Oh, it’s 100% irrational. The desire to be sure you’re a precious unique snowflake and not an algorithmic number; “That guy’s a total Type 2A400GTZ001 in his musical tastes”
But, as I said, I’ve since leaned more into “If the system knows I’m a Type 2A400GTZ001, it can give me the good stuff instead of me wasting my time”. But old habits die hard.
I never managed to train Pandora but one of my roommates did, and we had awesome music for a while. Unfortunately Pandora never identified the tracks via audio and it wasn’t my computer, so I never learned who the musicians or tunes were.
Nobody’s mentioned live concert performances in local genres. Like, not some pop star, but a local guy who plays, say, African blues from Mali. I used to follow a lot of local folk and world bands by going to concerts or venues that promoted them. Or bands that friends played in, were fans of, etc.
Sometimes I just do searches for my favorite bands from 20 years ago and see what comes up along with the original music.
I’ve picked up a lot of new to me artists just by listening to the music played during and after shows on TV or liking a song used during a commercial, which I then went looking for. That’s how I found out about Agnes Obel, Scars on 45, and Rodrigo y Gabriela, amongst others. Someone posted videos of songs by Greta van Fleet and Halestorm on Facebook and they showed up in my feed. The Hu I also found through Facebook, although they were (oddly) one of FB’s suggestions. And, of course, there’s always PBS and the radio when I’m driving. (I can’t listen to audiobooks when I’m driving, because I can’t see the road. It’s an ADD thing, apparently.)
Right now I’m trying to find the name and group that did a song on the last episode of the new The Equalizer show. I’ve already got the original and the show’s version of Glory, both of which are devastatingly good.
BBC World Music
tends to have good stuff. It may not necessarily be UK Top 40, but it is actual music that real people are listening to.
Music played during episodes of ‘Greys Anatomy’ or ‘House’. Or a commercial. That’s it, that’s my sole source of ‘new music’. The music really did stop for me in the late '80’s. I prefer show tunes, a bit of classical music, and oldies. I have neither time nor interest to audition ‘new music’ and can’t tell a Soundgarden from a Cranberry. But if I hear something that appeals to me in passing, on tv, I can look it up and enjoy it from then on.
To me it’s really not much different than noticing what your friends listen to or having a friend recommend an album for you because they noticed you liked certain bands. That said, I’d like it more if they threw in a few curveballs from time to time to keep you on your toes. Like the friend who goes “I know you usually listen to X and Y, but you really should check out this completely different band called Z which is really cool.” And then you have peer influence, which also kind of goes against the desire to be a precious unique snowflake.
I personally don’t care. I don’t like listening to the same old shit, and I don’t care if I can be pigeonholed. I have very wide tastes, but there’s clumps of interest that you can generally figure out what stuff I’ll really like and what I probably won’t. so I try to just listen to something like NME Radio 1 and NME Radio 2 on my Radio Garden app, and then I’ll just randomly listen to a radio stations in various foreign countries for fun. The NME stations gets me a curated mix of stuff I mostly don’t know but fit my general musical tastes. KEXP also does a decent job of keeping me up-to-date on alternative/indie radio.
I’ve got Shazam on the home screen of my phone, and some days I use it more than messaging. As soon as I hear a snippet of something cool, I listen to it with Shazam telling me the artist.
So my “source” for new music is “that store I was in once, a gas station that was playing deep cuts, end credits of new TV shows, and the gallery that was playing a cool instrumental… that turned out to be Pink Floyd.”
Oh, also, if you tell your friends you need to know about new music, you can get in a “trading links/playlists thing” with them.
Lol. I find it hilarious that you apparently still think it’s 2003 and mp3 files are “poor quality.”
And music has been sold to the masses as a commodity forever. I don’t know why you think that is some recent development.
TV shows and, surprisingly, stores are where I’ve picked up some new music lately. I listen mostly to 70s and 80s on XM when I listen to the radio, so that doesn’t often find me anything new, even to me.
The quick & easy version:
MP3 has been around I think since around the mid 90’s. There is varying quality to MP3 (mpeg) files. All are lossy. That’s the whole point of an MP3. Typically, storage on a phone type device is limited. Therefore more compression is used (smaller file size) in order to fit more songs onto whatever size storage one has available.
Most popular MP3 bit rates range from 128 kbit/s to 320 kbit/s and 32000-48000 Hz. The higher the number the better the quality, but also the larger the file size. Simple math dictates that the more a person wishes to store on a set device, the smaller the files must be.
Lossy is similar to jpg image files, or artificially expanding the resolution of an image, say from 72ppi to 300ppi without changing the image dimension. You get what’s called image interpolation. Basically, that’s false information used to fill pixels that no longer exist. Similar is true for sound. In this case MP3. It leaves out certain frequencies. It’s a bit like wiring $10000 speakers with lamp cord.
Conversely, a non lossy format such as FLAC should contain all the information from the original recording. Hence, a true sound.
Apparently some streaming services have recently converted to non lossy. This is good.
