It’s YouTube music, which is showing popular “podcasts” on its explore page. Must be just because it’s popular because nothing in my algo on either youtube or YouTube music would suggest this shit.
It’s YouTube music, which is showing popular “podcasts” on its explore page. Must be just because it’s popular because nothing in my algo on either youtube or YouTube music would suggest this shit.
I had been using YouTube for “background noise” a lot — nothing political, just movie reviews and video essays about pop culture. In general, my YouTube diet is pretty non-toxic.
But I fell down a rabbit hole researching a band lately and have been obsessively listening to music for a couple of weeks. Mostly on my MP3 player to give my phone a break. And holy cow it feels nice not to be bombarded with curated Content all the time. I didnt even realize how consistently/constantly there was just STUFF on that, while not bad, wasn’t really contributing anything to my life.
FWIW there are also radios, including public ones where content (without ads) is delivered via the Internet, usable via
cvlcormpvor even the browser (so nothing to install).I am indeed aware of the existence of radios. I dislike radio because I prefer to have some level of control over what I’m listening to. Even with algorithmic slop I can skip tracks if I want.
You can switch stations.
It seems like I have offended you in some way, and let me assure you that I don’t know how, but I am also utterly incurious as to why.
You haven’t. I’m not offended. I’m literally just sharing a solution.
FWIW I know because that’s what I have been every day for the last few months. I have been using music streaming for years, paying SoundCloud user for a while. Few months ago during my on-going transition away from surveillance capitalism I stopped more and more of commercial cloud services. One of the very last few had been music. I tried quite a few solutions and one of my fear was about music discovery. I thought if I download files then it will be hard to get new music. I looked at technical solutions, e.g. recommendation algorithm, offline and online (with API). I also noticed that my usage was split in at least 2 different listening mode : active vs passive. Active is when I specifically pick a song or an album because I crave it. Passive is when I want background sound, nearly like barely better than white noise. For active it was OK but for passive my own selection was too exciting. I then tried a great public and free French radio ( FIP.fr ) and that solved (by luck) both needs of passive listening AND music discovery. That being said I do not always love the FIP selection so sometimes I’ll switch to other stations hence why I said so. That’s it, nothing more.