The art of music discovery
I've been thinking about how to organize what I write for this site. There are a bunch of topics: music, books, technology and just general musings on what life was like in the 1990s. I live in Clark County, Nevada. You might not know the county, but you definitely know about the largest city in the county, which is Las Vegas. There are three major cities in Clark County that make up the metropolitan area: Las Vegas, Henderson and North Las Vegas. Boulder City is about 10 minutes from the most southern part of Henderson, although that gap shrinks all the time. Oddly, the actual City of Las Vegas is fairly small. Most of what you think of as Las Vegas (all of the Strip and much of the other populated areas surrounding it) are in unincorporated Clark County.
Why is that interesting? Because back in 1993, Clark County had just under 900,000 residents. Today there are three times that. The county built so many schools that they started naming them after anyone they could find. I worked at one of the two local newspapers, and we had three people in the building who had schools named after them.
I'm way off topic here, since the headline talks about music discovery. I found so much good music in the 1990s, and I've been reminiscing about how that worked. I had a few primary methods:
- Record stores. Yes, they mostly sold CDs, not vinyl records (which have weirdly come back into vogue), but they will always be record stores to me. We had an amazing place called the Tower Wow Superstore, which was a combination of a Tower Records and a Best Buy. They sold music, videos, merchandise, books and zines along with appliances. They even had a coffee shop. It was fantastic. For music discovery, they had listening stations with a rotating selection of CDs you could play through headphones.
We also had Blockbuster Music, which let you listen to any CD in the store. I found so many new bands through those two sources.
- CMJ New Music. A monthly magazine that had stories about bands who were then featured on an included CD. Another incredible way to learn about a band and sample their music. I had seen this concept before. Back in the mid-1980s, when I was in high school in Carson City, Nev., our local record store carried issues of Debut Magazine, a British publication that was the size of an LP. It had a magazine with features about bands and a vinyl record with music from those bands. If it's still there, when you follow this link, I still own this very copy with Howard Jones on the cover.
- Radio. This was still the days when there were eclectic selections played on our KUNV, the student-run station at UNLV.
- Usenet. This was a burgeoning and awkward method, since the Internet as we know it was just finding its feet. Usenet was all-text. Think of it as a Reddit from a command line, where groups of like-minded people could talk about their interests. This was all pre-Web. You couldn't easily download and listen to any music, but you could find a thread about a band you liked and figure if someone liked the Magnetic Fields and you liked the Magnetic Fields, other bands they liked might be worth checking out.
- Concerts. We had a remarkable run of great bands who performed in Las Vegas, and I was lucky enough to see a handful: James, Sarah McLachlan, Machines of Loving Grace, Catherine Wheel.
Today we pretty much have almost every song we ever want at our fingertips. I was talking to my 12- and 17-year-old kids about their music collections, and they had no idea what I was talking about. They don't think in terms of ownership of a song or album – they want to listen to something, and Apple Music provides it. They don't buy physical media or even individual MP3s, collecting, categorizing, digitizing, scrutinizing and fetishizing over all of it. It's just there, like air. I do love the way things are today, but I certainly miss the old days when I would buy a brand-new album and scrutinize the album art (who is this Hipgnosis, and why do they design so many album covers?), liner notes (why doesn't R.E.M. include lyrics?) and other details for hours while listening to the music. Granted, I was younger, I had time on my hands, there wasn't an Internet or iPhone to suck up my free time. But I do miss it.
