Spotify Killed the Thrill of the Hunt

> Now, it’s completely different. The moment some obscure demo drops, it’s everywhere, Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram, whatever. Everyone knows about it instantly. That sense of discovery, of finding a truly underground gem, just isn’t the same anymore. It’s too easy now.

I don't agree. I want to be clear that I think youtube is terrible in many, many ways, but one thing I _do_ love about youtube is music discovery. Finding label channels and tracing through their artists, seeing what else pops up in my feed as a result and following those threads...finding random weird stuff with four listens posted two days ago, which then leads you to more weirdness...etc. is all very fun to me and I've discovered a ton of great music that way. There's also tons of random channels that have DJs or mixes they put out that is also a great and relatively organic way to discover new stuff (I'm always thrilled when a new Kieran Hebden set drops on The Lot Radio for one).

Maybe spotify is different, I've actually never used it, but I don't think the "Thrill of the Hunt" is dead in a general sense. And I'm kinda old, I was a music major in the 90s and at that time I was all about finding weird bootlegs and going to shows with <10 people showing up, subscribed to The Wire for a long time, and etc. There is still a ton of great new music out there and fun avenues for discovery! If anything there is more than I ever could have imagined when I was younger. People keep making great stuff.

I will never understand this kind of sentiment:

> You had to dig. You had to seek out small, specialized record stores or spend time on shady forums. You’d track down obscure distros just to order releases you couldn’t get any other way... Now, it’s completely different... That sense of discovery, of finding a truly underground gem, just isn’t the same anymore. It’s too easy now.

To the contrary, I can now spend months digging into obscure African 70's music that there was just no realistic way for me to access before.

There are 10,000x more obscure gems to find, across the world and across the decades.

You can define your taste in far more granular ways than you ever were able to before, follow the paths of so many more artists, and even put out your own music with infinitely less friction than before.

The author is missing the forest for just this one tree.

This is not just a Spotify thing, but is endemic to all streaming media. When I was a kid (way back in the 1970s) I first saw the Japanese anime Reideen when my dad took me to a friend's house for movie night, which meant showing movies on a film projector from his collection of (what were probably) 16mm film rolls, which were likely purchased from bootleg traders at comic book conventions. It was incredibly rare at the time. I loved it and fondly remember the experience fifty years later. Nowadays you can easily find the entire series on YouTube, along with every other damned thing.

There's a philosophical point of view that equates art to "making special", as in, art offers something different from the dull routine of survival. In my memory, seeing Reideen for the first time in that way was special. Now that it's part of the infinite buffet, it's just flattened out with everything else into mundane fungibility.

This goes beyond music honestly. All forms of media used to have a kind of social underground or niche. Remember when you played that one video game you found on a video retailers shelf and couldn't wait to tell your friends all about it the next day knowing for a fact that none of them had ever heard of the game before? How about when you found that basement horror film randomly made by the guy from the next town over? There are so many small niche forms of media that used to speak to us and now all of them have to sink or swim against the millions upon millions of pieces being shared on social media every day. The effort the author describes here in finding these pieces really was part of experiencing them and in our new extra-social and commodified world I'm not sure many would go out of their way in that same way any more. Which is a shame.

This year I have been using spotify more. I do like being able to create custom playlists, but I don't always like the suggested songs after the playlist ends. I'll make a playlist like "Upbeat dance music that includes popular hits from the last 10 years and newer hits that I haven't heard yet. No country. Keep it positive and upbeat." And it will mostly abide the instructions, though I can never escape having a few songs about wanting to kill a b*tch for being a ho, or some such thing, but as soon the initial playlist ends it's all country and country light even though I never listen to country.

I have qualms with Spotify as well, but not sure I entirely agree with the premise of the article. It still takes effort to find good music. There's a LOT of music being produced nowadays, and wading through all of that and finding niche stuff you like can still be a "hunt" - it's just a different kind.

