When Did You Stop Listening to New Music?

I listen to mostly classical, but my "modern" music stops in the 1960's.

Ella, Louis, Sarah Vaughn, Tony Bennett, Crosby, etc.

2013. There had been a flurry of interesting artists for a couple years, like: Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Avicii, One Direction, Maroon 5, Robin Thicke, Lana del Rey, Lorde... Then it all kinda ended.

Mid-'00s

The only music I listen to now is the oldies radio stations when I'm driving.

I stopped driving to work in 2013 and that ended my radio listening time. I’m now a bus commuter with four handy playlists that are mostly pre 2008 ass jiggling tunes and power ballads.

I still listen to new music, but I don't go out of my way to keep up with whatever "the kids" are into. I check out whatever pops up in my YouTube recommendations and I'll use Shazam when I hear something good in a cafe or while shopping.

I'd say when hip hop, rap and bland pop took over. I haven't really listened to the radio since mid 2000s, I'd guess. Haven't seen a Grammy awards show since the 90s when I realized it was almost all hip hip and people I'd never heard of.

Studies have shown that people tend to stop listening to new music and seeking out new music in their 30s and it declines from there.

Outside of a few songs, there's so much crap and cheap records. The mumble rap and lack of melody is such a head scratcher for me - I honestly don't get it.

Some of the new artists just don't seem like stars to me.

I still like Harry Styles, Gaga, and some others. I WANT to like more new music - but the goods on offer aren't very tempting.

I lost track of new music when it all migrated online.

I stopped from around 2015-2023 but now I'm back to listening to new music. And it feels great to discover new music. It's very daunting with so many new artists popping up but it helps to follow certain podcasts/youtubers. I like Pop Pantheon Podcast and Anthony Fantano for reviews on youtube.

I listen to new music but not in modern genres. Its so easy to find new artists with streaming, and there is interesting new stuff coming out, just nowhere near the top 40

I still listen to new music. I am just more discriminating and don't always find it on radio.

It's still Rock 'n' Roll to me.

r7 "Studies have shown"

Great link

They lost me with auto tuned vocals, too many “guest” vocals and content that doesn’t relate at all to my life experience AKA Wet Ass Pussy. Plus I don’t like or respect any of these people - as artists or human beings.

It’s weird cause so much of today’s music copies directly from the 60s - 90s so it’s weird older people don’t like it.

Outside of hip-hop and modern country, everything is pretty much “revival”.

I’ve been obsessed with this song since I heard it last night on Spotify’s New Music Fridays. I mean it’s just 1960s / 1970s rock.

So it’s weird it’s “noise” or hard to digest for people who grew up in the 60s and 70s lol.

r15 You write like a 12 yr old

r15 " Outside of hip-hop and modern country, everything is pretty much “revival”.

You must be high. Those 2 genres are the most recycled, unoriginal crap.

r13, people are saying...

I didn't stop. I was never stuck in one era or genre, Maybe that's why it's easier for me to accept a lot of different kinds of music. I was listening to a new single today. I was listening to music from the 1920s last night. I don't listen to Top 40 radio, usually. I mean I don't let the music undustry dictate to me what I'm supposed to like or listen to. But I find bands and singers I like who are making new music (some of it even is on Top 40), if that's what you mean.

r19 We're proud of you

I've been singing that Benson Boone song around the house ("Sorry I'm here for someone else ..") so there is hope.

R20 What's your problem? I was just answering the question honestly.

People over 50 who are listen to new music and act all up to date on it look like idiots.

I haven't. I'm in my early 60s.

Same, R24. I'm in my mid-60s.

I listen to old music only by accidental exposure. Some old music holds up and can still have an element of freshness despite the years and endless exposure, but a great deal does not. And the people who liked only the most popular songs of the most popular performers...why would anyone think that they were in a position to provide a long view of quality music?

There's always good music that's new or new to the listener. It's just not simultaneously force fed in Top of the Pops lists to whole nations all at once. And it requires finding - just as better and more obscure music outside the Top 10 lists always has done. That the searching requires new ways has only made things much easier. To hate all new music is not to have bothered to use your ears.

