repeated playing leads to liking any record?

No.

liking your posts, weasel. an interesting question, particularly as, at the moment, i can't think of any "bad" music that i grew to like, at least in the way you characterize it.

thinking about it in reverse, two examples: i remember absolutely hating "when doves cry" growing up -- it was too "weird," deconstructed somehow so that it didn't even seem like a song. i probably needed about ten years' distance before i could listen to it and appreciate how good it was. similarly i hated "let's go all the way" by sly foxx, i think because it was so impossibly catchy. i'm don't think if i've heard it since then, but i can also appreciate that its very damnedable catchiness means it's "good." depends what you're looking for.

on the other hand, and perhaps more to your point, one of my college roommates listened to a lot of metallica. eventually it caught -- i don't see myself running out to buy master of puppets, but i wouldn't change the channel if "harvester of sorrow" came on, either.

I think that it is definitely possible to like almost anything through repeated listens, which is why I make it a policy not to listen again to music I don't at least kind of like on the first listen. The exception to my rule is for things that I hate at first but am perversely attracted to, like Beefheart (too weird at first) and Jonathan Richman (too nasal).

I disagree Roe Joe...
I think you can't always trust your first listen. I've come across so much great music on 2nd, 3rd, or 8th listen where you just have to be in the right mood for it. If I'm not feeling slightly depressed or self-loathsome, I'm probably not going to feel like throwing on Joy Division. If I don't feel like rocking out, I'm not going to put on Iron Maiden. There's tons of "difficult" music out there; stuff that's not immediately attractive. Stuff that's not sugary sweet with melodies. Stuff where the melodies are obscured a bit or even absent. So yeah, it might not sound too great on first listen if I'm not in the mood.

There's also the possibility that I won't know enough about a genre to fully appreciate it. For example, is Kompakt immediately intriguing to someone who doesn't know much about dance musics? I kinda doubt it. With a fair amount of listening though, I think it can really grow on you...which I'm sure is why so many music writers out there have totally flipped out over it in the past few years. Enough people said "this is something you should be listening to" and it finally caught on after enough "study."

For me, I have to be aware of my moods...sometimes if I really dislike something on first listen for no apparent reason, I almost make myself go back and listen to it a couple more times because I must've had something up my arse that day. Of course, this doesn't always work. I hated The Arcade Fire the first time I heard it and gave it five or more listens because everyone else was constantly listening to it. It still doesn't strike me as very likeable, very interesting, or very special...

in 1999 i was travelling wyoming for 2 weeks with my boyfriend in our friend's car. there were heaps of CDs in the car, but they were all very scratched... we checked all of them, and only one of them worked.
it was the (not very good) first album by then-totally unknown matchbox20 (menntioned in the 'bad names' thread).

and the stereo in the car worked this strange way: every time we stopped, it stopped, too, and when we drove on, the CD always started playing from the 1st track.

i think in these 2 weeks we heard the 1st track for like 3000 times.

3 years later, back home already, i got so fecking nostalgic about those times and these 2 weeks in particular that i ordered this (not exactly brilliant) CD and even played it to myself while alone.

so i don't think you can actually like something that you have heard 3000 times, but you can subconsciously connect it with something good in your memory, or just get used to it. get used.

Lasers, I'll agree with you to some extent. I just remembered that a friend of mine used to play Kinks "Village Green" album all the time in the background, and I did't mind it but wasn't all that impressed. I loved it when I listened to it a few years later and it's now a favorite.

So you can't trust a first listen, but there has to be SOMETHING there to draw you back -- you can't just listen to every band in the world ten times until you're sure you do or don't like them. If I don't like a band from the first listen or two, I don't go out of my way to listen again. I have heard a lot of music, but of all the music I like, at least 90% of it I have liked from the first listen.

i think there was another thread about this

I remember a review of Last Splash in Select (I think) that espoused this theory, which inspired me to try it out on that very album. I quite like it, but I've never loved it. The idea has always stuck with me though. Some records definitely need to be 'learned' to a certain extent to gain greater appreciation of them, but like weasel I go through a hell of a lot more music now than I did when I was 15 and I doubt whether I give it all a fair go. Now, there has to be at least something that grabs me on the first listen if it's to get a second chance.

there certainly is a point to revisiting things you didn't like on first listen or things you didn't like at a certain age. but there are many things of which i can't even get through a complete first listening. if i can never make it through it, i certainly can't grow to like it.

Yes.

Presumably this is a subtly different phenomenon from growing older/gaining in experience so that you like music you didn't used to?

Also there are songs which you are forced to listen to over and over again because they're popular and everyone else plays them. Then there are songs which you force yourself to listen to over and over again because you're sure there must be something in them. I think both options can lead to liking a song.

It's also partly about trust - there are some artists whose ability to make good music I trust more than my ability to tell good music on first listen. After I got into Hounds of Love by Kate Bush (which was not very difficult at all, at least the first half), I made sure I persisted with The Dreaming even though I didn't like it at first because I knew she could never release a bad album.

Similarly with King of the Mountain - even though I was a little underwhelmed at first I stuck with it because I know she knows what the fuck she's doing.

Somehow this has turned into a post about Kate Bush.