averagely speaking, how many listens do you need in order to be (more or less) sure if a song/record is good?

of course, if it does not sound like total shit in the first place..

more often than not, 1 does the job, but i'll vote for 4 because that feels like the point at which my impression of most stuff starts to solidify and not change too much afterwards

I'm not sure I ever know.

i have a friend who always judge music after first listen only. i want to prove him wrong! because he is!

0 - i know if it's gonna be good and/or suck just by looking

a witch

Sometimes once, sometimes a half dozen, sometimes it takes a particular party, or comment, or observation. Who knows?

6+1/2= 3.5.
so 4 for you

usually 1, sometimes 2, if there is a lot going on musically or if I have serious biases either for or against the artist or an element of the song.

I can generally figure out if it is good enough pretty quick, whether or not I get the music or want to hear it again sometimes takes a few more listens to absorb.

How much attention am I paying? What kind of mood am I in? Where am I? Who am I with?

assume you pay full attention and in a balanced mood

Holy Crap, this is amazing! Actually, no hold on.. it's shite!

it takes me 2 listens to decide if i like something or not, then a further 7.5 listens to recognise whether it is objectively good. i could probably do this in 4.7 listens but i think since i'm assigning something to the eternal pantheon of goodness or badness it's important that i be as fair as possible.

I very rarely change my mind after the first thirty seconds listen.

What an impossible question! Because it depends on the record, on the situation one is listening in, one's mood, being irritated at a stop/start streaming album advance that won't work properly, all sorts of things.

Most of the time, I can tell within 1 - or technically 2 - listens. Because if I complete a listen, and then have the urge to listen to it *again*, that means it's good. (1 listen with no desire to hear again, I mean, I can think "that was alright" or even "that was good" but I don't think that "it's alright" is the kind of good we're talking about?)

But then, I also have a rule that if I listen to something 5 times on Spotify, I have to buy it. So it might be 5 listens which is the test of "I like this" vs "I like this so much I have to own it." Because there are lots of things I think are good on first listen, that the fizzy feeling wears off very quickly.

But then again, I have also talked about the experience with records like the new Knife record and Goldenheart, where I have had a sense that the record was good, but that I just couldn't get *inside* it. And I don't know exactly how many listens it takes to get inside a record like that. There isn't a magic number where I can just decide "this is just not for me, and I'm going to stop trying to get it" or "wow, I have finally found a way inside this record!"

So I'm going with 2, because for most records I like, that's what it takes, but there are other records where it requires more.

then a further 7.5 listens to recognise whether it is objectively good. i could probably do this in 4.7 listens but i think since i'm assigning something to the eternal pantheon of goodness or badness it's important that i be as fair as possible.

but how can you tell something is "good" if you don't like it? I don't think that's possible.

Of course you can think that something is good, meaning having inherent worth, being an excellent example of its genre, being a brilliant work of art - and just not personally like it! It happens all the time.

People say that, but I don't necessarily believe it is true, apart from something having "inherent worth," but being "a brilliant work of art" -- that sounds disingenuous

I'm not being disingenuous. There are entire genres of music that I just don't like and probably never will. I'm not arrogant enough to presume that an entire genre of music that is just not to *my* tastes, is all "not good" just because I don't like it.

totally depends on the music, dunnit?

Perhaps "inherent worth" is not the right word for that kind of goodness. But there is definitely goodness in art which I am unable to *love*, but which does not stop the goodness from being visible/audible, if not to me, then to others.

But, if you don't like an entire genre, and you hear something from that genre, how would you trust your judgment that it is "good"?

But there is definitely goodness in art which I am unable to *love*, but which does not stop the goodness from being visible/audible

oh sure, but to some degree you like it, it just isn't the best thing ever, in your opinion? I'm talking about songs you dislike.

No, I wouldn't trust my judgement that it was "good" but neither would I trust my judgement that it was "not good" either. If we are talking about a binary, I would not be able to make a binary decision.

x-post

No, I wouldn't trust my judgement that it was "good" but neither would I trust my judgement that it was "not good" either.

Yeah, that is what I would say, too!

or rather, I dislike "x" but I dislike everything that sounds like "x," so it would be like asking a vegetarian where the best steakhouse is in their city

you know i was being mad sarcastic, right?

"inherent worth", if it means anything, just means "a bunch of subjective opinions like this"

so it's good to say "i don't like this but other people might" and it's nonsense to say "this here is Good, that there is Bad", at least in my world. and yes the latter might really be a way of just expressing your subjective opinion but the language obfuscates that recognition and makes people think their fly-by-night opinions are timeless judgements about Truth and Beauty and other things that try to kill the process of creation

i haven't quite sorted out an opinion on whether opinions can be Good or Bad tho, which is problematic to be fair.

OK, back from my constitutional, and I've figured out what I mean.

Declaring something to be "good" is an intellectual exercise, like appreciating a painting or a novel. This song is well written, it's well produced, well performed, the performers convey emotion or narrative in an effective way. I admire this song, and applaud its craftsmanship.

