I feel like every year I hear talk that it was a bad year for music or there weren’t any good new artists or bands. Bullshit. I am literally overwhelmed by the amount of great music, so much of which I don’t even know about until I start reading over lists like this one that people put together. Ordering the list isn’t easy and I don’t generally try, but it’s pretty much in order. There was no hesitation on my favorite album of the year, much to my wife’s chagrin. And it’s not even that she didn’t like the record. It was seemingly on repeat until she couldn’t take it any more.
This is the first year I didn’t assemble a downloadable .zip file in all the years I’ve been doing this list. I did create a playlist on Beats Music. And since most people I know don’t use Beats Music, I put together a YouTube playlist with all the songs (painstakingly sequenced of course). If you are inclined to re-create the playlist (in order, of course) on another streaming service, please tweet it out or just drop me a note and let me know [Edit: Jeff created an Rdio playlist and David created a Spotify playlist]. And if I missed anything you loved, let me know about that too.
The War On Drugs - Lost In A Dream
Run The Jewels - Run The Jewels 2
Ryan Adams - Ryan Adams
Tycho - Awake
The Coral - The Curse of Love
The Horrors - Luminous
Eagulls - Eagulls
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Wig Out At Jagbags
Wild Beasts - Present Tense
Damon Albarn - Everyday Robots
Beck - Morning Phase
Dum Dum Girls - Too True
Mac DeMarco - Salad Days
Glass Animals - Zaba
TV On The Radio - Seeds
Alvvays - Alvvays
alt-J - This Is All Yours
Spoon - They Want My Soul
Cloud Nothings - Here and Nowhere Else
Real Estate - Atlas
Aphex Twin - Syro
The New Pornographers - Brill Bruisers
First Aid Kit - Stay Gold
Parquet Courts - Sunbathing Animal
East India Youth - Total Strife Forever
It’s probably obvious, but I don’t listen to MP3s anymore, almost ever. And CDs? Remember those? I just sold a quarter of my CD collection to Amoeba last week and by the end of the month I don’t plan to have much of a CD collection at all. Who cares. They’ve been in storage boxes for several years. Nearly everything I want (or could want) to listen to is available on streaming services and I just don’t care about owning most of it. Crazy how fast things change, right?
MOG was the first streaming music service I used and it stuck. MOG is now Beats Music (which will be called something else since Apple acquired it last year) and that’s what I use. A considerable amount of time has gone into creating collections and playlists which makes the cost of switching music services, at least for me, pretty high at this point. That said, I’ve been exploring TIDAL recently, which I really like due to the high fidelity, especially playing over Sonos. Fidelity isn’t important to the vast majority of people. Heck, streaming albums isn’t important to the vast majority of people (for now). I appreciate the curated approach Beats Music took and have no reason to believe that’s going away. It’s also what I like about TIDAL in addition to the fidelity. I’ve discovered great music on both services, though I still find myself at a loss when I simply want to put a good album on without thinking much about it.
How do you find out about new music? Have you listening habits changed?
Wanna get emails about good music every once in a while from me?
