For me it was: A Lesson in Crime (Album) - Tokyo Police Club. Specifically the song ‘Cheer it On’.

(For anyone that saw my comment on a similar thread, I found it!).

And also a South African indie band called The Bang, who never did much, but had such a good MySpace release of an album called Shiny.

—————— Comment from the other thread: > The thing I miss most, and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects.

My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.

The result was pure joy: my music taste would develop in all weird and wonderful directions, my favorite songs would be the one I hit back on to listen again while I moved through an album, songs that friends skipped over and didn’t know at all; bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa.

(I’ve got a song still stuck in my head from a Canadian indie band that made its way onto my iPod via via and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band. I love this that I’ve never found them!)

I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.

I don’t listen to any AI generated music consciously, but given the music experience today I probably wouldn’t notice as these playlists, like a boiling frog, slowly became AI music dominated.

I bought a record player as my protest, and it gives me immense joy to find obscure records and play them through; but it’s really not the same thing, and I miss what we had.

Canadian here. Let me know if I can help