And I have little patience who people who insist that "good music stopped in [insert date certain - usually before their waistline exploded and their hair fell out and they started going to bed at 11.00pm.

I thought that my time of following new music was done after Dua Lipa, as there was a several year gap where nothing new on the radio was appealing to me. But I've recently found myself enjoying songs by Shaboozey and Sabrina Carpenter, and passionately loathing Chappell Roane, so I guess I'm not quite ready for the tar pits yet.

R5, I love Shazam! It has been a game changer for me.

r27 Which game has it changed?

R22 The last album they probably bought was “Guilty” on an 8 track and they’re offend by this thread.

I don't understand - how are you supposed to listen to new songs when this week's top 10 are songs that are over a year old? Many are over 6 to 8 months old?

Harry Styles? How is that worth listening to?

Around 2016 it just fell off a cliff. There's been a few catchy tunes since but overall the music in the past 10 years has been so unmemorable.

Sometime during the 2000's.

In the second half of 2010's, once Spotify took over. I actually listened to the music Spotify recommended to me and realized a lot of that was pop music which was designed on purpose to be sonic wallpaper and fit into an algorithmic list of things that sound alike, blending into one another. Basically, it became a banal 2-2.5 minute snippet created to soundtrack a short TikTok video. A lot of music streaming services have become the sonic version of Netflix: a lot of mid, background content to run in the background while you do laundry or some other chore without actually having to pay attention to it. I don't feel like I'm missing out on much; a lot of what passes for top shelf pop music these days is some girl like Sabrina Carpenter singing some thinly veiled diatribe about a guy who, in her mind, did her wrong, set to pretty generic pop backing. Not particularly interesting when you hear it for the umpteenth time.

Pretty much at 30. That was after 20+ years on being absolutely on top of everything and liking a good 70% of everything that came out.

Gradually, during the 1980s. I realized when Tusk came out in 1979, that it was the only album I'd bought that year except for McGuinn, Clark, and Hillman. And maybe a Talking Heads album. And through the '80s, I mainly bought music by the Police, Talking Heads, Donald Fagen, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, Joe Jackson. And when CD became the thing (1986), I suddenly became interested in classical music. Now, my favorite music creator is Mahler. The B's. Shostakovich. Schubert. And I still listen to a lot of my favorites from the '60s and '70s.

I occasionally make an effort to listen to new music, but frankly, it’s not meant for me. It makes me uncomfortable, as though I’m eavesdropping on a tween’s conversation.

Once, while visiting my sister, I slept in my 15 year old niece’s bed while she was away. That’s what listening to new music feels like to me.

In the mid 00s we suddenly had access to something we’d never had before - the entirety of recorded music at our fingertips, basically for FREE. Decades of masterpieces in every genre.

Who has time to listen to new music anymore? It sucks.

I discover both new and old.

On Spotify, it’s easy for the lines to be blurred because as I said earlier, a lot of newer music is “revival”.

So sometimes for example, I can’t tell if it’s a song from the 80s or if it’s a new song that was made to sound like it’s from the 80s.

For example this song “Once Bitten” is from 1988 and was an obscure record from Los Angeles that found its way into my shuffle and I’ve been in love with it.

I thought it was a brand new song lol.

I am 51 and only listen to new stuff at the gym, where I am almost everyday. Most of the new stuff I LOATH, it's just ugly sounding stuff to me. Some of it makes me queasy. I recognize some of the names, many seem like they have been around a long time but I don't know anything about them and find nothing memorable about their music.

Occasionally though, about 1 in 12 new songs sounds very listenable to me, some are shockingly tuneful in a way that kind off blows the cobwebs off my ears.

I really should make more notes about who has actual talent (to my ears) vs the ones who are about cultivating an image.

I never stopped, but I'm more selective these days with the artists I listen to (I'm 35). It really has to speak to me on some level for me to listen repeatedly. There are only a small handful of contemporary singers/musicians whose work I take the time to follow. I mainly listen to a lot of throwback stuff that reminds me of my childhood ('80s and '90s, a mix of alternative and pop). I also have an affinity for '70s music because it was what my parents played in the house a lot.