Declaring that I "like" something is a far more emotional exercise. This song *means* something to me, I connect with the emotions or the experience, or the performer. This song hits my particular happy spot, in terms of sound or mood or texture. This song is evocative to me. I *love* this song.

You can admire a song and think it's good, and yet still have absolutely zero connection to it, while still admiring the craft that went into it. You can also absolutely love and relate to a song which is objectively terrible - the singer is flat, the drums are off-beat, yet it just captures something that makes you feeeeeeeeeel something every time you hear it. Or, of course, a song can be both.

It does not usually take many listens to establish if a song is well-crafted and well-performed. You don't even have to love rap to be able appreciate that a rapper has good flow or clever rhyming technique. So it's very easy to say a song is "good" in a listen or two.

But whether you *like* a song is another question. Some songs just hit you immediately in your happy place so totally that you just go "yes! yes! yes! this song is amazing!" within the first 30 seconds. And sometimes it takes getting inside a song, letting the song soundtrack a couple of experiences, getting to know a performer slowly, like getting to know a shy friend, before you realise you love it.

So no, liking a song and thinking a song is "good" are not the same thing at all. And they take different lengths of time to establish.

i only listen to one genre and that's 'good music'

if it's not good, i don't listen to it.

i don't listen to bad music. i hate it so much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UYvsk6_foc

in all seriousness it's more about my own willingness to appreciate something.

i love being challenged by music and often seek out things that i know are going to need a while to be appreciated on their own terms. if there's something that doesn't instantly appeal to me but appears to be enjoyed by a reasonable cross-section of people (especially people whose tastes i generally respect - you fine folk for instance), then i assume that this is more my own problem than a problem with the music itself. in this case i like to try to take the steps to acquire, or at least understand why this music has such an appeal. once i've learnt this, i find that it opens doors onto other things which i can appreciate a lot quicker.

pretty much the only times i will write something off on first listen is if i can tell that it's a sound that i've heard a bunch of times before and doesn't attempt anything new - so if it's generic landfill indie or throwaway vocal-dance stuff or some attempt to mix two types of music and it's not working, then sure, life's too short and the world of music's too big to really waste my time on it.

if there's something that's been hanging around on my iphone for weeks unplayed, then i assume it's not the right time for me to discover it and i put it away for a while. if i come back to it later is really down to fate and mood.

dog latin, you are otm.

Except maybe about the part of dismissing music that sound like things you heard before.
In most cades I agree but there are exceptions where the charms hide underneath nuances or a fine songwriting.

oh sure - i'm not going to dismiss stuff outright based solely on the grounds of having heard similar stuff before. but i am less likely to listen to, say, the latest album by the Strypes, and this will be based on the fact i think their sound is generic of things that either i've found lacking in the past, or that i feel was done better the first time round. this is different from, say, Haim who i think sound like a lot of older music but it's music that i liked in the first place and i also feel they are taking that music in a different direction.

Funny because I somewhat feel the opposite about those 2 bands. But I might be wrong because..you know..first listen.

2

every time

no exceptions

second listen is only to verify "grower" status

the only thing i've heard in recent months (years?) that i've felt actively repelled by was kanye's 'blood on the leaves'. that was a very strange reaction that even i was surprised by, but i might have listened to it twice and that was enough to make me know i never wanted to hear it again. i did try and read up on it a bit too, simply because it's not like me to feel that way about a bit of music. all too often if there's music that i find difficult to enjoy or process i find morbid curiosity makes me want to understand why that is. in the case of 'blood..' i'm pretty sure that it's a cyclone of different factors conspiring against my senses which makes it so grating i can't actually explain it.

Oh wait. I'm listening to the Strypes record now. They are baaad.
(Heard them only live before
Xpost

I'd say two listens to know whether or not it's something I'll want to hear over and over again (although obviously the shelf-life of different songs from that point varies, depending on all sorts of things).

lots of albums take loads of plays to sink in. But some hit the spot in one or 2. But that's quite rare (for me).
but then again I can hate something on first listen.
so basically i cant answer the Q

but i doubt anyone gives a shit about what I think so carry on, i'll just read the answers

Some things which I voted very highly for on EOY I doubt I'll listen to more than 3-4 times all the way through in my lifetime,'Photographs' by Lambkin and Lescaleet being one of them. There's no doubt it's deserving of attention but it's not every day listening. I guess it's more like a film. Some films are fantastic but you wouldn't want to re watch.

I usually give something 3 listens before I try to form some sort of opinion of it. Of course, sometimes I can't be bothered to listen to it 3 times in the first place.

Stuff by artists I like a lot or that is otherwise highly recommended by people I trust, I will often listen to more often than 3 times even if I don't like it much initially, because I know it sometimes takes me a while before stuff clicks. Sometimes this will make me wonder if I would like almost anything if I listened to it often enough. I might have musical Stockholm syndrome.

Bramwell Bell and dopg latin both OTM. BB particularly with the 'good'/'like' dichotomy.

This is a particularly pertinent question to me at the moment because I'm trying to assess something and understand how nostalgia and 'good' / 'like' impulses are tangled up.

The Knife and Vampire Weekend albums from last year are both examples of 'good' over 'like' for me; I admired both, but cared about neither.

