My wee sis is a good few years younger than me. She is of this generation of music lovers, accepting with ease MP3’s, Streaming, single song listening and music Blogs. I on the other hand come from a generation of CD lovers, albums and record shops. Today’s music lovers have everything they need to build the most honed music collection to suit their tastes and yet as I sit at this laptop listening to streamed music I feel overwhelmed by the choice of music. Its all about the search.
I take you back to when I really started listening to music. My father was the first source. Here son listen to this album, it was Dinosaur Jr, I was hooked. Others followed and soon I discovered what I liked. Next I listened to Peel, read the NME, Select and occasionally Q (thanks for Grandaddy Q!). A narrow source by today’s standards. I steadily built a CD collection of which I am proud.
Today there is an unstoppable flow of music I like but I cannot hope to give those albums the same sort of attention that ‘Where You Been’ got. Uncut, Guy Garvey’s finest hour, Spotify, Personal suggestion lists, countless internet stations, DAB, the wonderful Third Class Ticket, Blogs, Blogs and more wonderful music Blogs (thanks sis), Jim Gellantly’s amazing radio. Last.fm, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Facebook/Twitter friend suggestions. I could go on. I have a wish list on Amazon I cannot possibly hope to afford. I also want to explore the music that has past.
Perhaps we need another Peel, Steve Lamacq could be the man if he got that late night slot that Peel used to fill with sublime music. Perhaps we need someone we can trust to say, this band are great and you’ll love them. Or perhaps I need to learn to filter the mass of talent (there is tonnes out there) and pick only the very best. That feels wrong though… So tell me how do you search?
(Pabs lead singer of Weird Decibels, we are on every modern platform waiting to be searched!!)
weirddecibels.com 