It sounds weird, but I was actually not a big music listener for most of my teenage years. My dad was a musician and maybe I was deterred from it because of the "I hate everything my parents like" teen rebellion trope. I didn't have a defined music taste for many years. It wasn't until my 20s that I really started exploring a lot of genres and different types of music and developed my own preferences organically. As far as that goes, I'm a major fan of '80s new wave and gothic rock, as well as a handful of noise and punk groups from the '80s and '90s. That's probably what I still tend to listen to the most.

r40 "Some of it makes me queasy"

Oh, please MARY

Mid '90s.

Music is so fragmented today, you really have to go out of your way to find new music that you actually like. The industry really is a Catch22 nowadays. Previously you had gatekeepers in AR that sought out new talented and tested them to make sure they had staying power. Of course this limited the number of artist you were exposed to, but those artist tended to have some kind of Star Potential - if not their music, their persona. Nowadays anyone can produce a record in their bedroom and release music, which is a great equalizer in that everyone can find an audience. But that just means you have to weed through so many untalented people to find ones that you connect with.

And with music as fragmented as it is, I end up listening to the same things over and over again with a new song popping up here and there. I'm 51 and like Cannons, Empire of the Sun, Washed Out, Phoenix, Tame Impala. But gain, I hear the same stuff all of the time.

People are still listening to the Great American Songbook, for example, 80 years later.

Today's music is not going to be around in eighty years. I'm guessing people will still be listening to singers like Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughn, big band music, and probably even Yacht Rock.

Today's lyrics have nothing on Cole Porter. And moving up to 1970-1990, I'm guessing in coming years people will still be playing or artists covering, for example, Bobby Caldwell's "What You Won't Do for Love", which didn't need to be auto-tuned, and which has been covered over 25 times.

Yeah, I'm older, Have at it.

r23 I agree, but you write like an idiot. Perhaps you should not judge others.

Well since you know how old you sound R45, I will leave it there. To suggest that there hasn't been any great music in the last thirty-five years is a bit disingenuous and an unwillingness to grow as a person in your tastes.

There's contemporary pop conventions like autotune and the whole stripper diva aesthetic that I don't care for, but there are elements in pop from "my" era that I never liked either. ABBA sounds as irritating as autotune to me.

[quote]The last album they probably bought was “Guilty” on an 8 track and they’re offend by this thread.

Close! I have it on cassette.

R47

You're right. I should have said that I thought there were certainly exceptions. Many of them.

Music ended with Shitney Spears.

r51 Before that, even

To suggest that there hasn't been any great music in the last thirty-five years is to see things the way they are.

Fixed.

r53 You tried

Still kind of listen to new stuff, but it’s limited. I like to listen to pop music, but there’s not much originality. Everything sounds overly produced and enhanced.

To be honest, the internet ruined the industry as far as artist with staying power. As I mentioned above, A&R used to be the gatekeepers of good talent. The industry would invest millions in a select group of artist who had cut their teeth moving up through the ranks of live performances, song writing and developing a star quality. But as soon as people started pirating albums that the industry had invested a years worth of time into, they shifted gears. It was no longer about developing talent, producing long lasting albums. It became about the quick hit. Producers became the stars with an interchanging roster of disposable artists. There is no originality - just proven fast marketability. Now you have one face after another with no specific sound or persona outside of the one created for them. Stars last at most three, four years and then on to the next. Lizzo might as well be Dua Lipa might as well be Katy Perry might as well be Sabrina Carpenter might as well be Chappelle Roan. It's all package with zero artistry. I think there was a survey that said the70s where the absolute height of the music industry where a perfect storm of business and artistry combined - "People out there turning music into gold..." And it has gone down hill since then, with a handful of outliers. It's basically ALL business now.

A few years ago I started listening to groups like Club Des Belugas, JoJo Effect, Bebo Best, and Tape Five. They take all sorts of music, old and new, and put their own spin on them. It’s fun and eminently listenable. All are available on iTunes for a listen.

Many comments seem to address pop music as the only sort of music that matters. It never was.

Or, R58, the kind they like to listen to?