Red Mosquito

This is something I think about from time to time, and this post in the "Best of 2012" thread got me thinking about it again:

BurtReynolds wrote:i dont think i listened to 25 great albums from last year yet. Might be a top 5.

A couple years ago I remember reading one of those end-of-year critics' polls, where a magazine's individual writers posted their own personal lists alongside the magazine's collective list. One of the writers surmised he had listened to somewhere around 150-200 new albums that year. I thought about that for a minute--that's approximately a new album every two days. I suppose if you're lucky enough to write about music "for a living," maybe that's not so absurd, but when I apply that to my own life, I just can't come up with a way to find time to listen to all that, plus all the other stuff in my collection, have time to process it all in any kind of meaningful way, and still retain any semblance of a normal life. How would one stratify 150 albums from the same year without at some point descending into arbitrariness?

I probably bought 20-25 new albums in 2012 (meaning, albums with a 2012 release date), and this was a year where I specifically made an effort to stop being such a crank and actually go discover some new artists. Granted, there are elements of my life now that make it harder to work in time to just sit and listen--at least in the same way I did prior to getting married and having kids--but I still listen to a lot of music and still really love getting new things to listen to.

But some of the folks here seem to process significantly more music than I do, and I wonder if that's an issue of circumstance (having a job where you can have music on while you work, having long commutes each day, not having children in the house, etc.), an issue of processing speed (i.e. how many times you have to get through an album before you internalize it), an issue of retention (i.e. a listener who listens to something a couple times and then discards it and moves onto something else vs. a listener who prefers to absorb things into an ever-expanding "collection," physical or digital), some combination of it all, something else I'm not considering, or what.

So, how much music do you listen to? How do you process it? Folks who have heard 150 new albums this year: How did you fit it all in?

Overall, I probably heard about 15 new albums from this year, along with quite a few releases from years and decades past that I'd never heard. Overall, though, I'm not a song junkie, although I do listen to music all the time. I tend to go the opposite direction, and just get obsessed with particular songs or albums. I think I also tend to enjoy listening to the same things at different points in my life, seeing how an album grows and changes if I've been in conversation, for lack of a better term, with it for a while. I have a similar feeling with bands, which is why overall I think I tend to know the catalogues of a few bands ship to stern than know many, many songs from a lot of different bands.

I think I heard 10 new albums this year.

Spotify has me discovering new music every day. So right now, I'm listening to a "shitload" of music.

I need to take advantage of Spotify.

what do u mean by "new" album? one that came out in 2012 or one we discovered this year? i find myself listening to older music the older i get

It takes me a long while to fully absorb an album. The process usually goes like this; If it's a CD, I'll listen to it on the way home from wherever I purchased it or downloaded and burned it, and then once I get to my destination, I'll pause it. That generally gives me time to assess the general feel of the album, without really making any judgements. I get through three or four songs this way, and if I really like the album I'll take the long way home and get an extra couple of songs in there.

After that, I play the album all the way through that night on headphones. I like that those first four or five songs aren't a complete shock to my system. Things start to sound a little familiar to me, and that primes my musical palette for the rest of the album.

From there, I usually go through a few more listens over the next couple of days and I begin to pick up lyrical things or individual instruments that I'm impressed with. Then the inevitable happens and I read a post on here about some band and get distracted with other music and put the new thing down for a little while (The Highway Rider is currently suffering from this, btw.) This is perhaps the most important step in my absorption process, because when I do return to the album in question a few weeks later, that first listen upon revisiting is the most crucial. It's on that listen that, somehow, I can just tell if this album is going to stick with me or be forgotten. Mirror Traffic was probably my favorite album of 2012, based on this lengthy process. I still can't put it down.

If it's used vinyl (which isn't really "new music," is it?); I generally buy in small bulk and throw them on when I'm posting. If the music is captivating enough for me to stop posting and just sit and listen, then I consider it "good" (Leon Russel's Carney is the most recent example of this for me.) If it's a used jazz record, I listen to it a few times before I decide what food would be best when cooked to it.

Like you, I probably listened to less than 25 new albums in 2012, but I feel like I know each of them intimately.

Though I listen to music all day at work, I don't think it has led to me burning through new music much faster. I need some time to build up a connection to most music, even if it is fairly immediate or accessible. I do listen to many new bands on Youtube, but most of it gets thrown back on the pile, for me to get back to when I'm sick of the one album I'm obsessing over. If I discover a band thats been around for awhile, I'd rather go back and find their earlier stuff. This leads to a pretty large backload of music.

I'm also content to let others be first adopters and recommend new music to me. I seem to be at least a year behind most people here.

