I just read the chapter “Who wants to be a cultural billionaire?” in Tyler Cowen’s Discover your Inner Economist (this review gets at many of the points of the chapter). Some of the advice seems nutty to me, like listening to music you don’t like 10 times in order to develop an appreciation for it. But I agree that there’s a wealth of great music out there that’s not hard to find, and I’d like to enjoy more of it.
In particular, I’m not interested in finding the newest music. There’s so much great existing music I’m not familiar with that I’d rather discover older treasures than keep up with what’s new.
Some favorite past methods for discovering music:
- 50 Great Voices series on NPR
- What makes it great series, also NPR
- The New York Times’ “Five minutes that will make you love __” series on classical music. (5 minutes per piece, not total!)
- Playlists like the “rediscover [genre/artist]” on Amazon music seem ok, but I’d like more background on where this music came from, what people love about it, etc. Are there podcasts like this? I tried “History of Rock and Roll in 500 songs” but that was about 480 songs too many for me.
And favorite ways of savoring music I already know and like (apparently mostly musicals):
- Documentaries, like Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles – mostly about the background / context of the work
- Seth Rudetsky’s analysis of Glitter and Be Gay and other Broadway pieces – about technical details of the composition and the vocal performance
- A coffee table book about Hamilton my parents gave me – fun to learn more about the background, instrumentation, etc.
- The Genius lyrics site – lots of songs don’t have many good notes, but this was great for digesting Hamilton (with Lin-Manuel Miranda as one of the users adding notes!)