Alright, so in the ideas thread, several of you expressed that you'd like / it would be more active if we went for a listening club that goes for something more general. As I think ~music is in a bit of a rough spot right now and needs a little more to bind it together, I'm going to try and have a bit of a hybrid solution that can hopefully be interesting for a lot of us.

Again, the idea is to come together and listen to the same record each week, discussing our thoughts on that album over the course of that week in these threads. For now, let's make our goal to build a community and become familiar with the thoughts, tastes, and musical histories of each other!

For every odd numbered week, we will listen to an acclaimed or important album of some kind that will hopefully have far-reaching appeal. I'm going to exercise my own judgement in picking these out of the qualifying albums, but expect them to be the OK Computers, A Love Supremes, and Illmatics of the world. If and when we reach a point where we've exhausted too many of these classics, we can restructure or retire this listening club.

For every even numbered week, we will listen to a more obscure record as voted on by the participants of the thread. For an initial guide, as stolen from @Eva, we will define "obscure" simply as not being certified Gold (or anything higher, of course). This is of course a very loose definition of the term, but it's at least a concrete starting place. As ~ gives us a raw vote count, we will do this through voting on comments. All nominations must be made as a reply to my top level comment. Everything else will be ignored, and this will help keep things organized once this voting occurs on a thread that's dedicated to its own week's record. If it becomes necessary, we can vote on an external platform.

I'm open to suggestions on how to change this process, but let's try to run it like this for a little bit. I don't want to get caught in that loop where you have so many tweaks and find so many flaws that you don't end up doing anything at all.

The first thread will be posted tomorrow (Thursday the 21st here) and will continue on from there weekly.

When we start our first record, feel free to listen, comment, and vote throughout the week. ~ gives us an opportunity to bump things and keep discussion going for a bit longer than Reddit, so let's take advantage of that where we can.

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.

We're at roughly 7 days since the last weekly thread, so here's another! Imo we should have more regular threads like these, if anyone has ideas then drop them here! Personally I like the idea of doing "listening clubs," where we choose an album for the week, all listen to it, and have a regular discussion thread for every week. If there's any interest, I would love to run a hip hop focused one, though I could definitely do a lot of other genres if the desire was there. Anyway, drop a comment if anything like that sounds appealing to you!

Shamelessly copying my own prompt for this one:

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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/

I've been thinking a lot about busking for money recently.

Here's some backstory:
Currently a broke but talented musician that just moved to a city. Looking to spread my music and earn a bit for myself while I'm at it.

Music is very important to me and spreading myself out and making my sound vulnerable is something I'm very hesitant about doing. I came here to check out if anyone reading this has ever busked and can point me in the right way to start doing so, or if anyone has any comments and suggestions /AGAINST/ doing so. I've never experienced it myself but some of my favorite musicians have bettered their lives and finances by playing music on the street.

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/