maybe it's because i'm young and grew up in the silicon valley with tech startups here and there (napster, kazaa, limewire) providing me with free music whenever i wanted — i've only ever physically bought a CD (from target)

now, i just use last.fm's app in spotify and listen to random things, often not giving a crap about who plays it. there's an infinite amount of music out there, and buying into individual artists (i feel) limits my exposure. of course, i'll still have favorites, but for the most part, i no longer 'shop' for music.

That is such a totally different environment to the one I grew up with, that although I understand how things work now, loving a song for me today still comes with an urge to have 'ownership' of it. It makes the act of collecting or discovering somewhat more of a personal investment than 'faving' a song.

I suspect then that younger people are not missing the store experience simply because they didn't grow up with these concepts. Wandering the aisles, flipping through album art, and taking CDs over to the listening station are probably completely analogous to random last.fm playback and listening to samples, from a modern consumer's point of view.

except in spotify, i dont buy the songs :p

cl.ly

once in a while i WILL drag an album i like (if i notice that i like it while i'm listening to it) over to the playlists section to save it

maybe it's also that music is just assistive to focus when i work. i hardly listen to music when im not working (or dancing)

The long deliberation over, and being forced to choose between, what music we could have (due to monetary constraints) probably made us focus on and assign more value to that smaller batch of purchases, and encouraged the formation of identities over what artists you followed/spent your money on — not unlike other consumer and fashion goods — leading to
a climate where artists were assigned value in themselves. That value would often stand apart from the output over time (witness bands that got worse but stuck around; I imagine that would be harder to pull off now).

Am just considering for the first time, thanks to the above comment, that today's music consumer might have less need for the cult of the artist (and the store/shrine).

super interesting, and i think that 'identity via music' thing is what the new.myspace.com is trying to get at.

I too feel nostalgic about it. You can say the same thing about other real life experiences that got replaced bythe internet. E.g. the arcade subculture. I long for the days when I walked in an arcade, seeing familiar faces. Putting a quarter on the SF2 machine patiently waiting for my turn while chit-chatting with the regulars. Then came the adrenaline rush when I built up a winning streak. Kids these days will never know how that felt like.

Back to music... I like how it is today. I like streaming free music, or only purchase a single song I like rather than the entire album.

I'm interested to know if you guys feel discoverability of new music is better or worse via digital means only, or is it useful to have physical places where music is browsable? I mean, it's hard to randomly find old gems on the iTunes Store unless they're being featured. But relatively so easy to walk to a spot in an aisle of CDs and start digging, and come up with something. Or am I still stuck in the irrelevant age by thinking about the iTunes Store instead of some streaming service?

Jon Wilks wrote something really nice about this, and it sums up all my mid-90s feelings and fondness for the store experience. theautojubilator.com

serendipity is algorithmic

these days it is anyway... engineered by people at last.fm to increase % of those randomly found gems. almost too often that it doesnt feel special anymore

@jin — almost never got those feels. i always felt ripped off at arcades because i had my own game system and home and knew how to download emulators and roms :D and cheated my way through all of them

I never thought I'd use an outdoorsman's analogy, but it's the difference between hunting your dinner and picking up a boneless breast fillet at the store.

WRT to the game arcades, it was the social element, same as when you played Counterstrike in a LAN environment versus purely online. There's something about physical proximity and interaction that digital has not been able to effectively simulate with game lobbies.

i can be down with LAN — cause i dont have to spend any money. i think as a generation where it was so easy to get digital things for free (and being asian), our perceptions of what is valuable to spend time/money/effort to get is totally different

Haha, being Asian myself, and growing up in a country where just about every piece of software in the 80-90s was pirated, I think I can see both sides of it (if only because digital music + internet didn't exist until later). So yeah, the things you pay for, that are in limited supply, are the ones you end up knowing better and valuing more. My feelings towards software and music were completely different at the time.

What made arcades interesting were the layouts and spaces themselves. The appearance of new games where your old favorites were, the back corners where people sat for hours without moving from their sleazy mahjong games, the 'zoning' of sports, fighters, shooters, and the tribes of people that inhabited them.

I think the discovery of music, both old gems and newer releases, online will get better with time. Spotify just announced a move towards discovery so we know its a problem we need to solve.

I think once we've solved that then the nice things about brick and mortar stores will soon be bettered. I do love buying albums on vinyl but for discovery I'd rather trial it on Spotify first, and then order it online.

The bigger thing I think digital music services are failing at is the social side that you'd get from a record store. But I guess that instead of the guy behind the counter making recommendations, it's a blogger. However, this requires a lot of work and engagement on the part of the listener.

All this talk of Spotify and Last.fm's app on the service was making me jealous, and then I realized: A lot of us in the world don't have Spotify/Rdio yet, but thanks to global trends, we're losing our record stores too. That leaves a rather big gap in discovery.

I've tried Deezer, the only equivalent available here (French company, with an intentional plan to launch internationally in neglected markets), but it lacks anything like Genius functionality, or Last.fm, making it more of an on-demand library of individual albums than something that will recommend music you'd like.