This is one of the reasons I’ve gone with Apple Music. The way the app is setup, I can treat the catalog like an online store and my library like my personal CD collection. I made a self-imposed rule to respect this paradigm. When I hear about a new band or album, I go the “store”, add it to my library, and the next time I’m looking to listen to some music, I can see some the recently added list has a couple albums I added that were recommended to me organically as if it was 1994 again. The only real difference is that I’m not out $19 if I don’t like it. I can simply remove it from my library (akin to retuning it to the store), so my library contains the albums I actually like, or am currently exploring.

This has helped me a lot to avoid the infinite choice and overwhelm of having a 100 million song library, which is the case when engaging with a streaming service library directly.

Spotify is one of the apps I've noticed continually getting worse and more buggy over time. The Android app is very annoyingly buggy and the WebOS (LG tv) Spotify app is completely unusable at this point.

Also, a bunch of (non-English) music/lyrics I listen to have recently become strongly censored.. which makes them unlistenable to me... I wonder if there is (or should be) a censorship-free, decentralized, open alternative..

> You can go on YouTube right now, search for any niche genre, and instantly access thousands of artists. And while that’s undeniably convenient, I do think it cheapens the experience.

I feel the opposite. Finding gems in all the trash and bland music streaming services have on offer does give the trill of the hunt. How is it better to send a money order and spend your time "just waiting" when you could be spending that time digging past whatever streaming services push at you and diving deeper.

Search for a genre on youtube and you get a bunch of artists. Search for those artists, find their channels, and check out the songs youtube's algorithm doesn't surface. You can still use recommendation services and websites outside of youtube and streaming services to get leads on good stuff to try. It's a whole lot more exciting than throwing cash into the void and hoping something good comes back at you.

I also don't understand the "you can't find anything that everyone else doesn't already know about" stuff. I love comparing playlists with friends and family because the massive amount of available music means that they always have music from artists that I've never even heard of before. If everyone knows about every song you're finding you aren't looking very hard. I don't really care much about being the first person to learn about a cool song or artist, but even on youtube I find good songs with very low view counts all the time. It doesn't make me feel special though. I kind of think it's frustrating and just think "Why don't more people know about this! This deserves more attention!"

Bad take, the more accessible is something to find, the easier it is for people to listen to it. And I think if you do music, you want as much ears listening to your tunes.

This romanticizes logistical issues for nostalgia purposes.

I did not live through that era, but his description makes me thankful i didn't have to go through all that to find my favorite music

I tend to agree. The less popular an artist the worse the algorithmic recommendations. Trawling last.fm similar artists is a good source of new artists to listen to and the best are tailored recommendations for friends. I have friends that are good for shoegaze and rock recommendations, others for black metal, a few for death metal and grindcore. My favorite band has never had their catalog on streaming and I found them via a recommendation on a forum years ago.

I don't subscribe to _any_ streaming services. All listening is done via a Navidrome server.

I don't think Spotify should be used for music discovery. I know it has that feature and I know the app wants you to embrace it, but I would say: don't use it.

Use YouTube for this. You can find experts, fans, all kinds there who will guide you through genres and act as non-algorithmic, human-sense-making curators. Use Spotify only to find the specific tracks and albums you already know the name of, to listen.

He has identified a real problem, and the good news is there is a solution.

I remember, when I was younger, printing out MapQuest bike instructions, following them, and getting lost trying to find the next street -- and then feeling incredible when I finally found it. When GPS became so commonplace you could use it on any phone, I realized that the feeling of suddenly realizing where you were was gone forever. Of course you can only feel euphoric about finding a street if you felt at least equally despondent that you couldn't find it, so it's probably a worthwhile tradeoff. I feel somewhat similarly about Spotify. Yes, some things are lost, but you can't honestly tell me you think it was better before, right?

I just had the best time migrating to Navidrome / Synfonium. I didn't think it would be as easy or as enjoyable, but it's changed the way I listen to music back to how it was -- listening to albums, not random singles. I'm happy to be free of Spotify. The fact it even works with carplay/ Android auto is remarkable.

