Daily Archives: 30th May, 2011

My music doesn’t come in “genres”

I had an odd realization the other day; I ran across a new music streaming site – promising “interactive radio that will blow your mind” – but while scanning through the list of 50 or so categories of music to choose one matching my tastes, my interest rapidly waned. ALL of them looked bad to me. It was like going back in time 20 years and flipping through the free audio cassette bin at a suburban yard sale. I couldn’t imagine starting up an audio stream in any of these categories and liking what I heard.  R&B?

At first I thought that maybe my musical tastes have just grown too weird and eclectic over the years, but there are plenty of tracks I like that are “popular”, or were popular 10 or 15 (or 100) years ago.

Here’s the catch, though — I don’t like categories. I don’t even like artists. Example: I like Radiohead — see, that’s totally mainstream! — but they have entire albums I’d just as soon skip past, and no single album I’d want to hear in its entirety.  There are songs I’ve liked enough that I’ve listened them to death, and never want to hear them again.