My attention span for listening to new music is currently at an all time low. How long do you honestly give to a new song that doesn’t grab you in the first 2 minutes?
Inquiring minds want to know.
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i won’t continue listening to something if its not good
amen
and in the same vein i will listen to a 20 minute drone if it’s worth listening to but hey
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not really listening to ‘songs’ in the standard sense, unless i’m setting my alarm… i’ll let something (random youtube / soundcloud audio) play out of it’s interesting. you’ll know within a minute or two if it’s worthwhile. honestly, it doesn’t say much about “attention span” so much as determining whether or not something might be worthwhile or unpredictable, rewarding, etc.
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Yip, at home a track gets 20 seconds max.
At work, when on task, i might have to listen to a 2hr playlist be it good or bad.
I generally don’t find new artist or tracks i enjoy at home, but do discover new things at work when i can’t stand there forwarding tracks every 20 seconds.
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I didn’t like operation doomsday the first time I heard it, had I not had the attention span to give MF DOOM further play I wouldn’t have seen what a genius he was. I’m looking at it as attention span because when we react to something as “do I like this now or will I like it never” we are falling into a trap that is “something is good or it’s bad” and not activating the thinking part of our brain that figures out what is good or what is bad and possibly recalibrating our listening to align with what we are hearing. I’m currently having trouble doing that with new music and I’m trying to figure out why, because there is a lot of music that deserves more than one complete listen before it’s judged as worthwhile. I understand if it’s not for you, but for me I think this breaks down to how much of my attention I can dedicate to appreciating one thing at one time, like I would if I had paid $22 for a cd and been stuck with it.
This is a good example of tuning things out, where you are listening to something you don’t want to be too involved in, but you don’t want to be put off by - usually a specific genre or atleast within a certain level of comfort in listening. Like if I want music to go running to, it’s more of “does it fall within a certain bpm” and “does it have a certain feel” - it’s not always songs I can get super into. But I’m with you, when you have a span of time in which you are already focused on something, it is easier for that time to have a window of uninterrupted listening in which something new or interesting may appear, because your primary focus is not “do I like this new thing or not”, however you may hear something and say “I like this new thing”. interesting, thanks.
This is a super valid point, the immediacy of skipping things we aren’t invested in is the perfect example of what I’m talking about. There’s something to be said for purely sensoral entertainment, but I used to spend more time analyzing the way songs were recorded and the way musicians sounded even if I didn’t have an initial “love it” reaction to something. Somewhere between youtube, listening to dj sets, and anime theme songs, and perhaps my own dwindling attention span for anything that doesn’t involve immediate gratification, I’ve encountered this pitfall where I start to get itchy around the 2 minute mark. Not in all cases, but in a lot of cases when I listen to something on youtube or wherever, I think my attention wanes.
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For me it varies. Sometimes it can be really short, but other times I’ll give something time to really develop. But my taste tends to be all over the place so sometimes it’s just a case of it being the right style for that particular moment. And I also hate hearing too much of the same thing… if I’ve just been listening to an hour minimalist atonal drone extravaganza, then I’ll might be following that up with some nosebleed techno or classic Eurovision tracks.
Coinicidentally, I read an article the other week about this sort of thing…
Seems like it’s old age… and I’m sure that will vary from person to person. I still have quite the hunger for finding new music especially in comparison to a lot of folk my age but it’s definitely not as full-on as it was in my 20s and 30s.
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before I get lost in the rabbit hole of that article…
this is the answer I was afraid of.
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I’m sure it’s partly age, but that article (which I only skimmed to be honest … too busy man!) didn’t mention the fact that when you’re older you might have more going on in your life. I don’t spend entire days sitting around with my buddies getting high and recommending music to reach other and exploring genres. When I listen to music now I either have it on in the background, or I want (almost) instant gratification, because I ain’t got time for bad music. Which probably contributes to me only listening to the same kind of styles as I already like, because they’re a safe bet.
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I probably have discovered more music I love in different styles in my 40s than in my 20s. Don’t indulge the idea that your curiosity is dead unless you want it to be.
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not good because I’ve heard it before/it’s a bit generic : 35 seconds
not good because it’s almost unlistenably weird/incomprehensible/makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, but sort of tangentially related to something else I like or on a label I respect: probably 2-3 goes through just to make sure it’s not secretly absolute genius.
Hearing something brilliant you’ve never heard before is still better than hearing your favourite records for me tbh.
Even though I am old.
