Are you still discovering new music?

Do you recall how much your high school mixtape meant to you? I'm certain you remember that party anthem that blasted through the dorms at frosh week. What about that song you played 40 times on the summer road trip up to Montreal.  Those songs became the soundtrack of some of the most formative years of your life. They had a bigger impact than what you might think. “Researchers have uncovered evidence that suggests our brains bind us to the music we heard as teenagers more tightly than anything we’ll hear as adults — a connection that doesn’t weaken as we age,”  Via  Mark Joseph Stern In certain parts of our lives, most people go through an addiction to new music phase. Sometimes its that friend that goes to every major music festival, and gives you the rundown on whats hot or not. Occasionally it was a new band that slipped into an online playlist that caught your ear. What about that opening band that you thought played even better than the headliner? Most people have a good sized library of their favourite musicians. Have you ever put much thought into where that all comes from? Lets take a look at how we find new music, and how thats been changing! Perhaps, but we’re drowning in choices. Spotify, Pandora and Apple Music (which launched last month) each teem with tens of millions of songs. Music festivals, such as The Denver Post’s Underground Music Showcase, July 23-26 on South Broadway, offer more live music than most of us could absorb over the course of a year (in this case, more than 400 acts at nearly 20 venues). While music discovery used to be about digging through crates at a record store or watching MTV, now it feels like a process of elimination. We worship the filters, whether they’re trusted voices, smart software or festival curators. Via - HeyReverb As much as it would be easy to jump on the band wagon of blaming these big corporate music companies for pushing their choice of new music down our throats... is it really that terrible? We could talk about the illusion of free choice, and handing over our music preferences to an elaborate corporate agenda, but I don't think this is the case. Has there ever been a time in music where we have had so much exposure to new music? This is a good thing! Streaming a new playlist from one of these big companies is going to show you new music! You can have a plethora of new afro cuban music delivered to you on a silver platter from songza. Say one these band peaks your interested, so you find their latest live show on youtube. You see some related bands in the sidebar, and suddenly you have 4 new bands that you love that all started with a playlist on Songza. Defining “genuine” music discovery is hard. Does it mean hearing something we haven’t heard before? If that’s the case, most of us discover new music every day, from [...]

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