Have I Stopped Caring About New Music?

I listened to less new music in 2024 than any year that I can remember. It's not the music. It's me. I think?

Photo by Ozgu Ozden on Unsplash

Over the holiday stretch I have been reading a handful of year end music lists. While it’s best to take these sorts of pieces with a grain of salt, they are a great way to catch up on the year in music. In past years, I have used lists like these to scour for holes in my new music listening patterns. Often, a year end list will provide another three or four records that I missed the first time around.

This year as I read these lists, instead of searching for the albums that I missed, I scoured to find the scant few records that I recognized, and hunted for the even smaller number of albums that I had actually heard with any degree of depth. I might have listened to half a dozen new albums in 2024 all the way through. As a whole, my listening was less than last year, which seemed less than the year before that. I am simply listening to less music, and almost none of what I am spinning is new music.