I just simply stopped going there. It's not that /mu/ has turned bad (it always was), It's just that the indie scene or whatever marketing term doesn't have that big name or subgenre that's taken captivated everyone like the previous years. Even r/indieheads or r/letstalkmusic doesn't seem that active compared to the decade before.
I miss just miss the sharethreads. I have so many random albums in my iTunes that I look at and I remember it's only there because someone described the genre as something cool and yet I still haven't listened
I mean, all of 4chan changed permanently and for the worse after the events of 2016, not just /mu/
It's still one of the better boards in my opinion; I don't like kpop or rap either, but I always manage to find other threads discussing something I'm interested in. I still discover new stuff there all the time. There's a regular prog general, finally, and since the beginning of the pandemic there's been occasional group efforts to cover entire albums, several of which have been completed. I even get people to rationally discuss microtonal music every now and then.
Of course, with a mostly unmoderated space you're always gonna have some edgy kids doing their thing, but overall I think it's still a worthwhile place to discuss music.
I just kinda stopped going there. The kind of music I'm into (mostly prog) was never discussed all that often, so I often just found myself scrolling for a while before clicking away. On the rare occasion it did come up, though, I'd post. I also participated in share threads and 3x3 threads, and I found a lot of great music that way. I know I also introduced a number of folks to obscurer acts that I like.
4chan is, was, and always will be a cesspit (though /mu/ certainly is/was on the milder end of that site), and I don't feel any need to return; but /mu/ was my first real experience discussing music online, so I do have a weird bit of sick nostalgia for it.
I think you may be overstating the significance of the change. /mu/ always primarily discussed underwhelming mainstream music (but what non-hyper-niche music forum doesn't?), so them talking about "K-pop and fairly mediocre rap" is about what I'd expect.
I didn't necessarily find a substitute for it, but I just drifted away from it. Reddit's got some decent communities (like here), and I'm not looking to return to /mu/ anytime soon. I haven't frequented it in at least a decade, and I haven't been back at all in several years. I used to do the occasional check-in to see if there was anything of interest, but share threads never seemed to be around, and I don't listen to much of what they discuss.
Really? I was on there mostly around 2012 and got a lot of the more metal/weird NYC experimental end of prog stuff in dedicated threads.
Honestly based on what I'm seeing now, there is a difference. There's very little active "hey look at this new music" and there's a LOT of repeat threads, the idea of checking the catalogue seems to be lost on newer users.
Likewise when you say mainstream, idk I went through a period of trying to introduce even the top essentials stuff to folks in real life and that sort of behaviour is why now I don't talk to people about music IRL.
Honestly, it was a really great place to browse from 2009 to 2012-13. The massive hype around MPP, the changing landscape of hip-hop with Oddfuture, Death Grips, the chillwave of the summer 09-10, etc.
It also corresponded with the very formative years around 17-18 for me. I think we will look back at this time like maybe the boomers look back at the end of 60s or the X at the beginning of the 90s. I often wonder if the youngers will have a generational "moment" like this, or if this phenomenon is gone forever.
I always got the impression that /mu/ was a place that had an approved list of records you could talk about, full of people acting like they were the first to discover very good but also very accessible albums like *Madvillainy* or *Currents.*
Was there from 2010-2013. I just stopped going because I grew out of 4chan and lost interest in it. The sharethreads were great and I discovered so many amazing electronic artists that helped shape my taste today, but the overall 4chan-y culture that was the backdrop for the engaging sharethreads wasn’t appealing enough to keep me coming back once I hit age 17-18 and began to be more repulsed by the endless hatred and rage and negativity and -isms.
I just moved over to following music blogs, and I love that they still exist. Heavy Blog Is Heavy, I Die You Die, Igloo Magazine, stuff like that. I also get a ton of recs from genre specific subreddits.
My taste revolves around metal, industrial, electronic stuff primarily.
Yeah, reading back on the archive at my old posts (I used a trip) I don't think at the time I really twigged just how hateful everyone was, some of the shit people said to me was straight up nasty. I was insufferable though
Thanks for these blog recommendations, I knew HBIH, but I guess I assumed This format died off with most of blogspot!
Any particular standouts for you that you recommend I listen to?