I mean, I do really like records from 1994 when I was a teenager, but I don’t think they’re better than records from last year. Just different.
The sheer weight of records available now does make it all seem a bit pointless sometimes, because you’re never going to be across it all… but I don’t think it actually matters, just means you have new stuff to hear forever, right?
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Depends, if it has a long unchanging intro I tend to skip forward, then skip forward again, often then skipping the track entirely in less than a minute because I find it boring. I have a good attention span if something catches my ear though, so will often listen all the way through a track if it grabs me.
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I would highly recommend that anyone with the time to do so read this fascinating article @jeye_musik shared in full. It is really bothering me, the dots I’m connecting right now as a result of having the information put into words.
totally valid, this is from the article:
" One explanation for the age-based reduction in music consumption simply posits that responsibility-laden adults may have less discretionary time to explore their musical interests than younger people.
Some scholars question whether there is a straightforward link between the decline in the rate of new music consumption and increasing music intolerance.
Others argue against using chronological age as a predictor for stagnant musical taste without first considering the different ways we process and use music across our lifespan. Teenagers tend to be very aware of what they are listening to. Adults who use music as motivation or accompaniment for activities such as exercise or menial tasks may be less conscious of the extent to which they actually do listen to new music."
from the article:
Also, musical taste boils down to familiarity. In his book This is Your Brain on Music, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin writes:
when we love a piece of music, it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times in our lives.
What we think of as our “taste” is simply a dopamine reaction arising from patterns our brain recognises which create the expectation of pleasure based on pleasures past. When we stop actively listening to new or unfamiliar music the link between the musical pattern and pleasure is severed.
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There is a section of time at work in the morning where we work around a noisy machine for about 1 1/2-2hrs. For me in the afternoon, I usually have another 1-2 hours operating a different noisy machine.
Everyone uses earbuds and music during those times, mine are some mid quality with noise cancellation (the noise cancelling works quite well). I go between searching out the angst filled punk or feels inducing new wave of my youth, and finding newer (by calendar year) or obscure genres I’m not familiar with using Spotify/Utube etc.
As mentioned, because my hands are busy, I generally have to set it and forget it for a while before I can dig my phone out and change it.
Another good idea I got from a disk jockey on satellite radio (which I have in my car and the app) - one of his regular listeners will listen to his show in the morning (favourite genre from that listeners youth) then in the afternoon while working systematically picks a consecutive channel from the list to listen to for a minimum of one hour.
Started at channel 001 and each day goes to the next. Will you end up on the country channel or the jazz channel or the classical channel or the 50’s greatest hits channel? Oh yes, you will. I’ve started doing that in smaller doses for my 15 minute drive to work and back.
It’s been, well, good and bad but only for 15 minutes at a time.
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“This is Your Brain On Music” is a great book, well worth reading.
I’m not sure he would entirely agree to their reading that “musical taste boils down to familiarity.” though! I think he says more that that’s a component of it.
It is quite important to get in there early and play kids a wide variety of things though apparently, cos what they recognise as “music” can get a bit set otherwise.
So I tend to put our daughter to bed with some Merzbow on.
I JOKE.
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I do the same thing. If I find that the song actually develops I will usually go back and listen to the whole thing, but I’m not going to spend a minute and a half listening to the same loop with no or few changes no matter how good that loop is.
On the other hand I have discovered more new music that I love in the last two years than in the previous five, because I made a concerted effort. My goal last year was to listen to at least one new album every week. This involved listening to a lot of stuff that I didn’t like all the way through, which felt like a waste of my time, so I stopped finishing stuff I don’t like halfway through the year. If a song didn’t catch me or didn’t grow, it got skipped. If more than a couple songs on the album didn’t grab me, or got skipped. There’s just too much music I like out there for me to spend my time on things I don’t like.
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Yeah, you’re right, they mentioned it … but then just moved on and didn’t mention it again. I think it’s a big factor and not worth dismissing so quickly.
You’re quite right, it’s a huge factor, but to be fair the article is a ten minute read spanning a wide array of cause and effect, you could easily fill several chapters of a book with just that one particular issue were it something so encompassing as a book length worth of text.
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I see a heavy decline in my music consumption in general. As I am easily bored by things, I don’t relisten old stuff much, so I just listen less in general (btw. I’m 41).
In my mid-twenties, there was a time when I bought 5 to 10 CDs per months but I also invested a lot of time in exploring new genres and artists and reading reviews. Now that I’m older I feel like I heard almost anything.
Good things is, I started making music two years ago, so I usually listen to my own tracks 