me rn

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=LmT48gE6gYQ

what if I post-post-meta-ironically got into Linkin Park when I haven't listened to them since like 5th grade..

@nyx i still un-ironically think this is a solid album

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=yKVcBXwDs4w

@rowb1t I'm conflicted about their legacy because like, everything Linkin Park has come to represent is awful (the mainstream commodification that really took off in the mid-late 90s of different music subcultures) but writing sort of embarrassingly candid emotional songs mixing rap and metal as a bunch of cis white dudes was also kind of a baller move I have to admit. from what I know about them they seemed to at least start off doing their whole thing pretty genuinely

@rowb1t also tbf this all is such a *completely* different era of mass culture which makes it all feel so benign that it can be appreciated as post-ironic and campy. like the "music industry" as a culturally monolithic thing is dead now, it's been more or less the same roster of artists with mainstream success for like two decades now

@nyx interestingly linkin park was the last band i feel like i had "marketed" toward me. they took off when i was like the peak target audience (middle school lol) and not long after that is when i got regular access to cable internet and sought music on my own. i honestly don't remember if that was simply a result of the kind of stuff i was into or a product of the changes in the music industry at the time.

@rowb1t for me the last bands that I felt were marketed towards me was like New Wave of Amerikan Heavy Metal sorta stuff of the late 2000s. like, Lamb of God, Children of Bodom, Avenged Sevenfold sorta, Hot Topic-core stuff like that. this was in my freshman year of high school and then I also started finding out music on my own on the internet halfway through that

@nyx that seems to be the age where people branch off. either you're an actual music fan that cares enough to look for stuff on your own or you just continue on eating the slop that's served up to you. i had always thought that internet access played a big role in that for me but i guess i knew plenty of people who had the same access but didn't do anything with it. and i guess before that mail-order tape trading was a thing.

this is where i put on my old lady hat and complain about the algorithmic nature of ubiquitous streaming services like Spotify. like yeah it's pretty good at recommending you music you're likely to enjoy, but i honestly think the chaotic nature of digging through rando's libraries on direct connect did me a lot of good at that age.

@rowb1t I mean honestly lol I have never had a Spotify account and still curate and download all of my music manually like I've been doing since I discovered music piracy blogspots in like 2009 lmao. like I'll just go down rabbit holes basically doing research into different genres/artists/labels/historical periods/regional scenes to find new stuff I want to listen to. I'm sure it'd be easier to just have an algorithm feed me slop that is optimized for my tastes, but idk I feel like it's important to be actively engaged in some way

@nyx the crazy thing about Spotify is that nearly everyone bitches about it but they still just use it. like it's >currentyear and you have an internet connection, it's not that hard.

@rowb1t I won't lie it does make me kind of feel like a gigachad using soulseek in 2024 while all these normies are using a streaming service that really has no technical reason whatsoever to exist

@nyx @rowb1t i just started using soulseek the other day. My library expanded from 8,000 to 10,000 tracks in a single day, and that’s not counting all the albums I replaced with better versions