do you want more people to like the music you like?

well yeah duh thats why i maintain an elaborate review site and post 100x a week on this board about bands that like two or three people here actually like

how's that working out for you so far

either is fine

yeah I don't really care. this is sort of a weird question - on the one hand most people have terrible taste and I don't care what they like. If all of a sudden they liked what I liked that just means a bunch of morons would be showing up at shows or blasting it out of their cars or whatever. On the other hand, it is fun to share music with like-minded people and I guess in some ways it would be fun to have more like-minded people around...?

I dunno. abstaining from voting.

oh yeah, I guess if you're talking about it that way. like I remember being really into Modest Mouse as a 13-year old when the Moon and Antartica came out, and now when you go to a show it's packed as hell with drunk people who only know like 2-3 songs, and that's something that truly sucks. also when LCD Soundsystem shows started getting infested with scene kids who never heard of the Fall or the good Bowie records the whole atmosphere got super lame

I don't want people to like my music so much as I want people to explain cogently why they like what they like.

like I remember being really into Modest Mouse as a 13-year old when the Moon and Antartica came out, and now when you go to a show it's packed as hell with drunk people who only know like 2-3 songs, and that's something that truly sucks. also when LCD Soundsystem shows started getting infested with scene kids who never heard of the Fall or the good Bowie records the whole atmosphere got super lame

so you must not like any music then

this is sort of a weird question

idk i think its a hard question, since there seem to me to be clear advantages to both cases, but i also think its really a p impt one and gets to the heart of a lot of the stuff we do here on ilm

never heard of the Fall or the good Bowie records

the horror, the horror

yes and no and maybe

i want only smart, attractive, interesting people to like the music i like.

I want the top 40 to exactly mirror my tastes so that it is easy for me to find awesome, enjoyable music and the people who make it enjoy tons of success and make a pile of money off of it.

also, their sweat should smell like lavender or almonds if we are standing next to each other at a show.

gets to the heart of a lot of the stuff we do here on ilm

eh maybe... doesn't seem like a lot of proselytizing to the great unwashed gets done here. what many of us seem to appreciate is the breadth and depth of different afficionados' listening experience and being able to take advantage of that and explore it. I enjoy aerosmith's input on, say, Mercyful Fate, but I don't necessarily feel the need to convert him to the Beach Boys (Kokomo thread aside). Similarly I don't really care if Alfred likes, say, metal, there's plenty of other stuff he's interested in that makes for insightful posting.

sarahel otm

This is a good question. To be honest, I don't entirely understand people who want the music they enjoy to be more popular, unless it's out of an altruistic desire for the artist to reap whatever rewards (financial or otherwise) that popularity might entail. As long as you are able to easily access it and enjoy it, what difference does it make who else does?

Other points:

1. I do like being able to recommend music to specific people I think might like it, but I don't get what drives the indiscriminate evangelists.

2. With some music, I specifically ~don't~ want it to be more popular, to better maintain the illusion of a special relationship to it.

3. The cliche "In a perfect world, this would be a #1 hit" has always really bugged me. I don't know if it's the inherent solipsism or what.

I want people to hear the music i like. I'm not fussed when people say it's terrible but there's an enormous sense of satisfaction in writing about a song, or playing it at a club night, and someone who would never have heard it otherwise coming along to say that they really enjoyed it. It has always seemed perverse, to me, that anyone wouldn't want to share the pleasure they get from a record with as many other people as possible.

other people liking music and the inconvenience of it is awesome

also when LCD Soundsystem shows started getting infested with scene kids who never heard of the Fall or the good Bowie records the whole atmosphere got super lame

― frogbs, Tuesday, January 3, 2012 5:49 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I love LCD Soundsystem but I actively despise both the Fall and the "good Bowie records".

