i think it is : there was no individually tailored to your past listening-habits programming going on, then.
Heh, I’m also in my mid 50s and I’ve always loved radical changes in genre within a listening session. Back in the 80s I used to have to make my own mixtapes if I wanted to hear Johnny Cash segue into the Dead Kennedys, Now I have Pandora to do it for me.
Almost all my listening currently is through Pandora, I have a few different mixes for different moods set up. Occasionally I’ll listen to an entire album straight through, but most of the time it’s just on random.
Playlists, compilations.
I don’t have the whatsit for sitting through songs I don’t like
Which can be a problem if you’re going to see live music.
Playlists. In the old days, a mixtape, nowadays, a digital playlist.
It stems back to my youth, where imported alternative music was expensive and scanty, but you could hear, and tape, good things off the radio or at listening parties.
Sure, if you owned albums you’d listen to them all the way through, but I didn’t own many, and what I did own tended to be compilations like Standing On A Beach, Substance or Louder than Bombs. But I had a Walkman, and good friends with some good album collections, and the time to sit there hitting pause and lifting the needle, or waiting for the DJ to play the next track on .
My commute time was my time for listening to new music on the radio. I’m never in the car that much anymore (my agency decided to ‘reimagine’ its office space while we were out due to Covid, and they aren’t done yet, so we’re still working from home), so I rarely have the opportunity to listen enough to new stuff to get familiar with it. The most recent new song I remember is Vampire Weekend’s “Harmony Hall” and that was four years ago.
Getting back to the OP’s question, I’d make playlists of my favorite songs I’d heard on the radio in the past year or three, and listen to them when I wasn’t listening to new stuff.
Playlists or singles. If I listen to a whole album it will have to be a greatest hits or best of.
80 % of the time I listen to my own music collection off my computer, which is based on the extensive CD collection I amassed in the olden times - thousands upon thousands of songs. I have never bought a tune online. The rest of my music listening time is divided by going on music sprees on Youtube, and driving, where I listen to the radio most of the time.
My kids ask me how can I stand to listen to whatever the radio station chooses to play, but to me this is a feature, not a bug. I wouldn’t hear new-to-me music much at all if I always chose what I listened to. At home I never listen to the radio, so I’m happy to do so when driving.
As a kid, long before the internet, I would listen to specific radio stations with music I liked for hours every day, and record the best stuff onto cassettes off the radio (always hated when the DJ started to talk before the song was over). I grew up poor, and only had money to buy albums from young adulthood onwards.
But back to the question at hand: sometimes I play whole albums through (and I think albums have specific worth as complete artefacts of particular times, with particular people, in particular contexts), but most of the time I jump from artist and genre to others as my whims go, usually growing from the feelings the music right now but maybe never again raises in me. I might listen to early Metallica, then Chic, then Kate Bush, just like that. I’m in my mid-40’s.
I make playlists with a twist. I like to listen to complete albums but not all at once unless they segue. All of my oggs are combined for segues.
I pick a parameter (albums with songs less than 2 minutes, a certain number of albums from each genre, among many others). When I’ve got 100 or so albums, I sort them by album title, date released, and track # in that order, so that they spiral. That way it’s like the radio but songs generally don’t repeat, and there’s always a surprise around the corner. Typically it takes about 3 months to go through a playlist because the vast majority of my “albums” are radio shows and DJ sets.