> I think it's more likely your age group.

I agree, that's certainly part of it and I'm happy to hear that young people are still obsessed about music. I'm not suggesting you need physical media to do it, but I am saying the medium has changed things to some degree.

Back then, if we wanted a mix tape, we'd have to mix it. Now, spotify generates five new ones each day for each of us, or we can request a new one on the fly for any genre, mood, artist, etc. So, it makes me wonder how these tools have changed the way young people today consume music. For example, how much of your digital listening is to entire albums start to finish vs some kind of mix/random play? What are you doing (if anything) while you listen to a complete album? Are you buying albums specifically or listening to them on a subscription service?

When I tried spotify a few years ago, it was exactly this aspect that totally failed my expectations. I wanted a service like Spotify as a replacement for genre radio. I wanted something that somehow figures out my tastes, and generates a mix for me. In my experience, this totally fails unless you happen to like the most commercial pop music available. Whenever I tried to coax it to play some alternative and undergroundy music, it ended up playing the most commercial nonsense after 2 or 3 tracks. I haven't tried a single streaming service since, because I dont feel I want to be poisoned by the most empty and stupid music in existance.

I suspect you didn’t use it for long enough for it to develop a good profile of your tastes. I’ve been using it for 5 years and the recommendations are my favourite feature, and on the whole very impressive.

I’d consider myself into quite underground music (electronic/techno, nothing mainstream or commercial at all, I’d wager even most people who consider themselves into electronic music wouldn’t have heard of a lot of the artists I listen to) and it usually gets it pretty right, sometimes amazingly so.

I’ve been introduced to some of my favourite music by Spotify, and the interface makes exploring related artists etc. really easy. Ideally I’d like better cataloguing (e.g. tagging) and metadata (e.g. more emphasis on labels) but I know I’m a niche user and I can work around these limitations.

My tips if you try it again would be:

- if it recommends something you don’t like, press thumbs down (if available) and skip - they use skipping as a signal you don’t like something

- build up a collection of music you do like, using the save button and/or playlists

- check out the feature which plays related music after you’ve finished listening to a track or album - this often finds the most interesting music for me

- check out the “related songs” area under any playlists you’ve created. If you have focussed playlists (e.g. I have ones for different subgenres), this can help you discover some great stuff.

I’d actually say the stuff Spotify plays after an album/song is the best part of their recommendations for me. The daily mixes it generates aren’t bad. Release Radar and Discover Weekly can be a bit hit or miss, sometimes for example it will recommend overly commercial stuff for my tastes, but it’s always worth scanning through (and I do thumbs down the really off recommendations).

It’s not perfect of course, for example sometimes I find it gets “stuck” in a small subset of artists after a while, but combined with other sources and some input to guide, Spotify is the best service I’ve found for discovering music, and is way above for example YouTube suggestions

Is there a good service that doesn't require FB?

How about Spotify? It doesn't require FB.

I thought it did and recall the login required a FB account.

You can try signing up right now - it offers Facebook as an option, but also to create a fresh account. My account is not connected to Facebook.

? Spotify doesn’t require Facebook

I had this problem with Apple Music and Pandora, but Spotify worked for me. I had to skip a lot of stuff in the beginning, but it got way better than any other service I've used. I assume skipping is just training the AI on what you don't like (and like) so it takes some time.

> My friends and I have countdowns on our phones ticking down the days to eagerly-awaited releases, we make plans to listen to it together at a 'premiere' hosted by whoever has the best speakers. If they live up to the excitement they get replayed to death, memorized backwards and forwards, and discussed endlessly.

Wait, does that still happen or did you just describe what you used to do in the past?

As a music lover and collector on fridays my todo list is filled with numerous entries of new release I scheduled months and weeks in advance. And yet this kind of musical anticipation, exploration and discovery seems to be a rather solitary passion. For most people music has been relegated to background noise it seems. If you and your friends still enjoy and explore music the way you described, that's exceptionally wonderful.

I’m 35 and we grew up with music on the Television. My main CD player was a Play Station. Sometimes a friend brought a new CD over and we listened to it in my room on repeat. We would watch music shows when they were aired on programmed television, or tune into specific radio shows that had “the top 10 popular songs” or something. When we learned about Napster no one had high enough speed internet to download but the most popular songs, but yet we did, and bragged about owning so and so song.

I bet people that were 35 at the time had similar complaints about us not discussing and appreciating music like they did when they were had their mix-tapes playing on their parent’s stereo.