Also, I would love for more people to like the music I like because that would mean more people could sing along when I break out my acoustic guitar at parties!

do you want foster the people to like the music you like?

did you ever play the Uriah Heep game? That's what we called it, but it's probably best known as something else. Anyway, it's based on the premise of that critic who wrote that if Uriah Heep ever had a top ten song he would kill himself. You and friends make a theoretical suicide pact that if a particular artist has a top 10 hit, you would kill yourself, and everyone picks an artist. Me and one of the other guys each picked an underground act that we really liked because we didn't want a bunch of douchebags to like our favorite bands. n.b. we were 20 yrs old at the time.

so you must not like any music then

????

the horror, the horror

all i'm saying is the average LCD fan in 2005 was a lot more fun to talk to. it's not a big deal and in general i do want the bands i like to get more famous, but yeah obviously there are downsides

I want people to hear the music i like. I'm not fussed when people say it's terrible but there's an enormous sense of satisfaction in writing about a song, or playing it at a club night, and someone who would never have heard it otherwise coming along to say that they really enjoyed it. It has always seemed perverse, to me, that anyone wouldn't want to share the pleasure they get from a record with as many other people as possible.

bingo

More people do like the music I like.

I agree that there is something satisfying about turning someone on to a band or song, but I sometimes feel like what I like is so determined by my individual tastes and preferences that it's useless to even try unless I sense that we're already on the same wavelength. In any case, it makes me feel vulnerable.

i wish my housemate liked the music i liked so i wasn't banned from playing it in the sittingroom

hopeful opinion: yes, bc i want everyone to be ennobled by the music i find beautiful
cynical opinion: no, bc i don't want the specialness of my opinion devalued by other ppl sharing it
realistic opinion: it makes a minor impact on my life either way
altruistic opinion: yes, bc i want ppl i think are talented to succeed regardless of the impact on me

there is no such thing as an "average fan."

i don't like this purely quantitative approach. i don't really care about the numbers of people who like the music i like (the more i think about it the less it rings true. if everybody would like the music i like, i'd ask myself questions), but i definitely would like to know more people who like the music i like. this is why i am here. those people can give me hints about music i will maybe like which i still don't know.

i would like my girlfriend to like the music i like

xp - this is exactly it, I'm kind of mixed on whether or not I want the bands I like to become big but just having people to talk to about them is valuable, and this board is generally pretty great for that (see the 1k+ posts written on Cluster/Roedelius for example)

haha nostormo otm

oh yeah, I guess if you're talking about it that way. like I remember being really into Modest Mouse as a 13-year old when the Moon and Antartica came out, and now when you go to a show it's packed as hell with drunk people who only know like 2-3 songs, and that's something that truly sucks. also when LCD Soundsystem shows started getting infested with scene kids who never heard of the Fall or the good Bowie records the whole atmosphere got super lame

i want this to be an incredibly elaborate troll

i want only smart, attractive, interesting people to like the music i like.

― sarahel, Tuesday, January 3, 2012 10:53 PM (27 minutes ago)

this neatly skewers the opposition

if u like lcd soundsystem = ~nah~, cuz it would be 'the wrong ppl'

if u like florian hecker = ~uh huh!~, cuz aesthetic extremism ensures only 'the right ppl' would ever be converted to the cause

in frogbs' case, only the wrong kind of scene girls fail to give him beejes in honour of his superior knowledge of james murphy's predecessors

oh yeah, I guess if you're talking about it that way. like I remember being really into Modest Mouse as a 13-year old when the Moon and Antartica came out, and now when you go to a show it's packed as hell with drunk people who only know like 2-3 songs, and that's something that truly sucks. also when LCD Soundsystem shows started getting infested with scene kids who never heard of the Fall or the good Bowie records the whole atmosphere got super lame

i want this to be an incredibly elaborate troll

― thomp, Tuesday, January 3, 2012 3:26 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you got the troll part right

in frogbs' case, only the wrong kind of scene girls fail to give him beejes in honour of his superior knowledge of james murphy's predecessors

in that case, they're all the wrong kind

awww :(

In his overlong, gloomy, histrionic essay ‘The Shadow of our Night’ [2] (Gillett and Frith, 1996, p.153), working-class 60s rock-kid Pete Fowler offers a single perfect anecdote of punk-think. By the 70s a teacher, eager that his art students think for themselves, Fowler had them discuss ‘fancying’: that is, what makes X attractive to Y, and so on. In class of ’79, the 18-year-old with the pink hair and the safety-pinned bondage gear hadn’t yet opened up. So Fowler asked him this: “You’re at a party, and three girls are on a sofa, all naked, all hot for you: one looks like Debbie Harry, one like Charlotte Rampling, one like the tall one in Hot Gossip. Which do you go for?”

