lirazel | (no subject)

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music

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Okay, I because I keep hearing people lamenting the end of the album, and it confuses me because I still mostly listen to albums??? So I'm curious about y'all.

Poll #29605

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 38

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How do you listen to music *most often*?

View Answers

Albums
14 (36.8%)

My own playlists
13 (34.2%)

Playlists created by others
3 (7.9%)

Algorithms (of whatever kind)
0 (0.0%)

Other
8 (21.1%)

I do have some playlists that I listen to, but not nearly as often as I just put on an album.

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Albums and shuffle :) when I'm on the hunt for new music, yt.

Two questions!

1. When you use shuffle, do you use it for your entire music collection? So the first song might be Led Zeppelin and the second one might be Bach? That sounds so jarring to me!

2. When you use YouTube to find new music, do you just pull up a song you love and then let auto-play bring up the next one and the one after that, etc.?

1. Shuffle is for all the songs on my phone. Not as extensive as my iPod used to be, but enough to not get tired of any of the songs. I wouldn't put a single album on shuffle, I like doing those in order :)

2. Listen to one song I like or that randomly showed up on my front page, then I scan the sidebar to see if something else looks interesting. yt is never on auto-play.

Sometimes I put on an entire album on yt or a live performance. Nice background for puttering around the apartment.

1. Makes sense! Oh, yeah, I have this running app that, if you open it before you open Music, automatically shuffles any album or playlist and I HATE it!

2. Ah, the sidebar is a much better idea. I've definitely done that with kpop before, though I don't tend to do it with other genres.

Very nice for puttering!

most of the time I go with the chaos of just hitting shuffle on all the mp3 files I have on my phone, which is over 3,000 songs. I will sometimes get in the mood for a specific album experience, but that mostly only happens for me with albums that are, like, very coherently Doing A Thing linking all the songs together to tell a larger story. Like the folk album Piece by Piece, by Maria Dunn, which tells the story of the women working in a garment factory in Canada from when it opened to when it was finally shut down. Each song tells a specific woman's story but overall the stories come together to form a mosaic picture of the garment manufacturing industry from the pov of the workers. That's interesting to me! but otherwise I want to have songs appear in my ears without me directly deciding on them, so that I'm listening to things I haven't listened to recently, and won't overplay anything to the point I get sick of it - which happens too easily for me.

I like learning how other people do things!

I really, really like the album form--I view it as like a short story collection, where even if the stories aren't all connected by an explicit theme (like the one in your example which sounds amazing and I'm going to check it out!) they are connected by virtue of all being by one artist who intended them to go together.

I want to have songs appear in my ears without me directly deciding on them, so that I'm listening to things I haven't listened to recently, and won't overplay anything to the point I get sick of it - which happens too easily for me.

These are such different priorities than mine! I'm really glad you found a system that works for you!

I view it as like a short story collection, where even if the stories aren't all connected by an explicit theme they are connected by virtue of all being by one artist who intended them to go together.

haha I also read short stories individually even if they're intended to go together! I follow most of the major free sff semiprozines (Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Tor dot com, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex), and most of them publish stories together as an issue, once a month or whatever the schedule is, and I don't everrrr read them together as an issue. I save the links and read whatever story from whatever semiprozine I'm feeling like reading at the time! I guess I just have less interest in respecting the inherent form or whatever lol.

(like the one in your example which sounds amazing and I'm going to check it out!)

yesssss it's SO GOOD! And it really rewards listening to it as an album experience! I think you'll like it, if folky styles are at all to your taste!

Ah, see I don't read them in the magazines--I read, like, a published collection of short stories by Ursula Le Guin. I can see myself reading a thematic anthology too. But yeah, never do read them in the magazine form!

Excellent! I will report back on how I find it!

I can tell though that the magazines do often have thematic stuff intended in how they group the stories in what issue they come out in together! In some it's more obvious than others but there's definitely editorial intent behind how the stories are published together.

I don't read a lot of published book-shaped short story collections though. I think because it does feel like if I'm reading it in book format there's an expectation of reading through every story in the book in order, and I like to be able to just x out of any story I'm not enjoying instead of feeling obligated to read it through to the end before moving on to the next one. Even in single-author collections by authors I like there's often at least a couple stories that don't speak to me. (Zen Cho is the exception. Every story in Spirits Abroad is perfect.)

Oh, yes, I know about your drive towards completion! I can see how the very experience of a short story collection would work against your enjoyment.

Other because I think I'm pretty equally split between all the options. It depends on my mood and Spotify's algorithm is decently trained to provide more stuff I will like, at this point. I do still enjoy listening to albums, but streaming and mp3 technology does not really mandate the album format the way we had to listen straight through on cassette, lol. I'd say I listen to at least a few artists who don't even really release albums any more? So it seems like you don't even need to have them from a business perspective - people can just stick all your individual song releases in a playlist now. I do feel a shift, even as I ignore it cause it is really satisfying to just play an album from the top.

