like, all the people who really do love music, but at some point stop seeking more. what are they all about?

Partly true – I can't enjoy the experience because I'm nervous watching them, and if they're interested in music their comments matter.

TS: subjecting significant other to unloved music via speakers vs. neglecting/ignoring significant other while wearing headphones

It's almost worth a separate thread: does bachelorhood affect consumption?

In my case, most definitely. Before I started dating my girlfriend, I would stay up until ungodly hours downloading stuff and drunkenly posting on ILM. I also used to go to sleep listening to music, and I teased my girlfriend, several months into our relationship, that I wasn't getting into as many ambient/electronic albums anymore because my ideal venue for listening to them was in bed. Of course, I still play music around the house a lot, and there are bands that we both like and listen to together, but she's by no means as much of a music-nerd as I am, so we end up also devoting time to things like cooking or watching TV (both of which I rarely engaged in when I was single).

Partly true – I can't enjoy the experience because I'm nervous watching them, and if they're interested in music their comments matter.

Tom Ewing's most recent Pitchfork column:

There's a kind of experience I think every music fan has had. I call it the "bad ears": It's a kind of one-on-one Wyatting, and it's what happens when the assumptions you make flip over and leave you the one vulnerable. It's when you're with a friend, and you play them some music you like and you want them to like too. They don't say anything. And suddenly you're hearing it with the bad ears: Every pretension, every flaw in the music becomes utterly obvious to you. The lines you thought were terrific are revealed as facile. The lines you thought were lovably dumb are chasms of embarrassment. The song ends. You want to vanish. And your friend smiles and says "Yeah, that was good," and then it's their turn.

you're less likely to put on music that the other person doesn't like while doing the dishes

^^^ or reading, or playing with the baby, or anything really. I have a night or two a month where after the family is asleep I have a couple beers, put on the headphones and either listen to old LPs/CDs, or (rarer) some new music I've acquired.

The rest of the time I probably have the Nat King Cole Trio on.

It's almost worth a separate thread: does bachelorhood affect consumption?

Totally. One hundred percent.

Not necessarily the AMOUNT of consumption, but the TYPE, for sure. When you are in a relationship with another person, and especially when you share living space with them, you cannot help but have your consumption patterns/amounts affected by that sharing.

I play a lot less video games than I used to. I also go to a lot less live shows than I used to. This begins to change tonight. TONIGHT, I SAY! well, at least with regards to music. Its going to be on all the time, from now on. Period.

Foot. Put. DOWN.

It's when you're with a friend, and you play them some music you like and you want them to like too. They don't say anything. And suddenly you're hearing it with the bad ears: Every pretension, every flaw in the music becomes utterly obvious to you. The lines you thought were terrific are revealed as facile. The lines you thought were lovably dumb are chasms of embarrassment.

Yes, this. And that in turn makes me think that ALL musical experience requires that you 'buy in' to a certain extent, like you have to allow yourself to get into a certain trance and the wrong influence breaks the trance.

Really? Is this a gender thing? If I'm doing the dishes, I'm gonna listen to whatever the fuck I want.

oh there's definitely things my wife will complain about having to listen to. Steely Dan, for example.

(otoh I complain whenever she makes me listen to AC/DC so it's all good)

a kid in the equation alters things even further - loads of hip hop is basically totally inappropriate for anyone under the age of like 14 or 15

xxpost

Heh, my wife too. She told me to save the Dan for Jack and Larry's wild night out at the Regal Beagle.

lololol

There's a kind of experience I think every music fan has had. I call it the "bad ears":

multiply x10 when it's your own music

I don't know if it's a "trance" so much that after the initial period of evaluation I get ever so slightly complacent, which is when a fresh pair of ears helps.

xxpost

multiply x10 when it's your own music

Part of why I love the new C4n4st4 album is that I get the simple pleasure of hearing something I wrote without the self-conscious anxiety of hearing something I played/recorded.

TS: subjecting significant other to unloved music via speakers vs. neglecting/ignoring significant other while wearing headphones

Why take sides? Do both!

Ok, well I do the latter when the Mrs is watching Oprah, and it's cool. When we're in a shared space with music playing I make sure it's something that she likes or at least is spouse-appropriate, i.e. The Fall is right out.

I count myself lucky that the wife digs the Fall, Beefheart, metal of all sorts (altho particularly Sabbath, 80s stuff, and drone metal), the Bee Gees, Kool Keith, etc. the list of stuff she hates to listen to is pretty short actually

re. bachelorhood/consumption of music: no significant change for me. Neither with fatherhood. My consumption of tv & film has been basically zero since what would become my marriage began, though, so I guess that's the tradeoff I made (and ffs that's not the usual "I don't own a tv" brag, I think).

xp haha the only album my wife has ever told me to turn off was Trout Mask Replica.

my wife won't stand for much twee indie shit - Belle & Sebastian elicits howls of derision

We do better if metal and jazz (aka "doobie doobie music") stay on the headphones.

xpost -- You should heed your wife's wisdom.

yeah my wife has very low jazz tolerance too, with a couple exceptions (Miles, some Sun Ra stuff, Alice Coltrane)

sorry to turn this thread into "things my wife likes" carry on

Anything overly guitar-wanky / prog, bar Hendrix, gets snorted at, and probably rightly so, by my wife. No Zep, no Floyd, definitely no Steely Dan.

I've read this thread with great interest and, unsurprisingly, with an awful lot of identification, especially with jaymc's posts.

Ooh, David Villa.