“None of them,” answers Pink-Hair.

“None? Are you sure? Why?”

“Because in the morning I might find I went with the one that wears flares.”

lately i feel less and less sure of what constitutes 'the music i like' which i feel problematizes the question somewhat

lately here = 'since i was thirteen'

this is sort of a weird question - on the one hand most people have terrible taste and I don't care what they like. If all of a sudden they liked what I liked that just means a bunch of morons would be showing up at shows or blasting it out of their cars or whatever.

it would mean you have terrible taste

eh maybe... doesn't seem like a lot of proselytizing to the great unwashed gets done here

more doesnt always mean 'a lot' tho

but really all I'm saying is that back when LCD was known mostly as a half-tribute to late 70's postpunk and didn't have a whole lot of fans you'd always meet cool ppl at the shows or whenever they'd randomly come up in conversation, now, not so much, I'm not trying to be snotty about it

That's your fault for not mingling.

yeah lcd soundsystem used to work much differently as a signifier than it does now, sure

i feel like there was a lot more of making the case for (x) kind of music on ilm up until some time in the middle of the last decade -- there's been a trend more to people coming here to talk to people who like the same kind/s of music that they like, share new things they have found in the music that they like (rolling (x) thread)

i don't think this is so much an ilm thing tho as a shifting of the baseline level of musical knowhow/openness assumed in and of 'people who like music' (this being a self-defined group, i guess)

my most musical friends are shading-towards-womad type people who feel no need at all to keep up with the latest in what is going on, which i find more and more helpful in terms of keeping a sense of perspective

-

xpost this is a terrible misreading of the lcd soundsystem project, obviously

this is a pretty easy 'yes' for me - more people liking the music i like would mean music i like would be easier to find, for one. also the communal experience for sure - i love being able to turn on the radio and be like "yeah, this fuckin bangs" and then going and talking about it with my friends/other ppl. most of us probably feel pretty disconnected from what's popular right now but for me - and i've mentioned this before - the rap landscape barely reflects my tastes as a listener and that seriously depresses me

lcd soundsystem is really not very good. maybe that's why it got so popular.

<really makes u think>

"shading-towards-womad"?

can u draw us a venn diagram of the not very good and the so popular? xp

yeah but the venn overlap between your (or my) taste and geir's is probably a tranche of 20+ yr old music which somehow and rather peculiarly succeeds according to very many different criteria and upon which divergent tastes might be superimposed

Exactly! I am not sure why you think we are in disagreement as this is precisely the point I'm making.

its like how ilm is about liking ilm for the right reasons right

i mean liking pop music

xp to Neandarthal: My experience too. I'm not a great cold conversation starter in the first place, but gigs are almost the worst venue for meeting new people ime, even in a small-town scene like mine.

maybe just try to look approachable instead then.

open body language

one time this total stranger at a bus stop asked me if i wanted to go see Hella with her

it was cool

was it marnie stern?

xps

Yeah I guess I've given up years ago and that might come across in my body language, but I never get the feeling that other people are striking up conversations with strangers either. Maybe I should proactively work on it. Anyway, this should probably be on another thread, we all know how ILM abhors a derail.

Exactly! I am not sure why you think we are in disagreement as this is precisely the point I'm making.

― Tim F, Wednesday, January 4, 2012 1:16 AM (5 minutes ago)

hah yes, i totally agree wrt 'overlap music', it's just that 'things you like' and 'the way you hear/think' are much more difficult to parse when it comes to the more recondite interests we bring to ILM.....i think most people who like say, night slugs, are finding more or less the same enticements.....

― Tim F, Wednesday, January 4, 2012 12:52 AM (23 minutes ago)

that was supposed to be...

Also have you never had the experience of only liking something (or only really liking something) after you read someone's take on the music that opened it up for you?