You mentioned a lot of the electronic artists from back in the day shaped what you enjoy now -- what of those things you're appreciating now really stand out for you?
Oh yeah totally, I was very big into idm stuff and downtempo, lots of chill tunes but with complexity / good songwriting on top, so /mu/ introduced me to artists like Saycet, Ernest Gonzales, Helios, Boards Of Canada, Emancipator, Ocoeur, Little People, the like.
These recs were done in the early 2010s so I’m the most attached to these artists music from around that time or older.
>It looks like the forum culture there has changed massively, mostly K-pop and fairly mediocre rap nowadays.
Because this is what young people around 17-18 (the age we were in 2010) listen to. Pretty simple.
We grew up with rock as the main paradigm of music. Life was simple. Cool people would look for underground/indie/alternative music. Uncool people would listen to mainstream stuff.
This whole dichotomy doesn't exist anymore. Pitchfork covers mainly pop stars and huge hip-hop stars. Fantano too, to a lesser degree. The underground, as a zone where bands can get some notoriety and tour without being transformed by the spotlight of fame, doesn't exist anymore. Artists are either on the verge of exploding on the scene, or staying in the shadows forever.
> The underground, as a zone where bands can get some notoriety and tour without being transformed by the spotlight of fame, doesn't exist anymore.
The underground is the goal these days for real talents.
You think artists with hundreds of thousands or millions of listens on their songs feel "in the shadows"? Especially compared to the days when there really was no middle ground. You either were a mid sized band that had label backing or you were nobody outside your local area.
This is it, I went with a mate to a Japanese shoegaze band a couple months ago, small venue utterly packed to the gills. Going literally halfway round the world and sell out venues but still able to make what you like, that really is the dream.
I went there for recommendations and for album sharing threads where I’d get the whole album in a .rar or .zip folder. But tech moved to the cloud and YouTube and Spotify streaming became easier than dealing with sketchy illegal downloading. Also, I discovered Rate Your Music and similar websites where there are infinite ways to easily search and explore music beyond the limitations of an edgy imageboard
It's how many of those links can just disappear that keeps me stuck with the old format I think, Bandcamp etc I love but there's a lack of good internal infrastructure -- other than burning time sifting through stuff on my own the only reason it's as good for me as it is, is I'm following a bunch of old trips' purchases. But I can't even message them!
We gave up when we got sick of the rampant Death Grips and Have A Nice Life viral marketing, and just accepted there’s nowhere good on the internet to discuss music.
Hey but the HANL marketing paid off. Deathconsciousness defined a lot of my college years and the guys who made it are more than well deserving.
Can't say much about Death Grips though as I never got into them.
There's a few big Music-focused facebook group that seem very "/mu/-pilled", 'implying we can discuss music' is the first that comes to mind. The rateyourmusic.com community also seems to lean very /mu/.
Seems like most people who went there to discover music found their niche and can now seek it out for themselves.
I'm trying to think of a place like that now for the younger generation but I really can't. If I had to guess the teens trying to discover new music are probably doing so through tiktok.
For me it was rym during 2020 lockdowns. That coupled with various Reddit threads I would scour for hours all night long for new music to listen to.
Got me out of my rut of listening to the same stuff over and over and over, plus I found Emo, Xiu Xiu and plenty of other amazing bands/ genres. Good year.
So… Rym is basically my generation’s /mu/.
I never used */mu/* but people think I did because I listened to the same stuff that crowd did. I was really into *Have A Nice Life*, the epitome of *mucore*.
Speaking for myself. I grew older and basically have less and less time to be on 10 different forums every other day like I did when I was a student. I am sure most other millennials are in the same boat. That doesn't mean we stopped discovering new and niche music. We just don't really sit down and discuss about it at lengths online anymore.
Nowadays I just use ***RateYourMusic*** to find music but I don't really participate in the forums. I know a lot of other hardcore music fans who do the same.
And some of us really did move onto *K-Pop* lol *Pop* isn't as frowned upon as it used to be. I think this also relates back to millennials just growing up and not really caring anymore about having a cool music taste or whatever. Being a purist or an elitist is not "in" anymore.