We bought a house and moved in together nearly three years ago, at exactly the same time as Stylus ceased publication, near enough. This was then followed by about 18 months of career he'll for me, which I only emerged from about 4 months ago properly. I now have a "serious" job that requires me to not piss about on the Internet all day or sit in a giant library basement in my own listening to whateverthefuck I want during the day. For about a year after house/Stylus I gave up on new music and was very down about that; now I've reached a kind of equilibrium, which I'm very, very happy with. I don't listen to as much music as I did five years ago, but I watch more films, more TV, I cook, I go on more bike rides, I did a charity run the other week - all stuff that, while I was being a music monster, i couldn't and wouldn't have ever done. And, bar a couple of small things, I'm the happiest I've probably ever been. Between us my wife and I have bought 20+ albums released this year. I think that's a good amount. Even when I was monstering my most, end of 2004" I was always concerned about getting value out of music, listening to it enough to not feel that it was... trivialized.

I remember a few years ago being really upset and disillusioned when Freaky Trigger started the parallel food and travel and art and sport blogs, as if Tom et al had somehow betrayed music... Or not music so much as... The purity of being a music fan. But, as has been mentioned, a lot of music fandom is about identity and my identity then was as a music journalist, pretty much. My day job was untaxing and low paid and I defined my achievements by what we were doing at Stylus, I guess. These days, well, I just gave up writing about music after Stylus, for various reasons.

One of them being that, right now, I'm watching the football with the sound down and listening to the Owen Pallett album and posting to ILM via an iPad on my lap. I haven't got the time now that I used to. I don't know how. My job still starts at 9 and finishes just after 5. I guess I make twompeople sandwiches each day, and cook dinner each day, and feed cats, and water tomato plants, and cycle to Sainsburys for breakfast cereal (with headphones on) (on the cycle path at least, not on the road!). I like to talk to my wife. I pretty much watched no television from 1998 when I went to university until 2007. Now i watch... Not a lot, but a lot more than none.

I don't feel any pressure to keep up anymore, but there is still a desire there. I've never been quite the voracious seeker of new sounds that other compatriots were - for me writing about music was always more about fathoming my own existing tastes or enthusing things than about discovery - and i guess that's an influence.

My new boss is an ex music writer too. We have very similar taste, and occasionally geek out about Four Tet or Can or whatever after meetings. We did a music quiz together the other week and took it super seriously (and won by some distance, thankfully!). We vaguely talked about getting a show together on the very local community radio station. I'd never have considered doing anything quite so fun when I was still a monster. I wonder why.

My ex complained that my music was all "boppy". My wife complains about "whiny guitars". (she's probably very much in line with a certain strain of ILM thought on that one).

xpost -- Hahah I like your random World Cup interruption there.

Em's got money on Villa being top scorer, on my advice. I'm invested here!

Another batchelor here. The hours I am able to indulge in listening to music are probably incredible to most people in a relationship - basically music is playing any moment I am awake and not at work.

Might be related to this: one of the best sensations I know is when you're just getting to know your next favourite new album, you can't quite consciously remember the songs yet but you wake up in the morning with snatches of them running through your mind.

Also I love to burn out a new favourite album, completely overplay it - because I know another one will be along soon. There's no shortage of music to fall in love with.

xxpost my wife and I have the same taste but she can't stand the Dan either. i think its a gal thang

oh there's definitely things my wife will complain about having to listen to. Steely Dan, for example.

― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 29, 2010 1:24 PM

Aren't you the guy who said his wife tended to listen to her box set of The Police only when he wasn't around, or was that someone else?

How music has changed since I am in a long-term relationship: I still listen to it, seek out new stuff, with a proportionate amount of passion & energy. I just don't do as many obsessive things surrounding that hobby. So I used to make a mix CD every month of every song I liked from that month (it seemed nice to have some empirical token of I'm Really Listening), and whenever I had a spare moment I'd sit around writing lists in a notebook of songs I liked, or songs of X kind of theme, etc. Lists. Or I'd draw charts or graphs about songs. I realized the other day that I haven't done any of that stuff in a couple years. I don't think that makes me less into music, though.

Aren't you the guy who said his wife tended to listen to her box set of The Police only when he wasn't around, or was that someone else?

oh yeah AC/DC and the Police are perennial bones of contention between us tis true

I've been following this thread and meaning to post since yesterday...all the comments about relationships and musical first loves and only having so much time for everything also speak to my situation.

At the moment I'm not really seeking out any new music, but at the beginning of the year I went through a voracious phase of loading 20 albums at a time on Spotify and making financially irresponsible batch album purchases. I'm sure the desire will drift back but right now my spare thoughts are focused on planning my next camping trip or working out a better way of stopping the earwigs from eating my bean plants rather than hearing every album on Olde English Spelling Bee. I've been passionate about music for about 15 years now, it seems strange to think that there's a virtue in never shifting my focus to things I know less about. I have accumulated more musical knowledge over the years than is socially acceptable, but pretty much everyone on my street knows more about gardening than I do - suggesting I should put more energy into the latter than the former.

Another reason people tend to get less interested in new music---when you start discovering all these bands, everybody in them is much older and presumably much cooler than you are. Some of them are from another generation entirely like John Lennon/Bob Dylan.

But then as you get older, the bands become closer to your age. Then younger. It gets really depressing when the bands that are considered "old" are all made up of people fucking ten years younger than you are.

Ten years? Try twenty...or more.

i was pleasantly surprised to note that the bands who made my three favourite records of last year are all older than me (and i'm no spring chicken). i'm pretty sure that's coincidental..

Paul Weller is older than me, so everything's ok in 2010...