I listen to music 8-10 hours per day while I work (mostly application development). I have about 2,400 songs saved on Spotify which I rotate through regularly, but I've become increasingly bored with my music.<p>Any suggestions on how to freshen it up? Should I do a music fast? Should I practice more active music appreciation?
Yeah - freshen it up. You might be interested in reading something like Deep Work or <a href="https://www.defetter.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.defetter.com/</a> on the subjects of distraction. Consider having no music at all, or white/pink/brown noise.<p>Other things to try:
- Explore some exotic places with <a href="http://radio.garden/" rel="nofollow">http://radio.garden/</a>
- <a href="https://sudo.fm/" rel="nofollow">https://sudo.fm/</a>
- <a href="https://musicforprogramming.net/" rel="nofollow">https://musicforprogramming.net/</a>
Spotify in the early days used to be great for this. Their entire catalogue was browsable with fine grained genres. They ruined it and became useless for music discovery.<p>If Last.fm is still around that may be useful, they are/were great at finding similar artists so you could go to one artists page, click through similar artists a couple of times and find something fresh that you didn't know you liked.<p>It was also great because you could hook up your music player of choice via plugins to Last.fm and it would do a damn good job of regularly finding your next favourite artist/track on your profile page.<p>Like most things tech related the music realm only seems to get worse as time goes by.
Take a break from regular music.<p>Listening to Eliane Radigue's Trilogie de la Mort was a great departure and opened a whole new world of music for me. It changed the way I listen, not just music, but everything.<p>I too get bored with music, so now I experiment making my own... <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63slAz55V6U" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63slAz55V6U</a>
<a href="https://stefanpowell.bandcamp.com/album/autonomous-drone-lullabies" rel="nofollow">https://stefanpowell.bandcamp.com/album/autonomous-drone-lul...</a>
I once did a digital detox which included no music. When I finally listened to music it felt amazing. Way better then before. I would suggest to try it, even if its just for a few days
You can use <a href="https://volt.fm" rel="nofollow">https://volt.fm</a> to check out the profiles of people who listen to your favorite artists and genres and see what other music they listen to.<p>You can even save their top songs as an auto-updating playlist. It's a great way to discover new music.
I used to listen to music when I'm working. But I figured it actually doesn't boost productivity so I stopped doing that for a while. I still listen to music when hobby programming.