― Tim F, Wednesday, January 4, 2012 12:52 AM (23 minutes ago)

i don't think i have, in this formulation

Pitchfork has kinda muddled this whole thing

Last weekend I was at End Of An Ear, a record shop in Austin, and I found 3 copies of Gene Parsons 'Kindling'. It's a record I've been hoping to find for a year or so and here were 2 perfect copies and one sealed for no more than 5 dollars. I thought why are people buying these? I put the remaining 2 in the front of the P's with wishful thinking. Happy that no one had bought them but said that Gene isn't getting the love he deserves. I actually found many records there that surprised me no one had bought them. I assume lots of people are looking for the music I dig, but there they are waiting for me instead.

yeah we've all totally disliked things after we've read the effusive p4k reviews, right? xp

I meant why aren't people buying these

not at all what I meant nakh but whatever floats, you know

if it floats, we know etc etc

right now i feel indifferent and apathetic about the question posed in this thread but hopefully i can find a way to feel otherwise about it

hah jacob, the rest of us weren't thinking of it as a zero sum game until you introduced material scarcity

the solution is to repress the good stuff yourself under license, and keep the originals

frogbs -- i'm not sure what you meant? there's a lot of people who don't read p4k tho

I have always had different music tastes than most of my friends, at least as an adult. My wife and I don't really share our music tastes at all. Having recently made some friends who share my music tastes (for the most part they do like dubstep a little too much for my tastes) I have come to realize how great it is to have people around you who share your tastes. I could care less what most people listen to except that it benefits artists I like if more people like them.

That being said, it would be useful to have my wife shar my music tastes, but that boat has long since sailed.

definitely yes to the thread question

i like reading about why people like the music i like, especially if it's for different reasons, which expand my own love for it

nah i could care less about a hoi polloi

i am so used to people making fun of my taste in music i would be totally weirded out if they started digging the same stuff

A lot of gigs I've been to over the last couple of years have been badly under-attended, so yes. Although I don't know if it's people not liking the music or people just being skint.

i want only smart, attractive, interesting people to like the music i like.
― sarahel, Tuesday, January 3, 2012 10:53 PM (Yesterday)

Personally I want only averagely intelligent, ugly, tediously pedantic people to like the music I like. Then we can have something else in common too and I needn't feel disdained for my unhipness (merely for my clumsy grammatical errors) at shows.

(sometimes I'm not sure if there is even "music I like" vs "music I don't like" any more, as I stay in my little cocoon of rarely hearing the radio, only downloading things I think I'll like and finding them all pleasant enough for a couple of listens and then mostly forgetting about them. but then I look at the cover of the NME and yes, fairly sure there is still music I don't like)

(sometimes I'm not sure if there is even "music I like" vs "music I don't like" any more, as I stay in my little cocoon of rarely hearing the radio, only downloading things I think I'll like and finding them all pleasant enough for a couple of listens and then mostly forgetting about them. but then I look at the cover of the NME and yes, fairly sure there is still music I don't like)

(that)

A good percentage of the music I like has a social aspect...nights that are put on, who is going to get booked, what venue it might take place at

Which means for me there is definitely an optimum level of 'people that like it'

Any less and it just isn't going to happen in the first place, and any more and it starts to lose the nice feel of a good venue with the right number of people to make the night out really great

I also rather like the "scene" element of a...scene

I know a couple of people who'll regularly moan about everyone (including their workmates and grandparents) listening to "shit music". Some even go so far as to say that people should be practically forced into listening to (and enjoying) their particular style. It's often these same people who are the first to jump all over any act that makes it "big" beyond its underground threshold.

So on one hand they're saying "If you don't listen to metal, you have shit taste" and conversely "If X metal band gets popular, it's the fault of part-timers and dickheads helping them to sell out". It's an extremely polarised way of looking at values and taste, but somehow I think there's a stilted logic going on here that goes on in the mind of most music fans to some extent.

It's clear the character described above gets off on feeling superior to others because of the exclusivity of his/her own music taste - the attitude allows them to disparage both "norms" and newcomers. Even though they claim more people should listen to the kind of music they like, they'd probably hate it if this really happened. I'd like to say this is inherent in metal fans only, but I think it crops up in every area, from dance snobs to indie fuxxor.

