Related Recs

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becoming increasingly DISILLUSIONED by spotify wrapped

i love looking at my music listening stats bc i love a pattern recognition moment but i've become indifferent to spotify wrapped for sometime now for various reasons. seeing all those layoffs happen right after last year’s wrapped left a bad taste in my mouth and with how much the company is leaning into generative ai, i wouldn’t be suprised if gen ai is being used to supplement the missing labor for wrapped this year. music is not as fun without the humans. i also dislike the culture that slowly formed around it. the idea of adjusting your listening habits so your results are “presentable” to your social media following is wild to me…why don’t you just…enjoy the music? i don’t know, people hold it on some weird pedestal. this is honestly tied into my increase in grievances with the app as a whole. if i didn’t amass 40+ playlists in the last ten years or listen to thousands of songs from an array of places, people and time periods, i would’ve left altogether. but alas, i am here. and i wont pretend i dont still look at my wrapped results when they drop. anyways, last.fm is more accurate and i don’t have to wait yearly for those stats.

@deardoveswings

Nov 28, 2024

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KeEping track of music finds

Every time you like an album enough to save it, add the first track to a playlist. At the end of the year you'll be able to see all the discoveries you made, new and old, and they might be roughly in order, too :) It's fun to look through and see any trends in genres or deep dives on musicians!

@greebo

Jan 2, 2025

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DETACH from the algo, become an active participant in your own curation, form relationships to music, track your patterns

I consume a lot of music regularly, and a huge part of keeping a fresh diet of new listens going is having enough sources of recommendations that aren’t an algorithm that either 1) reinforces your existing listening patterns, keeping you stagnant in your tastes, or 2) platforms whoever paid enough to push their product to the top, serving you something that may not inherently be of inferior quality, but may not align with your tastes, may not be exciting beyond just being a new release, and realigns your current listening habits to be more in line with what the average user on the platform is also listening to — which socially might have benefits but which creates a homogeneity of consumption that can become bland since you’re listening to something really just because it’s the next product on the assembly line to have its public moment and not because anything about the music actually captured your attention. the current landscape of streaming is designed to keep you at an all you can eat buffet where you take what’s served to you, and as a result a lot of us have forgotten how to look at a menu and order. so what does taking a more active role in your own music curation look like? for me, it’s meant not using streaming as a primary listening platform. I mostly use my local Apple Music library on my phone that I curate with the vestigial iTunes Library framework that’s still a part of Apple Music on my laptop. probably going to find an alternative soon since apple seems to be cutting integration progressively. I like this method because it forces me to choose what to sync to the limited storage space I have, forcing me to take inventory of what I actually listen to and what I can offload. the files I get are mostly from Bandcamp or Soulseek depending on whether it’s available for purchase or entirely unavailable online (as is the case for a lot of electronic music that was on vinyl only, which is where soulseek comes in clutch). I also have freedom here to change the ID3 tags to better sort and organize, rate, change track info, and track my own listening data. Bandcamp and other music purchasing platforms are great because 1) it reshapes my relationship to music away from consumerism and back towards curation. I have to pay actual money for this thing now if I want to use it, so i’m forced to consider its value (usually i’ll stream a release first to gauge my interest). 2) having to spend money helps me to course out my meals so to speak, as i’ll buy a few releases i’ve accumulated in my cart over the month and cash out on Bandcamp Friday when 100% of my money is actually getting to the artist (TOMORROW IS BANDCAMP FRIDAY BTW!!!), and between purchases I can actually chew and savor and digest my last orders, they don’t get swept up in the deluge of new releases. my plate is full until i’m done and then I order more. also for the times of the year like now when new music isn’t coming out as regularly I take time to find older music that I would normally overlook while keeping up with new drops. currently very into early 80s/late 70s music with early digital production, kinda stuff that would evolve into synthpop and dance music. so how do you know what to order? for me, I’m getting recs through trusted curation platforms. whether it’s bandcamp daily, y’all lovely folks here on PI.FYI, friends, or most importantly musicians who I follow on socials that share their tastes through posts, stories, playlists on steaming, interviews, etc. I like this last one especially because it’s kind of like a musical game of telephone. if I like an artist and they share their interests and influences it’s like every layer in this process is stretching my palate further from the sound that I was originally interested in and into a new territory that has some shared DNA but would never have been recommended to me by an algo because there’s no shared category or label between them, only the musical influence and interpretation of it made by the artist. as an example, I was a huge Skrillex stan, he signed KOAN Sound to his label, they collab with Asa who collabs with Sorrow, Sorrow takes huge influence from Burial, Burial makes some ambient adjacent stuff and takes huge influence from 90s rave music and drum and bass and 2000s rnb, now i’m listening to Brandy - All in Me, William Basinski, Aphex Twin, none on whom would get recommended by Spotify to me from Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites. LAST thing i’ll say — because in yappin about this i’m realizing how actually passionate about this subject I am: MAKE LISTS! playlists are cool, but they can flatten your music into vague categories of “vibes” and “aesthetics” and encourage picking one-off songs from artists that you never form an active audience relationship with. I make a practice of making my own year end lists of top 25 albums (plus some honorable recs and top individual songs) and keeping them in a notes doc that I regularly update and rearrange over the course of the year. this forces me to consider the actual relationship i’m forming with what i’ve ordered for myself. did I like it in the moment but it didn’t have staying power? is it slowly growing on me? it also encourages taking albums as a whole. maybe I liked one or two tracks a lot but the rest wasn't resonating. that’s ok! maybe I rank it lower but now i’ve actually taken time to consider it, it’s in my library, and maybe (quite a few cases for me) something I ranked like bottom 5 albums becomes a retroactive favorite from that year as my tastes evolve. also 25 albums to take with me from each year is really more than you'd think, i struggle sometimes to even find 25 that I formed a true connection with. I think the biggest thing the itunes era ruined that led into now is the single-ification of music, the ability to separate the hits from the deep cuts. albums are meant to be taken as a whole, and then once you've really sat with the whole you can find what actually stuck. even then I like to keep the whole around because soooo often i’ll write off a track that yeeeears later I come to love. trust the artist, they made it like they did for a reason. aaannyyyywayy TLDR: get recs organically, be more active in deciding your listening patterns, fr*cken pay artists yall, trust the artist embrace the album, really consider what you consume