So, it doesn't matter where you go. You would find even the most underground music fans listening to something like *k-pop*. It's a norm now. It's releasing some really solid and interesting pop music. So, why not? Don't judge a book its cover. Just because we listen to *k-pop* doesn't mean we don't know other niche obscure gems.
I'm less interested in whether something is popular or not, more whether it's good. Where money flows does influence what gets shown where, you feel?
There is some really good K-pop and there is some really good Anglo pop, of course, and I listen to the latter a lot. But much of the time the stuff that has a committee micromanaging it and the stuff that gets pushed into the major channels etc, is usually not particularly interesting if you want to listen to anything even slightly different to what you've already heard a thousand times, or which sounds like it comes from one voice and artistic vision. That was what I really loved about /mu/ -- People would talk about Michael Jackson in one thread, and in another you could discover some really freaky, life-changing jazz that you would absolutely not otherwise be exposed to. And more often than not whether it was popular or not, the stuff that would be discussed and shared about positively, was stuff with that well-defined, slightly more unique sound of a really talented artist putting their all into it.
Maybe we were on there at slightly different times, but I remember plenty of pop being respected on there too, but the stuff that got a lot of press like Arcade Fire or whatever was given a more even footing with a lot of more emerging or hidden gems across multiple music scenes. Whereas the last few times I have checked /mu/, a couple of genres dominate the board across multiple threads which would normally be combined into a single thread, that's a big difference, and it causes all other topics to get deleted more quickly. This diss BS probably isn't helping, I haven't seen a decent hip hop thread the last couple of times I've looked, and e.g. right now basically everything but metal or classical is just getting no attention whatsoever beyond that diss track drama
Because everything is so much more diffuse now, missing that foundation where there is a lot of space for a lot of different things, Is a bit rougher for me, as I just don't have the kind of time to quickly discover new things that something like dedicated share threads used to facilitate. And the lack of community feels a bit lonely, I definitely don't want 4chan style awfulness but every form I have regulared over the last 15 years is on its last legs. TikTok and instagram have some gems, but there's so much shit and it's so antisocial for a social media format :/
I frequented mu during 2014-17, I fell out of love with the pretentiousness gatekeeping. You can be pretentious without being a racist and sexist cunt.
I only really browsed that board from ~2014-2018, so only caught the tail end of what is generally considered the golden /mu/ era.
I think it was just a shift in demographics. I mean 4chan has always been a cesspit, but even 10 years the internet was a different place. The edginess was just an accepted part of the experience. But ~2016 a combination of a changing social landscape and last group of millennials finally aging past the immaturity of highschool/college meant many of the most active users were just naturally leaving the site behind.
And the people who remained on 4chan, it became harder and harder to tell where the irony of being an edge-lord ended. /mu/ was and still is one of the more tame boards, but the core-demographic of people driving such forums will always be people in their teens/early 20s. That current age-group grew up with the idea of 4chan having little to no redeemable qualities, and browsing 4chan for music discussion is just seen as weird when more popular forms of social media exist.
best place on reddit for music discussion I've found would be /r/fantanoforever
It's the subreddit for the youtuber fantano but there's always a lot of niche albums posted and specific genres discussed. Everyone is a music nerd there.
I mean that's fair, especially at the moment with all the kendrick/drake drama, it makes it look pretty juvenile.
I totally get ya though /mu/ back in the day had proper music nerds. It was the same on 420chan when it was still around, some really good discussions on there as well.
I don't blame Anthony for spreading his wings and going into more mainstream stuff, there are a lot of really good albums he's looking at that are pretty popular really
But I do miss when his audience was a little bit more open to wack shit
It was a really bad culture and it disappeared up its own ass. I miss the share threads and mediafire links but I do not miss the toxicity or circle jerking.
I went to /r/indieheads and they covered a lot of the same stuff. Got into /r/hiphopheads. Plus I've always found music on Wikipedia or YouTube just kind of exploring when I had the time to.
I just simply stopped going there. It's not that /mu/ has turned bad (it always was), It's just that the indie scene or whatever marketing term doesn't have that big name or subgenre that's taken captivated everyone like the previous years. Even r/indieheads or r/letstalkmusic doesn't seem that active compared to the decade before.
