes something at me, or I listen to the radio/internet radio sites) and decide that I like it too much not to have it. Or, alternatively, I get a jones on, for, say, Eighties music, and buy a bunch of it. Really, though... I've decided that what I need to do to filter my buying is to decide if it'd be one of "the hundred desert island discs" that I'd keep in theory --- it's how I'm filtering books these days, too. If I can't tell my self that I really will listen to it/read it again, then it's not being bought.
oh.. I see.. ok.. I filter my buying by not having enough money to buy everything. <g>
Hey, that's how I do it. I gave up long ago on having a 'complete' collection, and I settle for owning whatever recordings I happen to own. I filter my buying by only shopping for CDs once a month or so, and only buying a disk or two at a time. What I own is what happens to be running through my head when I do my shopping.
Why is anything "running through [your] head"? Where did you hear whatever you heard?
Why the sobbing, Ken? Down Home is a good retail store, but you can find lots of stuff online that you'll never see there. Specialty stores remain useful, but they're nowhere near the absolute requirements that they were before the rise of the CD, let alone before the rise of the WWW.
I'm sobbing at the idea that I have to limit the information inputs. "Folk Roots" magazine along leaves me with 3-6 must-have items every month.
One thing that helps me limit my information inputs is the quality (by my standards) of the information. Years of numerous must-have albums that turned out not to be that great has assisted the rise of my stoic attitude a lot. The rise of the Oyster Band, and the disappearance of Martin Carthy into the Watersons, were notable must-haves that it turned out I could live without.
Ah. My guides have, if anything, gotten better in the last 15 years. My estimate is that I've loved about 80% of the acquisitions which came personally recommended by FOLK ROOTS editor Ian Anderson, to pick my best example. Sorry about the Oyster Band, since I'm probably the person who exposed you to their existence...
re 15-16 This is why downloading an mp3 before purchusing a CD can save much heartche (or at least dinero :-)).
Some of us can't do that (yes, I know... dinosaurs... grin... but my office account is firewalled against any use of Napster, and my home machine is verrrrry slow, so slow that I don't think d/l mp3s would be worth it.
Really? My office had no problem using napster, and I actually got my boss using it because she asked me how it worked. I was really suprise how many firewalls it didn't have. But I did get a lot of music, a lot of obscure and rare musical stuff I couldn't find or had on vinyl and wanted a good copy of to put on cd.
(Actually, I beg to differ with raven. During my brief fling with Napster, I told myself I'd only download songs to find out if I wanted to buy the CD. Most of the stuff I downloaded, I liked well enough that I couldn't possibly have afforded to buy all those disks. The dilemma was solved for me after the flaky power supply in my dorm crashed my computer and partially fried my hard disk.)
OOOO...bummer. I put mine on cd as data files and took them home from work. now I do have to sort through and get the cds that i want, but like you, WAAAAAAAAAY too many, it'd be a project for sure...
My office specifically firewalled vs. Napster, according to the sysadmin. They didn't want us using it. That's *shrug* their choice, since we've got a T1 connection...
You have several choices: