Music discovery

In high school, I took an English literature class called “Search for the Self,” a title so conceited that you wouldn’t be wronged for thinking that it attracted the philosophy-curious sophomores of central New Jersey. It attracted me because the class fulfilled a first-language elective and I had heard that it was an easy A. For one of the assignments, we had to pick ten songs that we really liked and write about why we liked them so much. The teacher then made us recite three of our favorite song essays in front of the entire class. After everyone presented, the teacher delivered a mini-essay of her own, talking at length about how our musical tastes evolve during our teenage years and then solidify in place.

She said that the songs we wrote about are probably the songs that we’d still be listening to when we were thirty and forty, and that they’d be our permanent favorites for life. The room filled with doubtful and “not sure if” expressions, surely stemming from our mental extrapolation of how much music we had discovered over the past few years and how that would naturally extend into the future, resulting in our tastes constantly discovering new genres and lesser-known artists. Our teacher wasn’t wrong, the songs I wrote about are still some of my favorite songs that I regularly listen to and go out of my way to wait for to end if I hear it come on at a café or on the radio.

When doing this assignment, I remember vividly writing about a specific verse of the lyrics or how the chord progression in a song captured the leap into adolescence with such sudden grace. My songs were Clocks — Coldplay, White Shadows — Coldplay, Joy Ride — The Killers, Tranquilize — The Killers, In The End — Linkin Park, Float On — Modest Mouse, Karma Police — Radiohead, A-Punk — Vampire Weekend, Souls Meets Body — Death Cab for Cutie, and Map of the Problematique — Muse. I still listen to all of these artists (that are still putting out music) and religiously tune in to any new album release day to stream the entire album with noise-cancelling headphones. It’s pretty much a ritual. I’ve also seen most of them perform live. I remember struggling to narrow down my favorite songs to the top ten and methodically eliminating them until I got to ten with a made-up qualification criteria that I came up with on the spot. I also remember listening to these songs on loop as I struggled to put my emotions into words for this assignment that I, at the time, felt was completely ridiculous compared to the “important” things I was learning in math and physics class that would actually help me major in something useful in college and find a job. Ah, the struggles of high school.

I had a habit in high school where I would come back from school on some days and literally just go straight to our family computer without even bothering to change or shower or nap. I would type in the name of a song that a friend had recommended to me and go on a YouTube binge of that artist listening to everything else they had put out, carefully determining whether every song meets my bar for dedicating a few MBs of space on my trusty 1GB Samsung USB MP3 player, after which I’d boot up LimeWire and go through the risky process of finding a high audio quality version of each song, all the whole hoping that I don’t accidentally install a virus on the family computer, again.

This I think, is the biggest difference in music discovery between then and now. There were physical constraints imposed upon you in the form of limited space on your MP3 player, but we can now just command whatever song we want into our phones and watches from the internet. Even going back further, there were capacity limitations in home stereo systems, like only being able to hold 3 discs at any given time inside. You had to decide which discs had outlived their time in the stereo and replace them with a new one that has more alluring tunes. Same with car CD stereo systems, where every roadtrip asked for careful curation of music that you planned to listen to for that specific route, unless you had a fancy high-end 6-disc CD changer system in your vehicle. Going back even further, you’d have to visit record stores and sample the music right there, waiting your turn to listen on the wall-installed record players to determine if it was worth purchasing. That was music “discovery.”

Today’s version of music discovery boils down to a catchy tune you heard on TikTok and looking up the artist or hearing a catchy chorus in a commercial that sparks an interest in that genre. I still occasionally, organically go into the YouTube binges for a specific artist, but as my high school teacher alluded to, my musical tastes have solidified and I don’t really find that many new artists appealing enough to listen to on repeat. Of course, there are lots of high school friend groups that constantly share, discover, and popularize new music. I still think these are good songs and the artists are very talented, but I never find myself adding them to my daily playlist, even though there’s no real physical limitation stopping me from doing so.