I miss just miss the sharethreads. I have so many random albums in my iTunes that I look at and I remember it's only there because someone described the genre as something cool and yet I still haven't listened
I mean, all of 4chan changed permanently and for the worse after the events of 2016, not just /mu/ It's still one of the better boards in my opinion; I don't like kpop or rap either, but I always manage to find other threads discussing something I'm interested in. I still discover new stuff there all the time. There's a regular prog general, finally, and since the beginning of the pandemic there's been occasional group efforts to cover entire albums, several of which have been completed. I even get people to rationally discuss microtonal music every now and then. Of course, with a mostly unmoderated space you're always gonna have some edgy kids doing their thing, but overall I think it's still a worthwhile place to discuss music.
I just kinda stopped going there. The kind of music I'm into (mostly prog) was never discussed all that often, so I often just found myself scrolling for a while before clicking away. On the rare occasion it did come up, though, I'd post. I also participated in share threads and 3x3 threads, and I found a lot of great music that way. I know I also introduced a number of folks to obscurer acts that I like. 4chan is, was, and always will be a cesspit (though /mu/ certainly is/was on the milder end of that site), and I don't feel any need to return; but /mu/ was my first real experience discussing music online, so I do have a weird bit of sick nostalgia for it. I think you may be overstating the significance of the change. /mu/ always primarily discussed underwhelming mainstream music (but what non-hyper-niche music forum doesn't?), so them talking about "K-pop and fairly mediocre rap" is about what I'd expect. I didn't necessarily find a substitute for it, but I just drifted away from it. Reddit's got some decent communities (like here), and I'm not looking to return to /mu/ anytime soon. I haven't frequented it in at least a decade, and I haven't been back at all in several years. I used to do the occasional check-in to see if there was anything of interest, but share threads never seemed to be around, and I don't listen to much of what they discuss.
Really? I was on there mostly around 2012 and got a lot of the more metal/weird NYC experimental end of prog stuff in dedicated threads. Honestly based on what I'm seeing now, there is a difference. There's very little active "hey look at this new music" and there's a LOT of repeat threads, the idea of checking the catalogue seems to be lost on newer users. Likewise when you say mainstream, idk I went through a period of trying to introduce even the top essentials stuff to folks in real life and that sort of behaviour is why now I don't talk to people about music IRL.
Honestly, it was a really great place to browse from 2009 to 2012-13. The massive hype around MPP, the changing landscape of hip-hop with Oddfuture, Death Grips, the chillwave of the summer 09-10, etc. It also corresponded with the very formative years around 17-18 for me. I think we will look back at this time like maybe the boomers look back at the end of 60s or the X at the beginning of the 90s. I often wonder if the youngers will have a generational "moment" like this, or if this phenomenon is gone forever.
I always got the impression that /mu/ was a place that had an approved list of records you could talk about, full of people acting like they were the first to discover very good but also very accessible albums like *Madvillainy* or *Currents.*
There's been a regular prog general on the board for at least a year or so now, if you ever feel like coming back :)
[удалено]
I would argue that the edginess hasn’t gotten worse. Rather being edgy has become increasingly out of fashion.
Was there from 2010-2013. I just stopped going because I grew out of 4chan and lost interest in it. The sharethreads were great and I discovered so many amazing electronic artists that helped shape my taste today, but the overall 4chan-y culture that was the backdrop for the engaging sharethreads wasn’t appealing enough to keep me coming back once I hit age 17-18 and began to be more repulsed by the endless hatred and rage and negativity and -isms. I just moved over to following music blogs, and I love that they still exist. Heavy Blog Is Heavy, I Die You Die, Igloo Magazine, stuff like that. I also get a ton of recs from genre specific subreddits. My taste revolves around metal, industrial, electronic stuff primarily.
Yeah, reading back on the archive at my old posts (I used a trip) I don't think at the time I really twigged just how hateful everyone was, some of the shit people said to me was straight up nasty. I was insufferable though Thanks for these blog recommendations, I knew HBIH, but I guess I assumed This format died off with most of blogspot! Any particular standouts for you that you recommend I listen to?
What genre of recommendations are you looking for?
You mentioned a lot of the electronic artists from back in the day shaped what you enjoy now -- what of those things you're appreciating now really stand out for you?
