alt Hacker NewsTo counter this - if you were around in the blog music era, being young had little to do with the network effect. Shitty pop music was in the ascendent culturally at the time, and the huge indie revival of the late 2000s and early 2010s happened primarily online. Hypemachine and the hundreds of mp3 blogs pushed novelty, obscurity, cross genre experiments, lost records etc. I'd finished college by this point, but dove right back into music and broadened my tastes considerably.
Discoverability and usability in general is godawful on bandcamp. Always has been, and shows no signs of improving. Never heard of Qobuz. What made the mp3 blog era so unique was exactly the network effect referenced above. The curators had audiences, they were aggregated from larger platforms and both deeply specific and hyper erudite. There was a whole culture around this online, and waves of excitement around certain artists, which would spill into 'in the know' circles offline.
Googling who's playing at local festivals or using some random app isn't and can't remotely be the same thing. I could see a music based social network taking off in the future. Currently there's nothing with the buy in, and the existing platforms are way too financially invested in pushing major labels, AI etc to become real recommendation and sharing engines.
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It’s true I didn’t grow up with that at all. When music blog were popular I’d have been in university exclusively listening to what I already liked.
Bandcamp is indeed really bad at suggesting things you’ll like…
To your last point: it’s weird how Bandsintown or Last.fm didn’t figure this out. Last.fm has so much potential but just isn’t… interested?
One advantage of the offline scene is that I see a lot more local artists, all knowing each other and playing together. There seems to be some camaraderie/support for each other going on.
Music is tough. People like music which is a lot like what they're familiar with but just a little bit different. Musicians are always suing each other because it's hard to write a song which doesn't sound dangerously like an existing song, which is why Taylor Swift is generous with writing credits. It's a big problem for LLM generated music, regardless of the training data.
Myself I have gone through phases in my adult life where I tried hard to expand my musical interests. Like around the time my son was born I was really into obscure psychedelia, both vintage and contemporary and also prog rock and other rock B-sides from the 1970s. Then later I got into the british 1980s music I missed. Then it was Ingsoc and then the Super Furry Animals, lately Tyler the Creator. One thing that's driven it is that I make these cards
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115939341268444811
and don't want them to show my age!