@royallmonarch

Feb 29, 2024

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Top Recs from @madhearts

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growing older

“how can a person know everything at eighteen, but nothing at twenty-two” life truly humbles you. as you start growing older, you stop only chasing the big things, and start valuing the little things too. being able to weave stories of experiences and begin applying them—integrating the lessons and learning curves. in the past few hours of being eighteen, ive learnt how limited our time on earth truly is. i was advised (perhaps even lectured) that i shouldn’t try to defy nature’s course with futile attempts to “age gracefully”, but to rather age with mischief, audacity and a good story to tell. beyond grateful for the love that surrounds me, and the love that i am bound to give out.

@madhearts

Dec 22, 2024

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Pain is Inevitable, but misery is optional

An ideal world is one that knows no pain. That, sadly, is not the one we live in. Pain is a part of the human experience—but failure to move on from it makes you miserable. If you dwell too much on what has happened, you will never be fulfilled enough to see all the good you have/ that is to come. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of a situation. ‘And in fact, it’s time to forsake someone else’s idea of what gives you a spark or no spark. Block the “other” from the picture. No more audience. Just you.’ Whether you choose to take that responsibility (of acceptance), or give it up to the disappointments of life, you return to yourself. The choice is whether to wallow in the misery of that pain, or take it as it comes and look at what it has to offer you.

@madhearts

Jul 18, 2024

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Filming every Little thing

"You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place. Like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again." - Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran The best decision I’ve made this year was to start a video journal of my senior year and capture every moment—no matter how insignificant—to keep the year frozen in time. No matter how much time goes by; no matter how many characters I change to become, I’ll always have these videos to remind me of my essence—where I come from, and what made me. It doesn’t matter that the cusp of them are 0.5x videos of my friends’ foreheads, clips of me crying in public restrooms, and logs of us stealing grocery store carts to race them down the street—these moments are what I stay alive for.

@madhearts

Jul 22, 2024