Finding New Music and the Pros and Cons of Streaming Services - Jack Budofsky

     The way I tend to listen to music is I'll have two or three albums that I'll listen to on repeat for a month or so, and then I move on to a new set of albums.  I find I can't listen to music while I'm working or doing something else, I'm too easily distracted by what I'm listening to. Instead, what I ususally do is I take time to listen to an album all the way through and do nothing else other than focus on the music. This means I really only listen to maybe an album a day, so I don't get bored of any song or album very quickly. I know  this is a really weird way to listen to music,--I don't even use playlists--but it's what I've done ever since I've had Spotify. 

     This style of listening means that every once in a while, I need to find new music to listen to. This happened to me earlier in the week, and this time I decided I wanted to find something that I had never listened to in my life. And so my journey of scrolling through the For You playlists looking through the Similar Artist lists on Spotify. I eventually came to something entirely new that I might not have otherwise listened to and I really enjoyed it. 

     My search for new music got me thinking about how streaming services have completely changed how people discover music. In the past, the only way to learn about new music was through the radio or by buying music yourself. If you wanted to try something completely new, you would have to commit to it with your own money. You couldn't just listen to a few songs and decide it wasn't for you, because that was a waste of money. This meant the number of artists people would listen to were very limited, and there was likely a lot of music that a person would really like that they would never hear. Nowadays with Spotify and Apple Music, this is a lot less of a problem, because pretty much every song ever is availible to everyone for free. But here's the  thing, there is a lot of good music out there. Because it's so easy to listen to anything, it's also easy to get overwhelmed with options. This is a problem I ran into in my search earlier in the week. With no limits to what I could listening to, I had serious decision fatigue. I've found myself before choosing to listen to nothing at all because I just couldn't decide, which I know couldn't have been a problem before streaming services.

     Without getting into how streaming services pay musicians (because that's a WHOLE other issue), streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are ultimately a great thing for listeners. It's become so easy to listen to whatever you want whenever, and people can discover new artists just as easily as they could listen to top 40 music. In all, it's really interesting to see how streaming has completely changed how people listen to music, and even if it means sometimes I spend an hour chosing what to listen to next, it's amazing how you can discover something new with a mere click of a button.

The Spotify home screen can be overwhelming at times