Do you ever feel like you've heard EVERYTHING?

My suggestion is to quit looking for something new and begin appreciating the way new bands improve upon elements from music's past.

I recently experienced something that I think embodies what you're talking about:

I was at a friend's house at a small get-together. This friend, Michael, is a huge music geek. He regularly goes into record stores and comes out with $200+ of music. At any rate, someone with very little music knowledge-- we'll call her GX-231-- told him to put something in the stereo. Michael shuffled through his many, many Case Logics and the thousands of CDs on the shelf and concluded that there was nothing he felt like hearing, or maybe he said that he'd heard everything too many times. GX-231 was astounded that someone could have that many CDs and not want to hear even one of them.

Meanwhile, I sat there in silence, knowing all too well what Michael was experiencing.

Been in that situation as well many times over the years, just a sheer sense of 'what to listen to...hrm' while staring at the Raggettstacks. I usually rely on Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth in those cases.

you sound burnt out.

you need to forget about music for 6 months and come back to it.

or hell... maybe at the end of that 6 months, you'll decide you were happier without it.

regardless, with the thousands of new bands formed every year, i'm surprised to hear that you feel that you've heard it all. that seems quite unlikely.

m.

buy LPs or CDs with really awesome cover art. that's the best way to discover your new favourite band. and you often discover surprising tastes in yourself

Nope. There are far more things that sound interesting than available time or resources.

I do get completely tired of certain types of sounds and sometimes things that were blood favorites at one time I never listen to any more.

I think it's the "nothing is doing it for me anymore" that's the key here Dan-O. It probably has very little to do with music. If you really think it does though, just shut off your stereo and listen to your house gurgle / birds sing / cars honk / blood rusing thru ears for awhile. And don't give up on it after 30 seconds either. I guarantee you haven't heard that - those specific sounds in that arrangement - before!

I feel that I have a much more left to hear, including some things that I expect will surprise me. (Yes I know that sounds a little contradictory, but it makes sense to me. I don't anticipate exactly how they will surprise me, just that they will.) But I do get burned out on the recordings I currently own.

I've gone through that. What worked for me - well, it was an investment - but I have three 300-CD changers. I set them to play random selections. Not only does the music sound better juxtaposed against something of a different style, but I end up hearing bands/CDs/tracks that I never used to play very often.

Caveat emptor: Today I heard Joe Jackson's "Breaking us in Two" next to the Big Boys. That combination truly sucked. But usually, it comes out alright.

never -- the past and the present and the future are always rich with sounds to fill my ears with every day.

But Tracer, have you heard the remix?!

Too many times.

< /drugs joke >

try breaking up with your girlfriend. the next day you will wake up and look at your record collection and go "there is so much wonderful music on this shelf, i can't wait to listen to all of it".

Listen to your local Clear Channel Affliate for an hour.

You'll be running back to your collection

yeah, but have you ever listened to a song too much after a break up, the song being impossible to ever listen to again because of the associations it brings to mind?

Taking the question literally, no -- I've never felt like I've heard everything.

To break it down mathematically: If someone pops out of the womb, listens to music 24-7 (without repeats), and doesn't sleep one second for 90 years, that's 788,400 hours of recorded music that has been heard. Consider only the number of hours of recorded music that have been released to date, and then imagine attempting to listen to everything as it comes out on top of that. 788,400 hours of un- repeated listening wouldn't even cover rock'n'roll. It wouldn't even cover certain fractions of rock'n'roll.

I could do some more calculations relating to the fact that most people claim to only listen to good music, taking into consideration the claim that only 1% of released music is "worthwhile." But I won't.

About once a year or so, there's a moment when I stare at my collection and become totally stumped as to what I should put on. That means it's time to go to the record store. (Then again, it's always time to go to the record store.)

I don't feel like I've heard ANYTHING!

I am I writing the way an old Italian-American green-grocer would talk: "I feel that I have-a much more to hear. . ." The fruits of sloppy (non-existent) editing.

i often feel like i haven't heard enough. everybody seems to know about more music than me.

why do i need to hear everything when i can just listen to pavement as always be satisfied?

I agree with d- there are so many albums that are supposed to be great which I've never heard. I get so frustrated when I read a review of an album that I love, and it references other albums that I want to hear, and then I realize that I've bought too many CDs that month already.

I'm with the people who still feel that there are thousands of good things yet to hear. As for I often wonder, "is there some band that I've never heard before that could possibly become my new favorite band?"-- and I quickly conclude that the chances of this are extremely slim I would have said the same thing ten years ago (I am now 43). I'd have said in the early '90s that my tastes were pretty set, and the favourite acts and albums wouldn't get shifted much. I was completely wrong. I love Pulp as much as the Rolling Stones, Blue Lines as much as Mott, and I'm looking forward to the new albums from Massive Attack and Underworld as much as I ever looked forward to the new Bowie in the '70s, say. I have thousands of albums, but I constantly realise, especially here and in conversation with friends, that I need thousands more.

I thought the question wasn't about hearing ALL music so much as all types. And I certainly feel like that some of the time. Having started with rock music I was amazed and delighted when I started listening to jazz, techno, minimalist, reggae and funk. Now I'm hitting the 30's after 20 years of solid listening there's certainly less in the way of unexplored frontiers just sitting there waiting to be explored. I still hear new bands (and new-to-me old bands) all the time that sound amazing but usually they are playing in an idiom I know so there isn't the same sense of total revelation. Its a sense of ever decreasing circles.

But then I went to India and got an album of hindustani clarinet mixed with southern indian saxophone music and a CD which might best be described as techno-esque Sikh devotional music. Now they sounded totally new and amazing.

Some people think I;m being obscurist when I talk about stuff like that but Black Rebel Motorcycle CLub are never going to excite me the way the Jesus and Mary Chain or the Ramones did 15 years ago no matter how good their songs are.

Winkelman, I guess it's inevitable that there are going to be fewer and fewer paradigm shifting music experiences (to refer to another thread), but I didn't get the sense that that's what the original questioner was asking about.

I wish there were less of a stigma around exploring music from other cultures. Why shouldn't one's favorite music end up coming from a different part of the planet?

Maybe I did misunderstand the question.

My point was kinda if you already have an all time favourite rock band then any new rock band is gonna have trouble beating them. But it'd be much easier to get a new favourite rai band.