Two or three listens is usually enough to solidify my opinion if a song or album is in a genre or from a scene in which I'm already immersed, but some of my favorite music (like the VU or Beefheart) took months of listening off and on before I shifted from thinking, "That's grating, but interesting" to thinking, "That's interesting and immensely pleasurable." (As a teenager, I had much more time to relisten and reevaluate.) It's not so much about wanting to be objective as it is wanting to be receptive to elements of an album (or any artwork) that might reveal themselves over time.

I'm trying to find a thread, that I'm sure I started (or maybe just thought about starting) about how often you listen to your favourite music, or how long / many times you can listen to something before you 'wear it out'; and what is 'wearing out' music? I'm sure we must have talked about this before.

It's pretty rare for me now to change my mind about something after the first listen. Often even the first 30 seconds of a record (assuming it doesn't have a long "intro") tell me what I need to know.

But yeah as noted above, there are occasional examples where I change my mind after a long time, sometimes after years. VU was an example that came to my mind as well. But usually that's less a matter of give-or-take a few spins, and more a matter of coming back to it much later, at a different place in my life.

xxpost that's a much more pertinent question. i realised early on that i can get tired of even my favourite bits of music. after a few goes round i find that the once mindblowing elements of a particular song start to just wash over me or become wallpaper. I can barely listen to much Aphex Twin or the Beach Boys any more because of this - even though I love both, it's like I can't work out what was special about them to me. It's why sometimes i deliberately don't play something too much for fear of accelerating the over-playing process. But it's also why I consume so much music - I need something else to fill the void!
I compare this to when I was younger and maybe my parents would have the same tape in the car for years and years and years but somehow no one would really get bored of them. My mum would by an album on tape just so she could hear one song. I swear she wouldn't even listen to the rest of the album, just keep rewinding it when she got to the end of the song and put it on again. Even my favourite stuff today I can feel like I'm overloading on if I play something more than 3 times a day.

"Often even the first 30 seconds of a record (assuming it doesn't have a long "intro") tell me what I need to know."

Really? What kind of music are you listening to? What if there's a sudden chorus or middle eight or something that you dislike?

xpost

my favourite thing ever is the 'oh i get it now!' moment where some act or style you've never understood somehow clicks. it's why music listening can count as a hobby as well as a pastime. it's like a 'knack' you get sometimes.

xp I think it's because I get bored easily and am very picky these days, and especially a lot of rock bands just resort to certain cliches to open their songs/albums and when I hear those cliches I usually can tell right away that the band is not going to have ideas that interest me. Also certain things about the production aesthetics may just put my ear off or turn it on immediately.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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

from the other Branwell thread:

For me repetition doesn't lull me into surrender; repetition enhances a record's strengths, reveals its weaknesses in greater relief (or MORE weaknesses), or gets me to listen to instrumental, melodic, or vocal nuances I missed the first time. Many singles I review get middling scores only to wind up on my top twenty charts because I was wrong the first time (it happens more often with singles than albums; these days I rarely change my mind about albums more than once a year). A recent example: radio got me singing along to OneRepublic's "Counting Stars"

There is definitely a thing with singles, whereby a thing which passes you by entirely on first listen reveals its earworm properties more and more with repetition. But I also think that's "weaving into the fabric of your life and experiences" which is what pop singles are supposed to *do*, IMO.

It really doesn't surprise me that the bulk of the answers are 2 or 3 listens, but I'm going to persist with my experiment just because I've committed to it now.

Staring at a computer screen is probably one of the worst contexts to appreciate to music, but that's where I seem to be when I discover about 75% of the stuff I listen to. While Robbie Basho's 'Visions of the Country' sounds wild and majestic wherever I listen to it, nothing'll beat listening to it on a portable speaker while camping at the top of a hill on a farm in the Peak District this summer.

I'm trying to find a thread, that I'm sure I started (or maybe just thought about starting) about how often you listen to your favourite music, or how long / many times you can listen to something before you 'wear it out'; and what is 'wearing out' music? I'm sure we must have talked about this before.

― I can still taste the Taboo in my mouth when I hear those songs (Scik Mouthy), Monday, January 20, 2014 10:13 AM (4 months ago)

I'm always concerned with overplaying my favorite new albums to the point of purposefully ignoring them after I establish a strong opinion on them. Usually that takes 5-6 listens. After that I put it away for awhile so as to not burn out on it. It may seem strange but it really works for me. I can look at my Itunes and pick out hundreds of albums I haven't heard in quite a awhile that I would love to listen to.

As far as establishing opinions on the average album, the first listen is just to gauge my interest in listening ever again. Most of the time I don't love an album initially. But I can tell if I have zero interest in listening ever again after the first listen. I'd say roughly 2/3 of the music I check out falls in the never-again territory.

I roughly check out 300 newly released albums a year, so that leaves 100 albums I'll give multiple listens to. Out of that 100, about half never substantially grow on me. And out of the 50 that remains, I end up really liking/loving about 25 albums a year, sometimes more depending on the year.

8.34%ofmusicfanatic