Just leave Spotify behind and buy music again if you care about music in more than a casual way. It feels great. Bandcamp rules.

Sometimes I will check out https://www.sacramentopunkshows.com/?m=0

A surprising number of bands aren’t on Spotify or any streaming sites. Or they will be on YouTube with under 100 views

It did not work that way for me. My music interest has been rekindled since Spotify.

You can also hunt via Spotify. Songs and artists can help you find curated playlists (by other artists or fans) where you discover new artists.

Everynoise.com is also a great start, but these playlists are no longer maintained.

There is also a huge audience of people who want to hear “elevator music” tuned to their activity at hand and do not care about who or what made it. Spotify obviously wants those customers. I don’t mind these people subsidising my hobby, but I hope Spotify will continue to cater to my interest too.

I'd say the ways of discovering underground music have just evolved. In my (younger) circles those who are passionate about music still hunt out non-mainstream music. Their listening isn't dictated by the algorithm, they instead follow small Instagram music pages, read small blogs, keep in touch with communities, etc.

I've discovered a share of my favorite artists through friends and relationships, I don't think that will ever change.

Some will never know the thrill of downloading a mislabeled MP3 that introduces you to a new genre or thinking that Daft Punk actually released a track called “Vietnam”.

When Spotify came online I tried it and it immediately killed the fun around music. Less about the actual music, more about building out playlists. This was all for casual listening. The good stuff was at the clubs anyway.

Hunt by going to live shows. Nothing compares to finding a good artist irl first.

Spotify is even worse now. Now it keeps automatically playing stuff I dislike. Even though I'm paying them. (Wait, let me go fix that last problem at least.)

Neil Degrasse Tyson said on a Joe Rogan Experience episode that he has an issue with targeted advertising because, to quote the title of this submission, it kills the thrill of the hunt when it comes to discovering products that he might like.

Worse, its music discovery algorithm is kind of shit because it always tends to veer towards one of a few "popular" genres. SoundCloud, YouTube, last.fm... you name it - they are all better.

This reminds me of Once Upon A Time in Shaolin.

Man music hipsters are so obnoxious. Normal people don't discover shit they listen to whatever is marketed/popular in their youth and listen to that for the rest of their lives.

Spotify is not for you move on.

For many people's experience of music Spotify is probably alright. I don't use it as it doesn't appeal to me. I was a vinyl dj and then cds when those came along.

I get excellent suggestions from Youtube on old tracks after spending 20+ years liking music tracks on there. I go on there and get suggestions for a youtube video with 4 likes posted five hours ago for a track released 15-25 years ago and they're almost always good if not great music. I still go on bandcamp and soundcloud and other places and buy tracks, eps, full albums in mp3s and flac and wavs and download them for djing purposes. As far as I'm concerned I'm still crate digging whether it's in an actual crate of records and cds or sans-Spotify. New music is not hard to find and if you like something you can easily search other releases by the artist or label or even partial producers. People have it better than they know in 2026 but it takes some involvement too.

I think this translates to a few different mediums. I'm thinking about modern matchmaking in video games today.

I used to play a game called SOCOM II back on the PS2 and it was all lobby based. You had to jump around to find the right lobby with the game mode you liked, find people to play with and build community. There was time between games for banter.

Now everything is automatic and instantaneous. It has its advantages, just like with music, but something was definitely lost.

Instant access to all media has many benefits and is probably better than the how it was in the past, but there is definitely less magic in the world. Less surprise. Less excitement. The thrill of the hunt is a universal human feeling that occurs in all sorts of scenarios.

I remember in college there was a sandwich shop that was always playing amazing music, there was a tip jar and if you wanted to know what was playing you had to tip $1. Good times.

cool web design btw

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So don't use Spotify. Go to a record store. Hardly needs a blog post.