blog.mchiu.com

What kind of music do I listen to?

Although my MP3 collection has grown to over 80GB now, it's still not quite enough music, and I am constantly in search of new music to listen to. Last year, I was using the web music service Pandora, which helped out a lot in discovering new types of music, but later on, I started using last.fm. What I like about last.fm is that unlike Pandora, I don't need to turn all my tags into different radio stations, and instead, I use the tags to stream similar music over.

One thing that I have found difficulty in is to characterize the music I like to listen to. On the one hand, some people might call it "acid jazz", but the term reminds me of groups such as Jamiroquai, which is kinda sorta what I like listening to, but not completely. Others might call it "trip-hop", but I find that to be a little too technoey... Even others might refer to it as "drum and bass", but that still doesn't really define the music I enjoy listening to. I guess there are more generic terms like "ambient" or "chillout", but they certainly are a bit too general, and there are actually some songs in the genre of music I like that are a bit more up-tempo.

So on music services such as last.fm and pandora, I usually end up just typing in groups that I like, and hope that the music services can find similar groups, and for the most part, it works, but then I start to get sick of the lack of variety in music, but at least it turns me onto new artists. For example, a few years ago, Kevin turned me on to a group called the Blue Six, and from that group, I discovered other similar groups and artists such as Miguel Migs, Lovetronic, De-Phazz, etc.

So the quest to figure out what is the name of the genre of music I listen to continued. But after using last.fm for a while, since it has its own built-in wiki, when it presents new artists to me, I can read information about the groups that other people have posted, and I realized a common word that appeared on every song that I really liked... shibuya-kei... Wikipedia sums up this term as:

Shibuya-kei (渋谷系 Shibuya-style; also 渋谷系サウンド "Shibuya-kei sound") is a variety of Japanese pop music which combines elements of jazz, fusion, traditional music, and other styles. Shibuya-kei music first gained popularity in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, from which it took its name. Despite under-marketing, it enjoyed enormous success in this region.

I think this is the closest definition to the type of music I like to listen to, depending on what it means by "traditional music", since for me, it does not necessarily need to be sounds of traditional Japanese music, but of just any culture.

In any case, I guess I can at least say that I now have added a new term to my Japanese vocabulary. For anyone interested in looking up my profile on last.fm, it is mchiu.