2025-05-16

music

recommendations

my collection is not a pop/rock music collection. it is more about general rhythm, texture and synthesizers and rarely guitar and singing. over 10000 albums and it took decades to find the things i like, yet frequently it already existed for decades before when i discovered it. i know how subjective interests are and how everyone has a list of favorites tailored to them, nonetheless, i hope someones taste overlaps enough so that the lists can be useful for finding unusual music and to make better buying decisions. main genres: ambient, electronic, idm, experimental.

ratings

music listing 1

music listing 2

music listing 3

music listing 4

  • 1 top 10%. ideally a minimum selection of the most art defining albums. capable to provide intense experiences, the whole album should be worthwhile from start to finish
  • 2 frequently listenable
  • 3 with potential, not fully evaluated or not as frequently listenable. sometimes albums have only one great track - such albums would receive this rating

there are always entries that have an unfitting rating.

album rankings

difficulties with finding music

  • overwhelmingly large amount of existing material
  • hard to judge beforehand without listening to it thoroughly in high quality in the right mood. buying is a lottery
  • very expensive. 10000 cd quality albums at $10 take $100000. this is without including the time-cost required for searching, where pop music fans will always have the edge
  • experimental music labels tend to artificially limit copies to small numbers, making unusual music even rarer
  • compact discs need physical space, need to be shipped as well as copied to digital devices. it would be nice if cds were smaller and would not have large jewel cases, this would make them cheaper to ship worldwide
  • sometimes albums are only available as remasters. the overall sound of a remaster is typically inferior to the original

streaming

  • is fully dependent on ongoing payments by the listener. when payments stop, access to the music is lost
  • content can be, and has been, removed without notice. music that you love may vanish suddenly, not to surface anywhere again for the unforeseeable future
  • latency and network issues always occur. sound quality of drm-laden streaming through web technology is sub-par even from hd offers
  • only a small portion of all music is available
  • another big flaw of streaming is that while compact discs can be sold by anyone, streaming can only be offered by those who have the necessary temporary and costly licensing contracts with the copyright holders. it additionally depends on copyright holders to be available to make such contracts in the first place, and the contracts are often given out exclusively to single companies, which will become the sole source for this music for the duration of the contract. this not only fragments available music over different streaming services, it also leads to material being excluded from many regions because licenses tend to be sold per region and streaming providers then only buy licenses for a small selection of most profitable regions

where to get music in 2020

  • wav files on bandcamp.com
  • wav/flac files on 7digital
  • dsf files on nativedsd.com
  • cds on ebay
  • cds on discogs.com marketplace
  • streaming on tidal. note that spotify has far less than cd quality to this date (2020). none of the hd streaming services i tried did sound as good as playing local files. playback even seemed unstable through drm and browser, at least that is how i would describe the effect (damped/discontinous/uneven-flow)

a note on formats

  • dsf are files of the dsd format with has 64, 128, 512 or even more times the resolution of a standard audio cd
  • wav can have a higher fidelity than flac files because flac supports only integer sample formats and wav supports float sample formats and formats with higher bitrate (for example, the wav version of "猫 シ corp. - palm mall" had better quality than the flac version). perhaps attributable to decoding software and hardware, on my setup, wav playback sounds clearer than flac
  • sacds contain data in the dsd format but sacds can only be played on specific hardware devices. listening on other devices is made difficult because of copy protection

ways to find new artists

  • if you have a bandcamp collection: following -> fans to follow
  • discogs recommendations on detail pages
  • samplers - compilation albums with various artists
  • bandcamp tags. most-buyed albums are highlighted there
  • large language models like chatgpt (biased)
  • similar artists on last.fm
  • gnoosic.com, enter three artists and get a list of related

personal song of the year

other