I remain terrified of losing interest in any new music, because that would mean I am finally old. So I keep seeking it out, and with an ocean of tunes and a limited number of trusted curators out there, I have a very specific way of finding the stuff I like. I obviously find new music through the recommendations of friends, or by hearing it on the radio, or on the soundtracks of movies like normal people, but I also have a weird system that I would not expect to work for anybody else in the world.
What I do is get Mojo and Uncut magazines out from the library, and unless some souless bastard has stolen it, I digitally rip the free CDs they come with, and I put eight of the albums onto one blank CD - they are all 15 songs long, so that's 120 tunes all up - and then I play them on the car stereo, but because it takes me a while to decide if I actually like a song or not, (I am amazed by music journalists who can come to a concrete opinion after one go), I put that uber-mix CD on the stereo in the family car and listen to every single one of those 120 songs three times for at least two minutes, and then twice for 90 seconds, and then once for one minute, and it usually takes a couple of months of driving around town to get through that amount of songs, but by then I've worked out which songs I like, which songs I'm indifferent to, and which songs are actively irritating, because even the most abstract piece of music is staying on that stereo for the full two minutes, and then I save the tunes I like to a regular playlist of all the greatest songs in history, and expand my musical range by just one little bit, through personal curation of a curated free CD on a British music mag.
Like I said, it works for me.
I just finished the latest round, and while results were heavily skewed by the fact that one of the CDs was full of punk nonsense - and they'll bury me a punk - I came back from this small musical odyssey with all sorts of lovely new sounds, including some fairly recent tunes by old faves that I somehow missed:
...some things I would never have been exposed to like these beauties:
...some old timey charmers:
and some absolute punk stompers:
There must be an easier way of getting new music, but I'm not interested in it.
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