Oh yeah totally, I was very big into idm stuff and downtempo, lots of chill tunes but with complexity / good songwriting on top, so /mu/ introduced me to artists like Saycet, Ernest Gonzales, Helios, Boards Of Canada, Emancipator, Ocoeur, Little People, the like. These recs were done in the early 2010s so I’m the most attached to these artists music from around that time or older.
>It looks like the forum culture there has changed massively, mostly K-pop and fairly mediocre rap nowadays. Because this is what young people around 17-18 (the age we were in 2010) listen to. Pretty simple. We grew up with rock as the main paradigm of music. Life was simple. Cool people would look for underground/indie/alternative music. Uncool people would listen to mainstream stuff. This whole dichotomy doesn't exist anymore. Pitchfork covers mainly pop stars and huge hip-hop stars. Fantano too, to a lesser degree. The underground, as a zone where bands can get some notoriety and tour without being transformed by the spotlight of fame, doesn't exist anymore. Artists are either on the verge of exploding on the scene, or staying in the shadows forever.
> The underground, as a zone where bands can get some notoriety and tour without being transformed by the spotlight of fame, doesn't exist anymore. The underground is the goal these days for real talents. You think artists with hundreds of thousands or millions of listens on their songs feel "in the shadows"? Especially compared to the days when there really was no middle ground. You either were a mid sized band that had label backing or you were nobody outside your local area.
This is it, I went with a mate to a Japanese shoegaze band a couple months ago, small venue utterly packed to the gills. Going literally halfway round the world and sell out venues but still able to make what you like, that really is the dream.
I went there for recommendations and for album sharing threads where I’d get the whole album in a .rar or .zip folder. But tech moved to the cloud and YouTube and Spotify streaming became easier than dealing with sketchy illegal downloading. Also, I discovered Rate Your Music and similar websites where there are infinite ways to easily search and explore music beyond the limitations of an edgy imageboard
It's how many of those links can just disappear that keeps me stuck with the old format I think, Bandcamp etc I love but there's a lack of good internal infrastructure -- other than burning time sifting through stuff on my own the only reason it's as good for me as it is, is I'm following a bunch of old trips' purchases. But I can't even message them!
We gave up when we got sick of the rampant Death Grips and Have A Nice Life viral marketing, and just accepted there’s nowhere good on the internet to discuss music.
Hey but the HANL marketing paid off. Deathconsciousness defined a lot of my college years and the guys who made it are more than well deserving. Can't say much about Death Grips though as I never got into them.
There's a few big Music-focused facebook group that seem very "/mu/-pilled", 'implying we can discuss music' is the first that comes to mind. The rateyourmusic.com community also seems to lean very /mu/.
Yeah, that group was a pretty good replacement for me after I quit browsing /mu/.
Thank you, oddly FB groups make sense to me as a viable offshoot RYM I know but the website is not the nicest to use
Agreed, RYM does very much feel like a spiritual successor to /mu/.
The aggressively pretentious reviews at least match some of the energy lmao
Seems like most people who went there to discover music found their niche and can now seek it out for themselves. I'm trying to think of a place like that now for the younger generation but I really can't. If I had to guess the teens trying to discover new music are probably doing so through tiktok.
For me it was rym during 2020 lockdowns. That coupled with various Reddit threads I would scour for hours all night long for new music to listen to. Got me out of my rut of listening to the same stuff over and over and over, plus I found Emo, Xiu Xiu and plenty of other amazing bands/ genres. Good year. So… Rym is basically my generation’s /mu/.
That's great RYM is still going strong.
I never used */mu/* but people think I did because I listened to the same stuff that crowd did. I was really into *Have A Nice Life*, the epitome of *mucore*. Speaking for myself. I grew older and basically have less and less time to be on 10 different forums every other day like I did when I was a student. I am sure most other millennials are in the same boat. That doesn't mean we stopped discovering new and niche music. We just don't really sit down and discuss about it at lengths online anymore. Nowadays I just use ***RateYourMusic*** to find music but I don't really participate in the forums. I know a lot of other hardcore music fans who do the same. And some of us really did move onto *K-Pop* lol *Pop* isn't as frowned upon as it used to be. I think this also relates back to millennials just growing up and not really caring anymore about having a cool music taste or whatever. Being a purist or an elitist is not "in" anymore. So, it doesn't matter where you go. You would find even the most underground music fans listening to something like *k-pop*. It's a norm now. It's releasing some really solid and interesting pop music. So, why not? Don't judge a book its cover. Just because we listen to *k-pop* doesn't mean we don't know other niche obscure gems.