It should also be noted that in many instances none of this matters, for any number of reasons. The main reasons being; playback device. If a person is listening on a shitty sound system it won’t be capable of faithful reproduction in the first place.
If listening in a car, road noise will be a factor - or a passenger that won’t shut up.
Or someone like Eyebrows who clearly knows or cares little about such things.
I likely couldn’t hear the difference between a 320 kbit MP3 & a flac file. But a 128 kbit MP3? I’d have to wonder what I was missing.
Oh, I forgot one of my best sources, the coolest message board still functioning.
They have stuff like this (where I just discovered that Pamplamoose is doing lovely songs in French):
I always give a listen to the music on SNL or The Late Show or Full Frontal, even if it’s not a band I’m familiar with, just in case I end up liking it. I’ve found a couple artists this way. (Your talk show may vary)
Up until last year I was subscribing to the print edition of Rolling Stone and that is still a very good music and news magazine. I found a few new artists that way too. I only stopped subscribing because I wasn’t getting around to reading it anymore.
This is true but, on the other hand, storage is cheap these days. A high bit rate mp3 file might be 10MB instead of 3-4MB for a low bit rate file. An 8GB flash drive that can hold roughly 800 high bit rate mp3 files is four bucks. A 512GB microSDXC card for my phone is fifteen bucks and holds roughly 5,100 songs that are 10MB. More than enough for the car or taking with on a jog.
Quote snipped for brevity.
Agreed. Storage is nothing these days. I was simply addressing another poster’s apparent ignorance, which he then compounded by laughing at me as if I’m the idiot here. Any MP3 file is lossy. It’s the purpose of MP3. However few would notice the difference between an MP3 at high bit rate and a non lossy format.
In my opinion, given a choice, it’s best to start with either a non lossy or high bit rate. You can always lessen the quality, but if you start from a low bit rate, that’s as good as it’s ever gonna be.
I think it’s only within about the past year that streaming services started using non lossy. Some phone players were also slow to catch on. And I’m sure many will download the smallest file for convenience, not knowing the difference. Perhaps we’ve enlightened a few 
Training Pandora can take a bit of work. Before the IT department clamped down on streaming audio, I used Pandora to provide music for some parties in the office. Then I started buying tracks which my coworkers would like and I wouldn’t mind having on my iPod.
Sure. Not to defend the tone of the comments but I believe the point was that criticism of “poor quality mp3s” was perhaps more true in the early 2000s and earlier when people ripped tracks into low rate, low fidelity, files to be able to fit more onto a device and because you were sending stuff via dial-up but, these days, high bit rate mp3 quality is more than good enough for most use cases and the larger file size hardly matters for storage or transmission. I would assume that any mp3 seller worth their salt is offering high bit rate files given the negligible restraints. So your initial dismissal of loading “low quality mp3s onto your phone” was a bit curious. But, hey, I know people who refuse to deal with anything but FLAC files so takes all kinds and guess it doesn’t affect me any.
If you just want to listen to music, properly encoded mp3 files sound fine, let’s say CD quality to be precise, so it’s OK if your source is streaming that format. Note that it was not designed to be aurally transparent at “low bit rates” and such files sounded like shit in the 1990s and still do now. But, you should not be receiving such streams, and you can pull up the codec info in your media player to double-check.
ETA I certainly remember many Internet radio streams being 128 kb/s [which for MP3 is a quite low bit rate]; would not be blown away if some are still doing it.
Since we’re knee-deep in a tangent, I’ve got to vent…
I traded some music with a friend (we swapped portable hard drives). Most of mine were high bitrate mp3s (256mbps or better, so most songs were 10-20 MB), knowing they’d play anywhere.
I thanked him profusely for his giving me years’ worth of great music, and when I discovered a new artist by listening to his favorites, I’d drop a note of appreciation. But he never thanked me, and never even mentioned me giving him hundreds of songs I knew he didn’t have and that he’d like.
Then I heard from his wife that he’s such a music snob that he won’t even listen to anything that isn’t FLAC or AIFF at ultra-high bit rates. He saw that my songs were less than 100MB each, and never even transferred any of the files.
Later, I did a test listen on good stereo equipment. I could NOT tell any difference between “darn good” and “near perfect” file formats.
I’d gotten a song from him as a FLAC file that I had in three formats: AIFF, an AAC, and a high-bitrate mp3. Neither me, my wife, or an audiophile friend could detect any difference.
There is not much point arguing how much quality is good enough; it obviously depends on the type of music and many other factors. What is relevant to this thread is that MP3 is capable of delivering CD or DAT quality, which is usually fine even for “audiophiles” listening on good stereo equipment. If your friend were producing and mastering tracks, sure, it may not be nearly good enough quality for that, but otherwise it is not clear what his problem was.
ETA I just downloaded a random video from Youtube. The sound was encoded as AAC, 128 kb/s, 44.1 kHz stereo, 32-bit floating point samples
YouTube has lists broken up by music, gaming, etc. Look at the music list.