The album listener
I’ve been listening to music for as long as I can remember. In early childhood, Dad showed me his cool FM radio tuners, big hi-fi amplifiers, and CD players, and gave me some nice music to listen to.
That said, I only started identifying myself as an avid music listener during my middle school days, circa 2017–2018, which was around the time I got a Spotify subscription.
The Algorithm
Spotify, as well as other streaming services, has an algorithmic approach to discovering new music.
It involves finding individual songs in algorithmically generated playlists, and then marking them as liked to save them for later. Notably, liked songs do not influence the algorithm in a significant way—only your listens do. This has the nice effect of suggestions being based mostly on your current music taste, without mixing things in from the past, allowing your taste to slowly evolve over time.
The biggest benefit of this approach is that it allows you to comb through a large number of songs and artists in a relatively short timespan, simultaneously keeping the feed constrained to what you like listening to. This makes it somewhat suitable towards being listened to like a radio, where you play it in the background, and don’t really bother thinking too much about what’s on right now.
That same boon, though, is its biggest downfall, in my opinion—because being a music player, Spotify gives you more control than a radio. If you don’t like a song, you can just skip it.
That teaches impatience.
What’s the point of pondering over this song which is outside my current music taste, when I can skip over it?
My playlist(s)
Initially, when I started using Spotify, I would listen to music my friends suggested. I had a friend who was pretty deep into rap/trap at the moment, so that’s what I bootstrapped off of.
At this point, I would mostly just make use of Spotify’s liked songs feature to keep track of what I liked listening to. Any time I found a song I liked, I added it into my liked songs. Once I got bored of that song, I removed my like.
Soon enough, I realised this wouldn’t track if I ever wanted to go back to any music I liked in the past, so I created a new playlist called rolling to live alongside my liked songs.
With rolling, when I found a song I liked, I would add it into my liked songs and into the playlist.
I would then shuffle the songs on rolling until I got bored of them, at which point I would boot them out—but they would stay liked, for me to remember them in the future.
Around 2018, I found myself a new friend online, who would shuffle things up in my music taste a little bit. They were a pretty avid hater of rap (especially Polish rap, which I was listening to a lot at the time), which led me to abandon that side of my taste.
I replaced it with things I would listen to prior to my Spotify days—mostly future bass, prominently featuring San Holo’s album1. Alongside this, I had just finished playing Celeste, and I really liked its soundtrack’s electronic style, which led me to add a few tracks from it into the mix. I also added a couple tracks from FEZ that I liked.
This formed the seed for the next series of algorithmic suggestions, though I refrained from using them for a while, to avoid hearing any traces of rap music. Instead I would continue adding music from artists I liked in the past, until I thought the algorithm was sufficiently clean.
This highlights a major problem with suggestion algorithms—lack of control. The Original Sin
Since it’s a black box algorithm feeding you all the music, you can’t tell it to stop. That can get very frustrating really quickly, whenever you get sick of a particular genre or style of music, and are desperately looking for something else. Something which would happen very often during my time using Spotify.
But I kept using it, because I never really imagined another way of finding new music anyways.
It was to me what radio was to my parents’ generation, and I knew of no way to escape it.
Yet.
Something happens
Around 2021, something happened, and I bought my first bunch of music on Bandcamp. Among it was False Noise’s Floral Strobe, one of my favourite electronic albums of all time, and Frums’s vignette.
I can’t exactly explain what that something was that gave me the push, but I thought I’d listened to Floral Strobe so much already, that I should spend a little bit of my pocket money to give back to the artist. vignette came along for the ride for reasons lost to time.
Later on, another album I was excited for had released—Hudson Lee’s Reflex Angle—and I bought a copy on the same day. My collection was now up to three full albums I could listen to.
Up until this point I would listen to music exclusively on Spotify, but having a bunch of FLAC files around on my computer pushed me into downloading Lollypop and actually… listening to a full album, start to finish, for realsies, no skipping, no pickiness, for the first time in my life.
Switching up my way of listening and using an offline music player forced me to actually listen to full albums, because I had no other music to shuffle with—so I had to sit there, patiently, and listen through the whole 1-hour runtime, instead of picking only the songs I liked after one listen.
The effect was that I actually kinda started to like the idea of putting something on for one hour, and letting it play out as a whole—instead of shuffling songs separated from their parent albums. An album started becoming a cohesive unit of listening to music in my brain.
To someone who’s been growing up with physical media—cassette tapes, vinyl records, and CDs—this might not seem like a big breakthrough, but I can assure you it was for me, as someone who grew up as a digital native.
I’ve never had album CDs—I’ve been feeding off of single songs for as long as I can remember, going back to the days of finding future bass songs on YouTube in 2016, or even as far back as 2013, following accounts on SoundCloud that aggregated American dubstep music. Or even earlier than that, when I would stay up late on Saturdays to listen to DJ mixes on the radio.
And then you show me works like C418’s Excursions—thematically consistent, continuously mixed collections of music—and my mind is blown.
I just needed a bit of patience and a gentle push to appreciate them properly.
The album listening
Being an album listener is a true joy.
Not only do you not have to switch context every 5 minutes to skip tracks you don’t like that some stupid algorithm served you, you also get thematic consistency and a continuous mix in addition to that!
A lot of the time, at least.
Not all albums are continuous mixes.
Either way, yesterday I had a bit of a weird reflection about listening to whole albums.
Remember that old way I used to listen to music, picking only the songs I liked upon first listen, and shoving them into a playlist? Back then, I used to talk about songs I liked or didn’t like in very binary terms. I was impatient with music.
Listening to full albums helped me build up patience over the years, and I’ve become a lot more happy with my listening. Nowadays, I listen to a really wide variety of genres compared to 2017, back when all I really cared about was rap music with a cool beat.
I also no longer feel like I have to keep my personality tied to one genre. It feels like learning to listen to full albums was an important part of that growth, among other things.
When you listen to an album, it’s likely you will single out a few favourites. The Spotify playlist experience encouraged putting those beautiful gems into a playlist, and never looking at the album again—but consider what happens when you do the opposite—keep listening to the full album, despite those songs you don’t really like being there:
You acquire a taste for those songs.
Repeat exposure does really interesting things to your brain. If you’ve ever had a song get stuck in your head through listening to it a few times, you know what I’m talking about.
You can hijack that same effect to develop your music taste!
And I think that’s wonderful.
Listen to an album 2–3 times, and you won’t mind those bad songs as much.
Listen to it 10 or more times, and suddenly you find yourself humming or singing those bad songs in the middle of housework.
Albums pave way for new music taste to form in your brain… and that makes finding more music easier!
You get used to new styles, new instruments, and stuff.
And I think that’s incredibly cool, and wanted to share it with y’all.
Also, remember all those algorithmic problems I outlined in the beginning?
Album listening, with a local collection, largely solves those: the algorithm is no longer hard to teach, because there is no algorithm. And the algorithm no longer teaches you impatience, because there is no algorithm.
Finding albums on your own can also land you some cool friendships—speaking from experience. It’s a very social activity, and asking people for albums they recommend is an incredibly fun thing to do.
That’s all. Now go listen to some music albums!
Such as the: album I released in December!!