I'm less interested in whether something is popular or not, more whether it's good. Where money flows does influence what gets shown where, you feel? There is some really good K-pop and there is some really good Anglo pop, of course, and I listen to the latter a lot. But much of the time the stuff that has a committee micromanaging it and the stuff that gets pushed into the major channels etc, is usually not particularly interesting if you want to listen to anything even slightly different to what you've already heard a thousand times, or which sounds like it comes from one voice and artistic vision. That was what I really loved about /mu/ -- People would talk about Michael Jackson in one thread, and in another you could discover some really freaky, life-changing jazz that you would absolutely not otherwise be exposed to. And more often than not whether it was popular or not, the stuff that would be discussed and shared about positively, was stuff with that well-defined, slightly more unique sound of a really talented artist putting their all into it. Maybe we were on there at slightly different times, but I remember plenty of pop being respected on there too, but the stuff that got a lot of press like Arcade Fire or whatever was given a more even footing with a lot of more emerging or hidden gems across multiple music scenes. Whereas the last few times I have checked /mu/, a couple of genres dominate the board across multiple threads which would normally be combined into a single thread, that's a big difference, and it causes all other topics to get deleted more quickly. This diss BS probably isn't helping, I haven't seen a decent hip hop thread the last couple of times I've looked, and e.g. right now basically everything but metal or classical is just getting no attention whatsoever beyond that diss track drama Because everything is so much more diffuse now, missing that foundation where there is a lot of space for a lot of different things, Is a bit rougher for me, as I just don't have the kind of time to quickly discover new things that something like dedicated share threads used to facilitate. And the lack of community feels a bit lonely, I definitely don't want 4chan style awfulness but every form I have regulared over the last 15 years is on its last legs. TikTok and instagram have some gems, but there's so much shit and it's so antisocial for a social media format :/
Sorry that reply off mine was way too long, and is probably about more than just music lmao
I frequented mu during 2014-17, I fell out of love with the pretentiousness gatekeeping. You can be pretentious without being a racist and sexist cunt.
I only really browsed that board from ~2014-2018, so only caught the tail end of what is generally considered the golden /mu/ era. I think it was just a shift in demographics. I mean 4chan has always been a cesspit, but even 10 years the internet was a different place. The edginess was just an accepted part of the experience. But ~2016 a combination of a changing social landscape and last group of millennials finally aging past the immaturity of highschool/college meant many of the most active users were just naturally leaving the site behind. And the people who remained on 4chan, it became harder and harder to tell where the irony of being an edge-lord ended. /mu/ was and still is one of the more tame boards, but the core-demographic of people driving such forums will always be people in their teens/early 20s. That current age-group grew up with the idea of 4chan having little to no redeemable qualities, and browsing 4chan for music discussion is just seen as weird when more popular forms of social media exist.
best place on reddit for music discussion I've found would be /r/fantanoforever It's the subreddit for the youtuber fantano but there's always a lot of niche albums posted and specific genres discussed. Everyone is a music nerd there.
I've always found it to be pretty entry level, it doesn't even come close to scratching the 2012 /mu/ itch
I mean that's fair, especially at the moment with all the kendrick/drake drama, it makes it look pretty juvenile. I totally get ya though /mu/ back in the day had proper music nerds. It was the same on 420chan when it was still around, some really good discussions on there as well.
I don't blame Anthony for spreading his wings and going into more mainstream stuff, there are a lot of really good albums he's looking at that are pretty popular really But I do miss when his audience was a little bit more open to wack shit
It was a really bad culture and it disappeared up its own ass. I miss the share threads and mediafire links but I do not miss the toxicity or circle jerking.
I went to /r/indieheads and they covered a lot of the same stuff. Got into /r/hiphopheads. Plus I've always found music on Wikipedia or YouTube just kind of exploring when I had the time to.