physical music non-purchasers: how do you acquire/consume music? (NOW WITH MORE SOULSEEK)

iphone themed fleshlights by 2025

soulseek is so amazing for finding obscure limited-release avant-garde/experimental stuff

Xposts Well I just wrote a fairly lengthy defence/riposte to ronan and lex but my iPhone lost it (what's wrong with a pen and paper etc etc). But Clarke B pretty much summed it up above anyway. For me, personally, I think there's nothing wrong with admitting a certain attachment to the medium and acquirement of said medium and how all the external influences that may affect one's attitude towards the music I choose (and choose not) to listen to are as important as the essential absorption of sound. As a human being my enjoyment of music is drastically informed by even the slightest of conditions, and the format does play into that. If this doesn't apply to you, then more power to ya, but context, setting, experience, time and space all matter, and that's before I've even hit play.

a mix of purchasing digital music and torrenting. I should support the artists I like more than I do, but just grabbing an album from a torrent site is just so ridiculously easy and fast that it's hard to resist sometimes.

There unfortunately don't seem to be much decent streaming options in Canada. I would definitely use something like spotify a lot.

it's interesting that lex thinks memory can (should?) be somehow divorced from physical artifacts

When people say they like vinyl or CDs because they like to have something they can hold in their hands, or they like the artwork, or they prefer the sound, or they feel some ritualistic attachment in getting up an putting a record on, they're not lying or trying to be stick-in-the-muds. It's not necessarily related to nostalgia either - I thought vinyl fans were simply fetishists, weirdos and codgers for a very long time until a friend came round with a record player one day and started cranking out tunes. Since owning a record player only about a year ago, I can safely say that were I given the choice of listening to an album on mp3 through decent speakers or through my cheap little portable and its internal speakers, I'd genuinely have a hard time choosing.

I do feel like a fetishist sometimes, to be fair. I spent about an hour and a half the other week mounting and aligning a new cartridge on my turntable. But I like it! It's fun to do stuff with your hands. Lex is like the guy who would tell a whittler, "Look at you, you smug weenie with your little knife set; don't you know you can buy a miniature Indian chief head and a wooden piccolo at the store?"

Dog Latin, just wait and see how much more you love your records when you start playing around with a more serious setup... That's the thing for me; sure, it's sentimental to some degree for all the reasons we've been discussing, but it's really about sound. I honestly don't understand how to think about "the music itself" without at least some vital relationship to the way it's being presented...

I'm gonna sound like an old man here, but being obsessed with music before the internet, you had anticipate music and look harder. One record would last me for months. Almost all of the music I bought through mail order was stuff I had never heard and didn't really know what to expect. Reading catalogs and sales list, waiting for the record to arrive. It was fun. I still spend quite a bit of money on used record, most of which, i dunno 65% of I still have never heard before. And if I didn't track down these records I would never hear them, since there still is A LOT of music that can't be found on any of the means in this poll. I don't understand how the format is irrelevant or why it should be, Records are fun. Maybe lex just doesn't have the collector spirit in him.

Vinyl is awesome but not for these weird misplaced nostalgia reasons. Great sound, proper pitch control mainly

Comes with issues too tho, especially if you've little space, not gonna criticise digital...often not been in a situation I can play vinyl

I'm not saying records are The format to listen to music on. Mostly I listen to music in my truck since I'm always on the road, split between my ipod, which is mostly ripped records and the other half is sirius radio.

I have this weird thing where I don't like to take music for free unless it's a) old/out-of-print and/or b) made by people who don't need my money (lookin at you, Neil Young). so when I purchase music it comes down to what I enjoy purchasing/owning - which is records. For example I usually allot myself $25/month to spend on books/comics/music/whatever and while there are new things I want to purchase (Frank Ocean, Miguel, new Moon Duo) I have yet to be able to bring myself to just buy them from iTunes, since I would much prefer going to a store to buy a record (I dunno if there even is vinyl for Miguel; Channel Orange isn't out on vinyl yet). So I haven't bought anything yet this month.

There are many physical possessions I have a particular affection for because they remind me of different points in my life but my old CDs aren't really among them, even the ones I've owned since I was like 16. Conversely there are books I own that are battered from previous adventures that I'd hate to have to part with, even though I could buy a brand new edition if I wanted.

Yeah, I'm way less sentimental towards CDs than vinyl. Records have been part of my life since I was really little, and my mom used to take me record shopping with her every week or so, and she's buy me a few 45s or an album that I wanted. I still have all those, and I have all the records my mom has passed along to me over the years, too. On a very real level these are physical artefacts from my past, from my family; it's not this stubborn fetishization.

i had no idea people still used slsk or that it was still even functional

Probably about 50% artist-approved free content, 25% purchased mp3s, 25% slsk for me. I've flat out refused to buy music from major labels for a couple years now and wish nothing but death and dismemberment upon them. I also listen to vinyl when I feel like pulling it out and radio in my truck because that's all it has. I hate streaming if I can download and nine times out of ten won't even listen if I can't download, although I use soundcloud and youtube to preview and share music. Like I said on the other thread, it's been a while since I've owned a CD player.

btw Shakey, there is Miguel vinyl

I've severely curtailed my torrenting of MP3s, there was a day when I would do that all day long, but I have a library of 230GB of music most of which i barely ever listen to. If i go to listen to an album i used to physically own that i don't have anymore I'll torrent that but that's more or less it. Streaming has gotten pretty good the past few years, the idea of 'collecting' MP3s (which was a big part of my 2k consumption) has lost it's novelty. Sometimes it's easier to just type in "Cure Pornography Full Album" on youtube than to look for it on my hd.

Vinyl is how i started and i don't see it going away anytime. I inherited my parents' really awesome collections when i was a teenager in the 90s and then started buying up $1 records like mad when i first got into thrift stores. I still go thrift shopping a couple times a month, and have found plenty of amazing finds for under $5. One time i found a copy of the Silver Apples LP for a buck. It was beat up and had plenty of skips in it, but it's still a pretty amazing find. I think one of my best recent finds was original pressings of "Another Green World" and "You Made Me Realize" both for 2 dollars.

I can't see ever buying a CD again, unless it's a DIY band which has nothing else to offer. Amazed that slsk is still around!

youtube is shitty quality tho

You found You Make Me Realize for $2?????!!! Wow.

They also had the very first Flaming Lips self-titled record in colored vinyl. God bless that Last Chance Thrift Store.

Once i was at a Goodwill and kept finding OG Beatles vinyls and records were 99cents at the time. There was some middle aged record collector dude also looking through stuff and he got his hands on a Butcher Album and i was so insanely jealous.

The shops in East Atlanta are pretty good for finding some amazing vintage black gospel too. The kind of stuff you just don't see on CDs.

Spotify and Youtube.

The albums/tracks I LOVE, I either buy the cd or mp3s, cuz mobile Spotify kinda sucks.

I don't think I've bought any 'physical' music for about 7 years or more

I haven't bought physical music since 2007, if you don't count very occasional thrift store/yard sale record finds.

Trying something on Spotify before buying on iTunes is my most common method now. It's the equivalent of an old record-shop listening booth (not that I'm old enough to remember booths). I like the sense of commitment. I hear a song and if I really like it I want them to have more than the 0.000001p (or whatever) they'd get from that Spotify play.

like vinyl, dislike kneejerk nostalgia.

how do determine whether nostalgia is kneejerk or not?

when it exists independently of the remembered subject

What about kneejerk anti-nostalgia?

... You appear to be defining all nostalgia as kneejerk, because I'm not sure how it can exist independently of the thing you're being nostalgic about.

I prefer balljerk nostalgia

... You appear to be defining all nostalgia as kneejerk, because I'm not sure how it can exist independently of the thing you're being nostalgic about.

it's not difficult to conceive that somebody might be prone to nostalgia, and the merits of demerits of a given thing may then be less relevant.

Why is nostalgia bad? Why is newness good?

nostalgia isn't bad!

Why is kneejerk nostalgia bad? (I know kneejerk anything is bad... or rubbish at the least.)

can you really not think of how that might be bad? people fawning over things that weren't actually better?

i'm not even talking about vinyl, just the general sense on these series of threads that some people would wistfully pine for their happy days in a gulag.

I don't really get that vibe though; and almost anyone who's getting near that vibe is saying, quite candidly, 'this is just my preference'.

i don't expect everyone to agree.

can you really not think of how that might be bad? people fawning over things that weren't actually better?

i'm not even talking about vinyl, just the general sense on these series of threads that some people would wistfully pine for their happy days in a gulag.

― Know how Roo feel (LocalGarda), Friday, 12 October 2012 15:40 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not sure if this is referring to my earlier posts (probably is), but I think I've explained my standpoint on this pretty thoroughly. The only kneejerk thing about it seems to be your own reaction to people enthusing about anything from the past, even if they qualify this by saying they also have plenty of time for their current equivalent. Not everything from the past is a "gulag".

nostalgia isn't bad!

The sticking point here is "weren't actually better" and the presumption that you can call BS on someone's own highly personal rememberance of an already personal past

did anyone even do that? you can do what you like, but what i call bs on is extrapolating that highly personal nostalgia into society-wide trends as though it's a thing that "we" do

lex, half your steez on this board could be pretty much boiled down to you mapping your personal preferences and experiences into universal and absolute 'truths'.

I prefer to listen to clean vinyl and/or high bitrate files, but use Spotify a lot. My last apartment move involved me both getting injured and then fired because of the sheer weight of the vinyl.

Starting to wonder why I keep it.

Carrying milkcrates up and down 3 flights of stairs lead to a sprained ankle and missing a week of work.

So I got a new apartment and a new job at the same time.

The sticking point here is "weren't actually better" and the presumption that you can call BS on someone's own highly personal rememberance of an already personal past

all completely subjective, i agree.

You're selling the gulag short a little, it's hard to look at a loaf of bread on my table and not think that something has been lost. I'm just not sure we appreciate it as much now we don't have to fight five other prisoners for it.

Once something happened.

also, lex assuming youth are just like him and that he has an eternal handle on the teenage mind