When I graduated from my 1GB Samsung MP3 player to my 2GB Sansa SanDisk E250 MP3 player, I felt powerful. I had doubled my MP3 player’s storage, which meant I could carry entire albums on it instead of being so selective about what to put on there. The interface was also slick, with an iPod-esque scroll wheel that lit up when you scrolled on it. I eventually got the original iPod by saving up my own money, and that was a complete game changer in terms of the experience of listening to and discovering music. iTunes had the entire world’s catalog in it, but I still couldn’t afford to buy albums myself. I would manually load MP3s onto it, look for the album art on Google, and upload it into iTunes. Yes, I did this for every single song on my iPod. If I couldn’t find the album art or if it didn’t exist, I would literally make it myself in Photoshop (which is also partially how I got good enough at it to become a designer) by trying to capture the mood and vibe of the album, and then upload into iTunes which would make it show on my iPod.

I also remember having a spirited discussion in my college dorm with my audiophile roommate about Spotify. He had just signed up for Premium which, at the time, allowed you to download offline playlists so that you could listen to songs without needing an internet connection. I never quite understood the appeal, retorting that I could always listen to everything on my iPod without ever needing an internet connection. But as time went on, it became painful to continually try and find MP3s for every song I wanted, and the convenience of being able to look up a song on Spotify and instantly download it won me over. I’d frequently hear a song I liked at a café, open up Shazam or SoundHound, and add the song to Spotify. Just like that, I had added to my collection instead of setting aside some time to look up and download MP3s. I’ve had Spotify Premium since 2010 and haven’t looked back since.

My multi-cultural upbringing has also drawn a sharp divide in the history of my music discovery. When I was in India, I used to love Bollywood music and would actually cut a deal with my parents that if I aced the next math test, I’d be able to buy a cassette tape of the songs from that movie. If that sentence didn’t make sense, let me explain. Independent artists that put out their own music in India are a very small shadow of the Bollywood music industry. A typical Indian movie has anywhere between six to eighteen songs interspersed throughout the film. And no, these aren’t musicals. These are actual serious films with a plot where the actors suddenly break out into song and dance in the middle of a film, multiple times. I’d highly recommend watching a Bollywood film if you haven’t to get a sense of what I mean. My recommendation for international-friendly Hindi films are 3 Idiots, Dangal, Rang De Basanti, and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (watch with English subtitles, of course; these are on Netflix).

I was really into these films growing up and would run down to the local cassette shop to request a list of songs that the shopkeeper would record onto a blank cassette tape by individually copying the songs onto the blank cassette in a multi-cassette stereo tape deck. He was basically making me a mixtape for a small fee. I would curate lists of songs that would go well together and ask the shopkeeper to make it. I’d wait in the store to provide answers to any clarifying questions the shopkeeper might have like “Which version of this song do you want? The remix or the original?” and “Do you want me to exclude the two lines of spoken dialogue that this song starts with and goes on for two minutes until the real song begins? It’ll give you room for an extra song.” I did this process until my family eventually bought a Kenwood home stereo system that had built-in cassette recording functionality where you could insert two cassette tapes and copy the tape audio over from one to the other. That then became my obsession for a while, where I’d manually get a sense of timing to figure out where the song began or ended and then click the start/stop playback buttons to copy over the audio.

This evolved into CD burning when we got a PC at home, with me installing all kinds of increasingly questionable oddball software to copy over audio in varying formats onto a disc that accepted only a specific format. We then took these CDs on roadtrips and used them in our then-fancy Ford Ikon that came with a 4-disc CD changer, something that my dad always bragged about to anyone that we were giving a ride to. I never had a Walkman but had a Discman that I rarely used on train journeys.

All of these processes, whether it was cassette tapes or CD burning or loading songs into MP3 players or iPods, involved being selective about what songs you wanted to take with you on-the-go and spend time getting them on there. Now I hit a “Download for offline listening” listening on Spotify on a playlist that I’m in the mood for and I’m good to go. The impact this has on music discovery is that you’re not as attached to a song because you didn’t put the work in to decide whether it’s worth taking and didn’t already spend several hours fiddling with cassette recording or CD burning or hunting around in LimeWire for a legit version. Would you value the song more if you did? This might be a fun behavioral economics experiment.

According to some studies, we our musical tastes mature by the time we’re 30 and we stop “discovering” new music entirely by the age of 33, preferring instead to go back to older tunes that we loved listening to in our formative years. I can see why this is. New music just isn’t as appealing when a specific song from when you were 16 can trigger such strong nostalgic memories of a time long gone, especially in a world that’s changing too fast for us to keep up with. I hope I’m still continuing to discover and listen to new music beyond 33, but I have no doubt that I’ll keep coming back to my eternal top ten, even if it is now in a drastically different format and time than when I started listening to them.