I have tried to make an effort to listen to more new music this year, but I dont know if I'll stick to it. As an experiment, I downloaded several new albums last month (probably because of all the year end lists), but found that I was trying to force myself to enjoy it. I wasn't having much fun. I was enjoying myself a lot more when I was listening to Warp Riders nonstop all summer.

Wow, I guess I was late to the Mirror Traffic party. It will always be a 2012 release to me.

My job allows me to have music on almost all day long so I usually listen to 300-400 albums each year, and that's only counting the ones I hear in full. It doesn't take me long to know if an album is worth my time so I can discard something very quickly if I'm not feeling it, and I'll give something some time if I'm not convinced yet but I feel there might be something more.

The ranking thing, though, it's mostly bullshit. I know which few albums blew my mind, I know which others I liked a lot and then there's a shitload of stuff that is good enough to deserve a mention at the bottom of a long year-end list.

Yeah, I can't really get behind ranking either unless it's to be a serious thought exercise centered around a theme, a la the novel High Fidelity or most Paste lists. Those are generally fun reads and occasionally very enlightening.

kreng wrote:

conoalias wrote:My job allows me to have music on almost all day long so I usually listen to 300-400 albums each year, and that's only counting the ones I hear in full. It doesn't take me long to know if an album is worth my time so I can discard something very quickly if I'm not feeling it, and I'll give something some time if I'm not convinced yet but I feel there might be something more.

The ranking thing, though, it's mostly bullshit. I know which few albums blew my mind, I know which others I liked a lot and then there's a shitload of stuff that is good enough to deserve a mention at the bottom of a long year-end list.

you remind me of someone

This questions interests me greatly and I often worry that my need to constantly consume music could be a problem. Only thing is I rarely listen to new music when it's released. I tend have periods where I fixate on an artist and go through their whole catalogue.

This year I did go through a few 'Best of 2012' polls and downloaded some current music to check out. Out of Beach House, Ty Segall, Frank Ocean and Swans it's only really been the Swans album that has excited me. The rest seemed good but I wouldn't listen to them more than a handful of times.

Yeah, with the advent of Spotify I am discovering more new music than ever before.

verb_to_trust wrote:Yeah, with the advent of Spotify I am discovering more new music than ever before.

Could you eloborate on this? I use spotify a whole lot but I still find out about music through other channels and then just stream it through spotify rather than download. How do you go about discovering new stuff through spotify

conoalias wrote:My job allows me to have music on almost all day long so I usually listen to 300-400 albums each year, and that's only counting the ones I hear in full. It doesn't take me long to know if an album is worth my time so I can discard something very quickly if I'm not feeling it, and I'll give something some time if I'm not convinced yet but I feel there might be something more.

my work situation gives me lots of headphone time but i like to listen to audiobooks as well so i don't devote all my time to new music.i'll usually download about a hundred new (or new to me) albums per year. i can typically tell right away what i'll like and what i'll just toss. filtering that much music over the years has really gotten me in tune with my tastes so i can filter through a fair bit of music over the course of a year while giving most of it a fair shake. but some stuff i'll keep on the off chance that it might catch me on random in the right mood for it at some point. i've had a few albums creep up on me that way years after the fact.

conoalias wrote:The ranking thing, though, it's mostly bullshit. I know which few albums blew my mind, I know which others I liked a lot and then there's a shitload of stuff that is good enough to deserve a mention at the bottom of a long year-end list.

this is pretty much how i operate too. as far as ranking goes, i tend to just break things up into tiers. a tier 1 album is one that blew me away and i listened to endlessly throughout the year. tier 2 are good and i listen to regularly but not earth shattering. then you get the decent stuff (the music i'll hold onto just in case but i'll rarely revisit it) and the garbage. the individual ranking within those tiers is pretty fluid. when i look back at my past year end lists i get a laugh because i could completely reorder them and entirely ditch some of my supposed favorites at the time. but that's a thing with a list. it's just a time capsule of my taste at that particular time. it would be a fun exercise to go back and revisit a year based on my tastes today. 2006 (the first year we did the RM year end list) would look entirely different for me today than it did then.

I love music so much I will go through periods of becoming anti social so that I can just sit at home with a beverage, a guitar and some music playing. I dont keep track of how many albums I listen to but im always checking out new stuff. However, id say maybe 50% of the stuff I check out stays with me for extended periods of time. I listen to music all day at work, while skiing, while at the gym, while in bed....

pathetic maybe but there it is.

durdencommatyler wrote:I think I heard 10 new albums this year.

yeah, if that. I just can't find time and I can't really work with music in the background.

Not as much as i used to.
For some reason this year i did not feel the hunger to look for good new music.

Before i would generally listen to 35-45 new albums a year on a regular basis

I think this year i probably listened to 15