Which Comes First, Listening To Old Favourites Or Discovering New Favourites?

It depends....

Possibly not the best start to a reply, but mostly I put music on to listen to, sometimes it is company whilst doing chores, it used to be that I would put the radio on, no longer, I cannot stand the inane chatter. So 75% of the time I will be listening to favourites in the sense that I already own the discs.

Then there is the time of the month sessions, that is, I may, just may, buy a hifi magazine and regardless of the articles I will always look at the music they quote and go to you-tube to have a listen to anything I have not heard. Similarly I will look here and on the Linn forum and seek out recommendations. It generally works quite well, I do that whilst dearly beloved watches TV when I can sit with a tablet and a £7.99 pair of Lidl headphones. If it sounds good on that it is usually worth a purchase.

As mentioned in "What are you listening to..." Nigel Finn has a lot to answer for, his blog on the Chord website or reviews elsewhere have cost me quite a bit over the last couple of years, so far without any bad choices.

Then there is live music, book to see a favourite artist and end up buying the support act CD at the merch stall, or as one of my favourite genres is "folk" and there is a massive amount of collaboration between UK players and singers, I discover new artists, so I reckon 25% research.

Good question Nigel. Important for me is to first 'pre-screen' new music via Spotify on the Sonos system in casual listening - whilst washing up/ironing/doing other things. In this way I find I'm able to reject 90% of candidates. The other 10% make it through to the 'Judges houses' round and get logged to my Sonos Favourites and get several listenings. If they pass that round I'll buy it (usually on CD) and rip it to the NAS.

For precious listening time I'll spend a bit of time listening to something new, then the (usually larger) remaining time listening to what I know and fancy listening to.

I would add the qualification that much of my 'new' listening is actually rediscovery of music I already have, but that I either haven't played much or at least not for a long while. I find that a great way to broaden my horizons too. 

A very interesting question Nigel - I'll enjoy reading the responses to your question from others as this is something that i often ask myself. Not having explored Tidal or the other new streaming services of late, i tend to discover new music via magazines, radio and the very useful Music Room here. A few years back before Spotify was blocked at work, i found it fantastic for discovering new music based on it's recommendations and ended up buying a lot new music as a result.

As to what i tend to play, I find i do have a number of favourites that tend to get played very often and so quite a bit of my collection can go unplayed. Again the WAYLTAWMABI? thread is great for reminding myself of past favourites.As a result, i've been limiting (!) my new purchases and have started spending more time going back through my collection (coming up to about 2000 CDs now) and making myself listen to CDs i may have overlooked . I have really been enjoying discovering old favourites again and finding some new favourites too. I think if i had something like Tidal i'd be a kid in a musical sweetshop (and making Amazon very happy with the resulting CD purchases !)

James

PS - Apologies for straying OT - Kevin, your lounge in your profile looks superb - love the Obs 

My default mode is discovery, especially now I'm retired and I spend most of the waking day listening to music one way or the other.

I make no excuse for being a new music junkie. Mostly through Bandcamp and Qobuz, though Radio 3 provides the odd new gem (e.g. listening now on Qobuz to a delightful modern choral piece called The Doors Of Heaven by a Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds).

I'm with Kevin, in that there's a high attrition rate. There is an immense amount of new music being generated and though much of it is good not enough is good enough to scream "keeper". 

Evenings tend to be for more known stuff, or giving new louder stuff a work-out. I'm no Bert but Music Collector tells me I've bought (so far) 115 albums released this year (so not counting stuff I discovered this year dating from previous years) so that's a lot of new stuff to get to know better.

As for old stuff, I move in phases, so currently Prog is on the back-burner, Berlin Electronica is to the fore (not that it's ever far away) as is more modern electronic stuff, and the Dan are never too far away...

A good research from magazines and online for new discoveries. The" people also bought this "recommendations from the Estores have resulted in some great intuitive finds.   A habit I picked up from going to the record and cd shops and just picking up stuff that looked and sounded cool.

I sometimes use the Desk top client, instead of the serve app to select from my Unitiserve.  A usefull feature shows how many times an album has been played. Quite a few have only been played once or twice after being ripped.  

Just thinking about how I hear new things these days.  Before I retired it was listening to the car radio while travelling to/from the hospital and hearing something I liked.  I I usually bought the album it was on rather than a single, just to see what else the artist was capable of.

Now, I only listen to the car radio when travelling with SWMBO.  Alas, this is usually at the time the irritating Steve Wright is on and he is one of the worst offenders for not saying what the track was that he just played.

So most of my 'new' things now come from other's recommendations, being subjected to my young granddaughter's latest favourite, and hearing songs etc on DVDs blurays then checking the soundtrack on IMDB to see what the track I like was.