~music Listening Clubs: Ideas + Planning
Okay everyone, so with the grand total of one response (and being informed that it's apparently been discussed before) saying there's interest in setting up a listening club, I'm going to try and get something going. Even if it's just a few of us, it seems like a fun thing to me.
For anyone that doesn't know, a listening club is pretty much what it sounds like, we choose an album and all listen to it over the course of the week, with discussion on it occurring in the weekly threads. Over the club's length, the idea is generally to better understand the subject of the club, usually being a genre, movement, or era.
There's a few ways to go about deciding what to listen for these. We could go by outside lists, allow users running listening clubs to curate their own listening lists (my preferred method just because it's so easy to set up), or vote every week for the next record. The last option seems the most natural, but also requires a certain level of community involvement that may not be reliable, and it gets a little bit awkward before the hierarchy system is running / before we have a trust system or community moderators.
So, what do you guys think? How would you like to see these organized? What should we start with, since a general "all music" listening club doesn't seem quite right? Do you want to participate in these at all? I'm willing to manage anything yall want to do, but I would personally love to do user-curated ones and run my own hip hop essentials club. Of course, that requires trusting an individual to do their own thing, which may not be where we want to go...up to all of you.
Personally, I would prefer if there was just one album for everybody. I'm open to all styles of music and would love to expand my horizons a bit.
I assume you mean one club that jumps around regardless of genre? While this does seem interesting to me, I have some concerns about running it. Like, if it's democratic, then this is going to be a reallllllyyyyyy boring thing. We're gonna go OK Computer, Dark Side of the Moon, Pet Sounds, Revolver, etc. and it'll be a directionless slog through stuff we all know. If we wanted to do that, we might as well formalize it into something a little more informative and have "~music listens to the rock canon".
Though if we had some music guru that we all respected and who could curate their own listening club cross-genre, that would be cool. I just don't know who that would be or how we would agree on that.
I participated in something like this a while ago on reddit and it was a lot of fun. The way we did it was a user picks an album, then someone from the comments on that album picks the next album. I forget how we chose the next user, but it could be something like highest upvoted comment that hasn't picked in the last N weeks.
Like OP said this does have the problem of already acclaimed albums being the only thing that gets upvoted. Now this doesn't have to be an obscure album only music club but only listening to things everybody knows about will get tiring quickly.
Disallowing gold/platinum records would mitigate this a bit.
Then just make the user pick 3 or 4 and then have a vote.
Yeah, like a book club, but with an album. Everyone go listen to such and such and report back on June whatever and let's discuss. I could totally listen to an album while I worked each day.
On general album listening:
The thing I originally proposed in one of @Flashynuff's threads was something along the lines of a nomination thread where people would nominate something they liked and wanted to see get more attention (ideally avoiding big things like the rock canon, the more well-known hiphop canon, things like that) and describe them with like a one-liner or a short blurb and they would either be chosen by highest votes or totally randomly.
On specific genre listening:
We have a decent amount of fans for each general genre, I think? Things like rock, jazz, electronic (electronic fans don't beat me up I know electronic isn't the best umbrella), hip-hop. I think it might be doable if someone wanted to run a specific one for each of the very biggest umbrella genres, like those. I'm not sure how much attention it would actually get, but that's the easiest way I would see specific splitting working while we're still small.
Yeah, let's just try this. Let's not talk it to death. Let's start a thread that has people propose stuff and just try it and then build on what worked and didn't.
Unfortunately I don't have any suggestions for how this would work, but I would like to voice interest. I'm always looking for new stuff, but I don't really know where to look for it outside of the "Recommended Releases" kind of thing on streaming services.
I do think this kind of thing could stand to have a huge benefit from some additional moderation tools on the site though, most notable to me being some kind of sticky post mechanic.
I would definitely be down for something like this.
Since everyone has wildly different tastes and we don't have genre specific subgroups yet, how about instead of one specific album, doing a "theme" (e.g. heartbreak, energy, etc) and have people submit a song they think best fits that theme? All those songs can then be added to a playlist (youtube/spotify/etc) and we listen to that over the course of the week. This would be a nice opportunity for people to be introduced to artists and genres they may not normally listen to, as well.
Not to say that that's invalid, but I think something like that has a different goal entirely. Like that's a cool way to get a sampling of what the community likes, but it doesn't quite play into what a listening club can accomplish...namely understanding the subject of the club, getting an interesting curated list of things to hear, or fostering discussion beyond recommendations.
Though my perspective here may be a bit skewed just because playlists of any kind don't interest me much. I try not to be a jerk about it, but I am firmly grounded to the album being the best way to listen to music. But by all means, do this! I'm almost certainly an exception here, and I might pop in anyway.
Also another thing that goes a little beyond the scope of whatever this is: I think it's worthwhile to try and create things that are a little more niche, even if the site itself doesn't encourage that yet. One of the few problems I have with browsing ~ right now is that because it covers so many topics while having a small community, we all end up posting and talking about much more general and wide-reaching things (outside of the tech stuff since you can reasonably assume someone on here is invested in that), which gets a little boring after a while. I'd like to counteract that a bit and get specific, even if it means we have 4 users participating. If anything, it means we have good roots when we do have the opportunity to carve out our own spaces, officially.
Fair enough, your criticism of my suggestion makes total sense and I would still be down for participating the way you proposed it. I just think the difficulty will be in how best to pick the album to find enough interested parties to make it worthwhile which is why I made the suggestion to potentially broaden the appeal.
Yeah, this will be good for variety too.
I think the best way to greatly narrow results down would be to assign a time period to each selection. So, 80's, 90's, 00's, and so on. It doesn't restrict by genre, which would greatly skew numbers, but rather by a much more influential marker - the passage of time and introduction of new tropes/conventions seen in music. It would bring up some good discussions about how some artists were ahead of their time or whatever. The period selected doesn't have to be in order, either, it could be selected semi-randomly, a la elimination depending on what has already been chosen and what is leftover, restarting once all periods have had an album
I feel like if you wanted to do a time period thing, that's very hard to get anything out of unless you restrict by genre.
Like, what would you learn more from: Listening to three essential 80s hip hop records (say, Paid in Full, Straight Outta Compton, and The Great Adventures of Slick Rick) or three 80s records without any regard for genre (like going Paid in Full, Master of Puppets, and Psychocandy)? Personally, I think a listening club should have some goal beyond being a list of recommendations...there should be a clear way to make connections and learn, and going too general dilutes that. It becomes a lot harder to see how trends emerge unless you limit the range you're looking at a bit.
And if it were democratic, we'd end up with "records from the rock canon that came out in this time period" anyway. Of course, if that's what people want to do, that's far far better than nothing!
Can we use some generator to randomly generate a theme of some kind? Then select 3 albums that fit and we vote? And just exclude major albums like The Wall or Rumors. We could have a monthly discussion on different iconic albums but the weekly be not so iconic.
That could certainly be a fun thing and I encourage you to run it! However, we have slightly different goals as you can see in the week 0 thread for my listening club.
Nah I didn't see because both posts are kind of scattered and broad. Glad it's happening though. If things get tighter / more structured this will be fun.