Spring 2022

I just finished my free trial with Apple Music. Honestly, the one thing I’ve taken away is that music and how I listen to it simply isn’t fun. Having to switch back to Spotify, it’s whatever – no difference. On all of these streaming services, the spiel stays the same: I listen to my selection of favourite songs most of the time. Which is fine. I mean, I love the music I listen to and have no problem with the same songs being on repeat. Still, I sometimes reach that maximum amount of times one can listen to a certain genre or specific selection of songs without going crazy. It’s like that 80s music station you turn on after lunch and forget to change, and finally realizing before dinner oh my god! I can’t take the 80s anymore. That suspended moment, when I’m craving something new and outside of my 3 playlist music sphere, that’s when the problems begin.

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Look, I already know what you’re thinking. Oh who is this? Have they never heard of ‘Discover Weekly’ on Spotify? Wait, he said Apple Music, right? Don’t they have that ‘For You’ mix? And yea, I know about those. But they don’t help me at all. Every time I try listening to one of these mixes, I feel disappointed. From time to time, I do find new songs that I enjoy, but the music in such playlists is mostly just mainstream pop. Though, the playlists run on algorithms, right? AI, robots, shouldn’t they know what I want to listen to? 

It doesn’t add up, so, as an avid music lover, I’ve come up with two theories.

The first one is simple: algorithms are terrible and haven’t learned from my years of streaming music because I listen to a much wider variety of music than the billboard top 100. The second theory is more cynical and conspiracy-esque: what if the algorithms aren’t actually meant to help me find new music, but rather exist to push me to listen to certain things? In a world where advanced advertising and third-party cookies can lead me to getting a notification with the top 10 holiday destinations half an hour after I talk about taking a vacation, it could be possible. Either way, the result doesn’t change the fact that these music discovery playlists are terrible. So, I started to look for a solution to make my music listening experience enjoyable again. Operation Get Back in the Groove.

Turns out, the solution to my problem was pretty simple: I needed to go back to the things that I loved most about music; the things that made me save up my spare change and birthday money to go into the Apple store and buy my first iPod. 

This solution meant going down the memory wormhole; remembering when I used to record songs onto a cassette tape from the radio player, or when my parents put vinyl in the record player for the first time. I remember being fascinated with how a spinning disc and needle made music. 

Live music was another one of the things that made me fall in love with music, and I’m forever grateful for the privilege of being able to see artists perform on stage. No studio, no tuning, no BS. Just the artist, their band, and the music filling up the crowd. One of my first concerts was the Rolling Stones. Their performance opened my eyes to the power and possibilities of music. It was a packed outdoor stadium with people standing shoulder to shoulder and climbing barriers. There was pure magic when the Stones came on stage and began playing the first guitar riffs. Everybody was moving together to the music; tens of thousands of people that had only come together in the last couple of hours, everyone stepping and singing in unison. It felt like anything was possible. 

In my search to get away from algorithms and back to enjoying music to its fullest extent again, I’ve started trying to recreate and recapture the feelings and memories that started my love for music. 

I started with the amazing live music scene Toronto offers, checking out everything I could drag my friends and family to. The TD Jazz Festival, Salsa on St. Clair, and the Beaches Jazz Festival were all free events that helped reopen my eyes and get back to the core of music. The variety is what I loved the most: everything from Latinx salsa, to jazz cover bands, to klezmer music, and so much more.

Concerts at the Budweiser Stage also took place the whole summer (and still do!), with tickets usually starting relatively cheap at $20. Such was a great opportunity for me to branch out and see artists that I usually wouldn’t have discovered on streaming platforms in an outdoor venue with a great atmosphere and lakefront view as a bonus. Now, I could continue this list for another couple of paragraphs, but the point is that live music is an essential part of why I love music so much. The brutal and honest simplicity of being able to see artists in person helped me reconnect with the passionate, full feelings that music used to spark for me.

Something else that helped me get back into music was sharing. A key part which makes music so good is how it’s community-based; something that is severely lacking in individualistic North American culture. People come together to make music, people come together to listen to music, and people come together to critique music. Simply going to different music stores and browsing the record cover art, maybe picking out the ones that looked the nicest, gave me such a refreshing feeling of discovery and freedom that Spotify and Apple Music didn’t give me. Going back to the foundations of community, taking time, talking with my friends about music and the various artists and tracks in their current rotations also helped bring me back to that good music feeling.

To close this article, I’m going to end with a simple recommendation: Listen to and enjoy music the way you like the most. Be proactive, and go find those feelings and moments that made you first fall in love with music, because whether you do or don’t, the line between you choosing your music and artificial algorithms choosing it for you is constantly growing thinner. So why not enjoy music to the fullest?

Right now I’m listening to Sunny 107.5 for the 70s 80s 90s vibes at the beach and pool, Miami Hot 105 for R&B, and CHUM 104.5 from Toronto so I don’t get too homesick.

Shoutout to mi familia for always playing music and bringing me to the 80s and further back, to Sam for coming to see some music, and Bee for an extensive list of K-Pop recs that I’m getting through (slowly but surely) 💜