Personally, I think I’m pretty adventurous. I love music and my library has thousands of artists across dozens of genres like classic rock, new wave, Motown, smooth jazz, shoegaze, drum & bass, prog rock, hip hop, and more. Hitting ‘shuffle all’ is a recipe for absolute chaos.
I love finding new artists and connections between them (solo projects, supergroups, samples, etc), and every 5-10 years I discover a whole new genre and enjoy going down the rabbit hole. I have all-time favourites, but listening to the same thing for too long drives me crazy.
By contrast, my wife only ever really listens to 2 or 3 different artists and somehow never gets bored of listening to the same few albums on repeat for literal years.
Where do others fall on that spectrum? Do you feel the need to constantly seek out new music, or are you the kind of person who prefers settling into a groove long-term?
I constantly seek out new music and pick it up from everywhere. Currently on a folk punk kick, before that it was Billboard Top 100 stuff from the 60’s and 70’s, before that it was hyperpop. I ask that anyone who wants to get me a gift instead make me a mix CD, I’ve got enough physical stuff.
But I listen to the new music mixed into the old music. Recently using shuffle, but before iTunes went to shit I used to have Party Shuffle pull from a dense web of smart playlists that ensured I was always listening to new favorites, old favorites, and tracks I hadn’t listened to recently in a roiling cycle. Man I miss having smart playlists.
My “favorites” alone, songs I can sing along to, are in the thousands after more than two decades of this. The floodplains of attending tracks, other songs from good albums, local music I don’t get get rid of because I wouldn’t be able to find it again, CDs that I ripped for my kids’ or from my wife’s collection, mix CDs made for me that I’m still getting around to digesting, these make up several thousand more tracks.
So if you, OP, or anyone else want a list of recent highlights, I’m down to trade a tracklist of most played from the last year.