Edited 2023-07-20 19:12 (UTC)

I think the loss of the album as a form is so sad!!! but I know that people who grow up without it won't even miss it. They'll be used to acquiring single after single, I guess.

Thanks for answering! I enjoy knowing what other people do!

I usually shuffle my entire collection, or all the albums for an artist, if I have a specific mood! No algorithms involved. I used to enjoy the last.fm algorithm back in the '00s though I don't remember why I stopped.

Do you ever get major whiplash when the shuffle takes you from Beethoven to Beyonce or something? I can't shuffle my whole collection because it's just too much of a shift from song to song! But it seems like a lot of people do that.

Not really?? I also have a very varied collection, with classical music, metal, pop and what have you in there 😂 I might occasionally skip one if it's not the right moment for it, but usually it just keeps going in the background and it's fine. At some point, I might think "Actually I would like to listen to more of that artist!" and switch to shuffling all of their albums I have.

I walk nearly everywhere and usually listen to music while doing that. It's kind of a background to my thoughts. Or sometimes, I put it very very low while I'm working on something focused.

But I'm probably half and half in terms of how often I shuffle the whole thing, and how often I shuffle a specific artist with 1 or more albums!

Do you always listen to the albums in order?? I remember hearing an artist back in the day describe how carefully they picked the song order, and feeling guilty because I usually listened to any album once in order, and then always always shuffled it after that :D

I voted "my own playlists" because I have a loooong playlist of faves I like to listen to a lot and it came to mind first, but then I realized immediately after voting that I definitely listen to albums more. (Though I usually skip around them rather than listening to the whole thing in order as God and the artist intended.) So I take it back! My vote is a lie!

How dare you lie to me???

I do love the idea of having a kind of default playlist of favorites. That sounds lovely!

I buy things as albums, still, and when I get a new album I will often listen to it as an album for a bit, but eventually it just becomes songs that I throw together into playlists to listen to based on my mood.

Ah, that's interesting!

I exclusively listen to music on Youtube these days — I used to listen to albums uploaded to iTunes, or playlists other people had made me (also uploaded to iTunes), but I lost all those when I replaced my computer in 2012 (the replacement has survived since then!) — all the individual songs were still there, but the filing and ordering into specific albums and playlists disappeared, and I gave up and just streamed mustic on Youtube after that.

I answered 'other', because although I do sometimes listen to specific albums or playlists created by others on Youtube, what I most enjoy listening to are recordings of live music, uploaded to Youtube. So I'll search for specific performances (either concerts I personally attended or wished I had attended), and take things from there.

Oh wow, that's so interesting!

but the filing and ordering into specific albums and playlists disappeared,

That sounds so incredibly frustrating!

So I'll search for specific performances (either concerts I personally attended or wished I had attended), and take things from there.

That's cool! Isn't it incredible what access we have to things that would have been ephemeral not long ago???

I listen to albums, and if I'm listening to someone who does only singles, I generally listen to them all in the same order so it's like an album anyway XD

I don't know that I listen to anyone who only does singles, but if I did, that's exactly how I would do it!

Almost a pure playlister at this point... it's a rare few albums where I vibe with every song for one thing, and I like being able to queue up exactly what I'm in the mood for. Even prior to Spotify I favoured MP3 playlists, and custom mix CDs and tapes before that! Apologies to the artist's vision, I'm a scrapbook consumer.

Haha, fair enough! I do skip specific songs that I dislike, and there are a few artists where I just have a song or two of theirs, but for my favorite artists who I listen to the most, I am happy to go along with the whole album.

I have a long list of 'music to check out' from songs I encounter in various locations, and I am working my way through the list by listening to the whole album each song is from and then deciding if I want to purchase the whole album or just the song, so I'm actually listening to a lot of albums at present! But that's only for times when I am Working Through The List and the rest of the time I pretty much just have everything I like in one massive playlist on shuffle (with the exception of wordless stuff that I have in a different massive playlist for writing.)

I have a long list of 'music to check out' from songs I encounter in various locations, and I am working my way through the list by listening to the whole album each song is from and then deciding if I want to purchase the whole album or just the song

Oh, that's so great! I love that approach!

Separately out wordless music from stuff with lyrics makes a lot of sense to me. That's why I can't just shuffle everything I listen to--I do not want to skip from a track on Faure's Requiem to a Shania Twain song!

Yeah, I don't mind a jarring shift on shuffle (often I find it kind of fun) but when I'm walking around listening to music or doing basic work tasks I want something that can be a Whole Brain Activity if I want it to be, and when I'm writing I want something that I can push fully to the back of my brain without having it distract at all from the words I'm putting down -- the divide isn't always exactly wordless v with words (some wordless stuff I find compelling enough that it goes on the Walking Around playlist and some stuff that technically has words is meditative enough that it goes on the writing playlist anyway) but that's the most common denominator.

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