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i’m not saying i want to or will put on every subgenre (bc i will not!) but i love being able to listen to most genres or at least appreciate most genres when playing their best. i’ve got playlists for so many moments and genres and moods and it makes me so happy having such a variety of music in my life!
i’ve found that people who say “i listen to everything but country and rap” usually don’t even have a wide variety of music preferences within the “everything but” they refer to. music is such a diverse form of art and restricting yourself to a few artists or only what’s popular (hello tiktok…) is doing a disservice to the medium and to yourself as someone able to listen to music. now, i’m not at all saying that liking “popular” music is bad in and of itself. i also love charli xcx and tyler the creator and so on, but i don’t think you should restrict yourself to the top 40 and your daily life will likely be improved if you listen to all kinds of music, on the reg or least occasionally in an exploratory way.
it also makes me sad when artists i’ve liked a while become popular online for a few songs but it seems like people new to the artist don’t bother listening to their earlier music or subgenre. i’m happy more people enjoy them but omg! like for example, charli XCX being seen as “new” by some people - but there’d be no brat without how i’m feeling now and pop 2, nor without pc music and SOPHIE. i actually suspect the percentage of people streaming apple who could tell you who SOPHIE is is probably depressingly low :(
anyways, i’m no purist and of course have my own regular rotation but, i really really recommend exploring within different genres to find more of what you like. you might even be surprised! maybe you don’t like all kinds of country, but you learn you fuck with folk (or at least johnny cash, i mean, c’mon); maybe you think hyperpop is “too weird” for you but you discover some electropop you’re obsessed with. exploring music—“listening to everything”—is very worth it!
Dec 31, 2024
Related Recs
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Normally, I’m a big album person, but lately my roommate got me into listening to my liked songs. It’s amazing. You get the best of all worlds, Nirvana into Clairo into Caroline Polachek into Talking Heads into Andre3000… How spectacular that we have all of the music in the world just at our constant disposal.
Nov 12, 2024
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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
Feb 29, 2024
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Some of y’all have great taste in music. I’m really just a “if I like it I’ll listen“ type of person. Don’t really have crazy music knowledge (more of a movie guy) so it’s cool to come on here and go “oh ok they know what’s up when it comes to this music shit, let me peep what this is about”. Discovered so much good shit scrolling through this app. Keep it up music lovers, y’all keeping my ears blessed.
Sep 23, 2024
Top Recs from @marxinista
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being traditionally cool is really quite boring and iterative, and it’s actually very cool and sexy to geek out about something you like or share bits of knowledge on a topic you’re passionate about
Aug 17, 2024
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i had it for a little over a year until i was like wow this is actually terrible! i genuinely think it has negatively impacted society by ruining people’s attention spans, having a horrific algorithm, and most of all by the most mind-numbing or outright harmful trends -
fake words that people now use IRL (“unalive”), trad wife tiktok, shein hauls, body-focused fitness vids that encourage fatphobia and unhealthy habits, shallow political/feminist theory and queer discourse, “alpha male” podcaster tiktok, encouraging overconsumption in general, trends ruining local spots or niche things… the list goes on
Aug 17, 2024
a million times cooler than the lackluster “sleek” tech color palette used today
Feb 22, 2025