Embracing the Firehose

Several ago I realized that I wasn’t discovering much new music. I would listen to new releases from artists I liked and occasionally get a good recommendation from a friend. But without listening to the radio or spending a lot of time around musicians, the number of new ideas was steadily decreasing.

It’s difficult to find new music that is excellent and challenging while still falling in line with your personal taste. It’s virtually impossible to do that without listening a lot. Unless your taste is very predictable, you’ll probably end up checking out ten recordings for every one that you really like. The other nine aren’t wastes of time, but you might not ever feel the need to listen to them again.

The key problem, I’ve discovered, is coming up with the ten albums in the first place. No matter how much I ask for recommendations, I’m not going to get that many, and I’m not going to stumble on enough other things to fill the gap. Instead, I’ve sought out as many resources as possible to identify new music as it is released. The result is what I think of as a “firehose”–a steady deluge of ideas that I couldn’t keep up with even if I tried.

The best sources are monthly lists from magazines. (Bonus points if there’s an RSS feed.) I check perhaps a dozen of those each month. For the true firehose experience, the All Music Guide publishes lists of everything that comes out. Here, for example, are the 67 albums on their October classical list. This is a complement, not an alternative, to other methods of finding music. When I discover something I like, I check out the artist, the label, and sometimes contributing artists. On occasion, a new find will even lead me to a new genre, and the search space widens further.

(Another tip: If you find a really great album, especially if it’s obscure, search the web for sites that list or review it. This will sometimes turn up a personal site or something like an old-fashioned webzine. At the very least, it’ll have a few other ideas. Sometimes it will be a steady new source. This is the non-commercial version of the “If you like X, you’ll also like…” recommendation algorithms.)

The idea isn’t to listen to everything on every list–that isn’t possible. If you wanted to be a completist, you could probably keep yourself busy for the entire year just by listening to every item from a pile of last year’s best-of compilations. The goal is that there’s always something to queue up, preferably several things that might fit the mood at the moment. As I find things, I just copy URLs (of lists, artists, labels, etc) to a text file. I tend to listen on a last-in, first-out basis, which is another way to keep things simple.

As with the infinite scrolls of Instagram and Twitter, it’s important to recognize that the list is inexhaustible by design. There’s no shame in leaving something there for months, years, forever. If something is truly worth listening to, it will probably come to your attention via multiple sources.

I’ve found that this framework is useful for much more than music. It’s changed my approach to my to-read list (both books and online articles), and it has made me more comfortable with to-do lists (such as ideas for website features) that I’ll probably never complete. It can be frustrating to have too much to do (or read, or listen to), but it’s far worse to have too little.

DALL-E thinks I’m talking about vinyl: