Where do you get your new music? Is it from hearing it on the radio? Is it by word of mouth? Is it from seeing a new album coming out from your favorite artist?
I genuinely want to know, because I have the hardest time finding new songs to listen to, and I am always on the lookout.
I have never been the kind of person to have an artist that I really like and wait for new albums to come out.
Even more, I physically cannot sit down and listen to an album in one sitting. I just don’t have the kind of attention span for that, and I genuinely respect people who can just relax to an album.
I have to be doing something else, which normally means if I want to listen to an album, I’m in my car driving around aimlessly.
While driving is one of my favorite things to do and it can be a lot of fun, with these rising gas prices, I am finding it harder and harder to justify just going for a drive.
I know some of you may have it worse, but my vehicle is a gas guzzler, and $50 for a tank of gas is getting ridiculous.
Most of the music that I listen to now I got from my dad’s old iTunes library. Growing up, I would just hear what music he was listening to and put it on my iPod Classic.
It was as simple as that. I didn’t even have to pay for any of it. But as I have gotten older, my music taste has changed pretty drastically.
Starting in high school, those songs I used to love listening to on repeat just weren’t doing it for me anymore.
Sure there were a couple songs I heard here and there that I liked, but for the most part, I was just listening to the same things over and over again.
It was around this same time that I figured out that one of my greatest passions in life was watching movies. I always have like movies, but in high school I really started watching behind-the-scenes footage more consistently and absorbing as much as I could about my favorite pastime.
With that love of movies came a love of movie soundtracks, and I’m not just talking about songs that happen to be in the movie, I listened to and continue to listen to the film’s orchestral scores.
That’s a topic for another day, but that is one of my favorite things to listen to.
Movies like “The Big Chill” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” have been huge influences on my music taste and I can remember buying both those soundtracks on CDs and playing them nonstop in my car.
The thing that annoyed me back then, and still annoys me is when songs are in a movie, but not on the official soundtrack.
I realize now that getting the rights to use songs differs between the film and the soundtrack, but it’s still annoying.
It’s in these cases that apps like Shazam and websites like TuneFind have become my new best friends. Take last week for example.
I have been binge watching “New Girl” on Netflix, and there are a bunch of good songs in each episode that I have been wanting to download.
All I have to do is go on TuneFind and put in the season and episode number and it will give me all the songs in that episode, along with a little description of what scene the song was in.
This has been an absolute godsend for me, and I’m listening to new music now more than ever, and it doesn’t feel like a chore.
No matter how we get our new music to listen to, I think it’s really important for people to continue to find new songs that they like.
Variety is the spice of life, and without a variety of music, I would go insane.
BENJAMIN HAYLETT
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