To Keep Up With New Music,
You Basically
Have to Quit Your Job
You Basically
Have to Quit Your Job
I have a suspicion that if you want to properly keep up with new music these days, you basically need to stop working. Preferably, you should also have no relationship, no friends, no dog, no need to shower, and no other interests whatsoever. Then maybe by Thursday you’ll finally get through everything that came out last Friday. Although, no. Something else will have already dropped.
There’s literally more music now than any one person could possibly listen to. Sure, you can have it playing in the background from morning till night while you work, go somewhere, answer messages, make dinner. But I’ve always thought music is something you’re supposed to actually experience. You sit down with an album, listen to it, come back to it, notice things you missed the first time. In an ideal world, that’s roughly how it works.
In the real world, you open another list of new releases and realize the ideal world has been canceled again.
It’s hard to form a real opinion about an album after just one listen. Sometimes you listen to ten new tracks, two of them seem pretty decent, and that already feels like a small victory. To really understand an album, I need to come back to it several times. Now try doing that with at least ten albums that actually deserve your attention. Then do it all over again next week. Congrats on the new job, it doesn’t pay.
At some point, I consciously stopped keeping a “need to listen to” list. Just the thought of having that list already stresses me out. I listen to new music very selectively now, because otherwise I hit a point of overload where I don’t want to listen to anything at all.
There’s another problem that feels a little awkward to talk about, because every new artist is, of course, potentially the next big thing. But there are just so many artists now who appear very quickly and sometimes disappear just as fast. Someone could have been a big new name five years ago, and today the band is gone, the artist has changed genres, gone off to do something completely different, ended up in rehab, or simply disappeared somewhere between two updates to your playlist.
I’m pretty skeptical of very rapid success. Not because an artist is necessarily bad if they suddenly become famous. I’m more interested in what’s left once the attention is gone. Being a musician is a pretty brutal job in that sense: it takes an enormous amount of work, repetition, failure, and years when nobody particularly cares about what you’re doing. When someone seems to go through that entire journey in a single TikTok season, I inevitably wonder whether they’ve even had time to understand what that work actually costs.
That’s why at THE OTO we’re happy to give space to very young artists, but I need to feel that there’s actually some substance there. The simple fact that someone released an album stopped impressing me a long time ago. Good for you. You made an album. So what?
Maybe that sounds a little harsh, especially coming from someone who runs a music publication. But that’s exactly the problem: there are so many releases now that simply releasing new music isn’t an event anymore. An album used to be able to stay with you for months. Now you haven’t even decided whether you like today’s album before someone is already telling you what you need to listen to tomorrow.
Because of that, I think we really have become worse listeners. An album is increasingly treated as a unit of content: it comes out, we hear it, discuss it, move on. Of course, there are bands with twenty or thirty years behind them whose fans will play a new album on repeat simply because their relationship with that music started long before today’s release cycle. For a young artist, getting that level of attention is much harder, and I’m not sure the listener is the problem here. Human attention has one pretty annoying technical limitation: you can’t buy more of it.
Maybe that’s why I’m becoming less and less interested in how much new music I’ve managed to hear. The more interesting question is how much of it I’ve actually listened to, because if being a good listener means turning music into yet another list of unfinished tasks, I’d rather miss something.
It’s hard to form a real opinion about an album after just one listen. Sometimes you listen to ten new tracks, two of them seem pretty decent, and that already feels like a small victory. To really understand an album, I need to come back to it several times. Now try doing that with at least ten albums that actually deserve your attention. Then do it all over again next week. Congrats on the new job, it doesn’t pay.
At some point, I consciously stopped keeping a “need to listen to” list. Just the thought of having that list already stresses me out. I listen to new music very selectively now, because otherwise I hit a point of overload where I don’t want to listen to anything at all.
There’s another problem that feels a little awkward to talk about, because every new artist is, of course, potentially the next big thing. But there are just so many artists now who appear very quickly and sometimes disappear just as fast. Someone could have been a big new name five years ago, and today the band is gone, the artist has changed genres, gone off to do something completely different, ended up in rehab, or simply disappeared somewhere between two updates to your playlist.
I’m pretty skeptical of very rapid success. Not because an artist is necessarily bad if they suddenly become famous. I’m more interested in what’s left once the attention is gone. Being a musician is a pretty brutal job in that sense: it takes an enormous amount of work, repetition, failure, and years when nobody particularly cares about what you’re doing. When someone seems to go through that entire journey in a single TikTok season, I inevitably wonder whether they’ve even had time to understand what that work actually costs.
That’s why at THE OTO we’re happy to give space to very young artists, but I need to feel that there’s actually some substance there. The simple fact that someone released an album stopped impressing me a long time ago. Good for you. You made an album. So what?
Maybe that sounds a little harsh, especially coming from someone who runs a music publication. But that’s exactly the problem: there are so many releases now that simply releasing new music isn’t an event anymore. An album used to be able to stay with you for months. Now you haven’t even decided whether you like today’s album before someone is already telling you what you need to listen to tomorrow.
Because of that, I think we really have become worse listeners. An album is increasingly treated as a unit of content: it comes out, we hear it, discuss it, move on. Of course, there are bands with twenty or thirty years behind them whose fans will play a new album on repeat simply because their relationship with that music started long before today’s release cycle. For a young artist, getting that level of attention is much harder, and I’m not sure the listener is the problem here. Human attention has one pretty annoying technical limitation: you can’t buy more of it.
Maybe that’s why I’m becoming less and less interested in how much new music I’ve managed to hear. The more interesting question is how much of it I’ve actually listened to, because if being a good listener means turning music into yet another list of unfinished tasks, I’d rather miss something.
