What do you guys think are the best albums released so far this year? Obviously this is subjective, I'd just like to hear some of your opinions :-)

My favourites out of the ones I can remember are:

• Kids See Ghosts by Kids See Ghosts
• Egg on face. Foot in mouth. Wriggling Wriggling Wriggling. by Crywank
• Moe Moe by Moe Shop
• Little Dark Age by MGMT
• Veteran by JPEGMAFIA

I've gone through quite a few of the music streaming services now. I was on Rdio for a long time until it (sadly) shut down, switched to Spotify for a while, then to Google Play Music, and as of yesterday I have access to YouTube music (which it sounds like is intended to replace GPM before too long).

From a quick glance at YouTube Music I'm a bit worried—the "library" functionality seems pretty limited, and the search isn't really working as I'd expect. It also doesn't seem to have any connection with my GPM collection or playlists.

I think it's been out in the US for about a month now, has anyone been using it? Any thoughts on it so far or suggestions about using it?

Years ago I was following several electronic music blogs, Missingtoof was a favorite, Panda Toes was another. Then the updates stopped and they disappeared. I don't spend lots of time trying to track down new music, and local radio is a joke at best, so those blogs were a great asset. Not to mention there really isn't an electronic music scene where I live. Any suggestions for music blogs or websites with independent reviews of music?

If I ever trip and fall into a pile of cash I would open a radio station, I would only play unsigned artists and have no advertisements since I had that pile of cash. No top-40 format, no payola, no corporate pressure, just decent music with some human DJs. For now I guess I will just stream stations online and grumble over here in the corner. Speaking of which, anyone know if its possible to start an online radio station cheaper than a physical one?

I was just wondering what all you lovely users prefer in terms of listening to your music collection. I know that both analog and digital sound very different, however I'm more interested in simply how your music collection is stored and how it reaches your ears. Additionally why do you prefer your way of listening to music, and is there a method you want to try but simply never got around to doing so?

Personally, I prefer listening to music through my beloved iPod Classic. My entire collection currently resides on my laptop, all in FLAC, but I modded my iPod to hold up to 250GB worth of music and so I can simply dump my entire library on there and have every song available on the go. I prefer this to streaming as I like the fact I don't need to rely on the internet and can pretty much listen wherever I go, however I would like to try out vinyl and tube amps to see if analog music really does provide a "warmer" sound that a lot of people seem to praise it for.

What sites/(maga)zines/people do you use to find music? I'm especially curious to how you find older music? (since newer music is often covered by p4k, needledrop, subreddits, or whatever you choose, although i'm curious about that too)

It's just a quick thought but having a thread like that might be really neat-o.

Something like all parent comments just mentioning the one album, with links to previous discussions, or relevant reviews/discussions elsewhere?

As you've probably noticed, ~music is kind of dead compared to a lot of the other tildes. There's been a grand total of 3 posts that have gone over 10 upvotes in the past week. I'd like to try and change that.

The purpose of this thread is to collect interesting music discussion prompts. Don't worry about if it's a super high quality prompt or not, this is just brainstorming. If you ever notice that there hasn't been a decent discussion for a while and you don't have any ideas of what to post, go ahead and grab a prompt from here that hasn't been posted yet and post it. Try to start off the discussion with your own thoughts on the prompt if you can!

Also, we should try and keep any responses to the prompts themselves out of this thread — it'd defeat the point if we have all the discussion here :)

hey everybody, looks like it's been NINE whole days since the last one so here comes this week's. also, sorry for not commenting in the last one — i'm garbage :)

if you ever notice it's been a week or so and nobody's posted one, feel free to post! just steal the description from the last one (credit to @whom for writing it in the first place) and post away.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something!

Feel free to give recs or dicuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Are there any albums by your favorite bands that make you think "Why didn't I listen to this sooner?" Or "Why is nobody talking about this one?" My unfortunate candidate for this title would be Maladroit by Weezer. It's such a weird shift in tone from Green and moreso from Blue or Pinkerton. It's a lot of short and sweet songs but between the kickass solos and chugging metal influenced chords, the whole album is a banger. You have songs like Burndt Jam and Slave that have a much more mellow and poppish, feel; and then you have more aggressive songs like Take Control and Dope Nose (The most well known hit off Maladroit). It seems that in the wake of people not liking the Green album much, this stellar poppy, metal-y, strange yet great little album was panned over, which is a crying shame.

5 tracks from my game Rashtal. Feedback would be appreciated.

Playlist

Or each song separately:

• Life in the Treetops;
• Song of the Forest;
• Through the Sunken Glades;
• The Canopy;
• The Forest Floor;

The game is still in development. Just sharing some music to get feedback.

How important are lyrics to you?

For me, the words are probably as big a part of my experience of a song as the music itself. It's unlikely that I'll come back to a song if the lyrics don't speak to me. On the other hand, I know other people who claim not to care about the lyrics at all.

So, I was curious. If you are a person who cares a lot about the lyrics of a song, do you also read poetry? How do you feel about purely instrumental music?

Personally, I can appreciate instrumental music, but it's not something I tend to seek out. I enjoy poetry a lot (probably as much as music), both reading it and listening to it.

I'm interested to see if there's a pattern to this. :)