Me, I'd just like it if more people I knew listened to music in general, especially in my age range (25-35).

It was really nice the other day to chat with an acquaintance who told me he'd bought Rain Dogs on my suggestion and started asking me what else he should get. Don't think that's happened in years.

I want enough people to like my favourite music so that the musicians in question can afford to keep making records. That is all.

A lot of gigs I've been to over the last couple of years have been badly under-attended, so yes.

Huh. Just the other night I was bemoaning the fact that it's no longer possible, as it was 10 years ago, to see a band that gets a good Pitchfork review in a small club without buying tickets in advance. I guess my tastes are too mainstream now.

Or people still go to gigs in the US? I dunno.

I want to like more people

I want more people to be open to the musicality in the sounds I like to listen to. "Like and dislike are cheap," as the big man likes to say...

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I want exactly 100 people to like my favorite music, and then I want them all to start a band. Maybe even one band with 100 members.

i want more people to like the music i listen to. i want the artists i love to be as successful as possible. but i don't ever want to pay more than about $15 (max) for a show or go to a place that holds more than maybe a couple hundred people. i hate crowds, so i want even those small venues to be less than jammed. i'm a vinyl fetishist and am easily seduced by obscurity and scarcity, but i find manufactured scarcity insulting when there's substantial public demand for the product.

as a result of all that, i engage with bands most closely when they are relatively unknown and tend to lose interest when they start playing decent venues and selling significant quantities of product. i don't begrudge them their success or resent their fans, i just get distracted by competing obscurities.

I have two semi-separate angles of approach to this question:

1) I am a freelance writer, but I don't have to take assignments just to pay the rent. So I wind up writing mostly about music I actually like, the odd negative CD review aside. So yeah, in that instance, obviously I want more people to like the music I like - I'm literally writing about it in the hope of enticing more people to listen. And on the site I actually run, I only write about things I like or am interested in - no negative reviews ever.

2) I work for a record label, one that's put out a lot of records I 100% endorse going back years before I ever got there, and is continuing to put out stuff I like a lot. There were at least four albums released in 2011 that, if I didn't work there, would have been in my Top 20 and contenders for my Top 10, but I couldn't list them at all due to conflict of interest. So in that case, it really does help pay my rent if other people like the music I like.

I want Electric Six to be millionaires, so yes.

I also want to see them on Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve With Ryan Seacrest.

Can't understand any of the reasons for voting "no" here, unless you're assuming that "more people" means "ten million more people".

Good question. I sort of do, but probably more the case that I want people to at least understand the different things I like, in the way that I can argue with people here but there's a shared understanding of music as a very large world and of the actual depth of music itself.

But that's people as in..people in general, the avg person, whatever that is.

In terms of people like my friends, I think I want them to like what I do much moreso. Just so we can talk about something great. I love recommending things to friends.

I want exactly 100 people to like my favorite music, and then I want them all to start a band. Maybe even one band with 100 members.

there's already one Polyphonic Spree, we don't need another

I just want to have local friends who like all of the same early/mid 90s indie stuff as me and want to play in a band with me in Hoboken. I even asked Ira from Yo La Tengo if he knew anybody here with who plays and with similar tastes and he said "no way I don't even talk to anybody here" or something in a polite/dismissive jokey "I'm too much of a loser" way.

So yes! I'd also like to see more new bands come out who share this fascination I have and can't quite explain.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

jyp

Tough question... There's a side of me that remembers bands I loved getting bigger and resenting how much more of a scramble it was to get tickets to their shows and lamenting them playing bigger and less intimate venues. Then there's a side--probably much more relevant now, as I go to fewer and fewer live shows--that just wants to share what I love; like Ronan said, recommending things to friends is one of the true pleasures of being into music. I guess it's the macro-/micro-, global/local distinction at play... So I guess my answer is something like, "Yes, but particularly if they're people I already like, and even more particularly if I played some part in them liking the music." We should also always try to remember that, for every instance in which we were an early-comer to an artist, there are several instances in which we're part of some other early-comer's mass of "more people"--or maybe I'm just always late to the party!