I used to buy a lot of music. It has always been an important part of my life. I never was the person who stick to a particular kind of music. I listen and buy music according to the pleasure of my ears and my heart. As a classically trained person I always love classical music and have a sizeable collection. Growing up in Hong Kong without a doubt I got hooked on to Cantonpop. Some critics may classify most of them as sickly sweet candy tunes, which in my opinion is a sickly over-generalised view without understanding the music and it's culture. Then there are English pops. Some of them introduced by my radio days, some of them from the school's music club and some of them by accident. I also got into Japanese anime songs as these were stuff I grew up with. I even learnt Japanese because of that. With the "invasion" of Japanese drama I got into J-Pop, which for most of my friends I was a late bloomer. When I developed my interests in video games, I started listening to video games music too. To top all of these, there are also Latino music, French music and musical theatre. So with such wide spectrum of musical interest (or according to some people lack of specialisation) my music collection should be growing continuously. How did it happen that I am spending less and less of my disposable income on buying music?
With the advance of technology buying music had never been easier. Long gone are the days you need to go to the shops to get a CD. I still enjoy browsing on the shelves flipping through racks of CDS enjoying their packaging and covers. But then online shopping is now complimented with digital download purchase, which means I can virtually buy any music I like at a click of the mouse. So why isn't my music collection growing as it should?
I believe my love for music has not waned but probably as I grow older, I get a lot more picky on what to buy. This probably due to that fact that not all my disposable income is that "disposable" anymore. As I moved out of home, expenditures rises. Bills that were dealt with by parents are now my stuff. Utilities, food, car and now a mortgage they all inevitably shrunk my share of disposable income. So I have to rationalise my spending across all categories of things that I like - theatre, cinema, concerts, music, videos, video games, books etc. As a result I began to play safe in my purchases. Some of my adventurous attitude to music and cinema was eroded and leading me to restrict myself to all the safe purchases instead of just buying anything that seemed interesting. For me this is not healthy as it starts building fences around my interests, which is not great when you work in a creative industry. I believe you always need new catalysts to stimulate your creativity.
Radio used to be a main source for exposing me to new music but nowadays radio is so boring that I eventually just switched it off. One thing I sometimes cannot understand about radio in Australia is that a lot of time it is about the shock jocks not the music. Maybe the industry had moved forward and I was left behind. The fact is on any day I prefer to listen to music broadcast than wasting my time listening to the babbling of some radio hosts who think they are funny and relevant to the society. Radio seemed to have lost its function of promoting music.
Some people may think this is a mid-life music crisis - you live to a point in life that most musical contents became irrelevant to you. You can no longer relate to those puppy and silly love songs the newer and younger artists are talking about. Yet you refuses to admit that you belong to an older generation of musicians. As a result you become the void generation on the dichotomy of music appreciation. I personally do not agree. I am still open to new music just that I do not know where to find them sometimes, or worse still do not have as much time to find them. Maybe my appreciation levels and standards are now more refined with all these years, good music is still good music. By that I do not mean music that complies with certain composition structure or marketing blitz, I mean music that pleases my ears. Once a colleague made a comment on me saying "I would never expect you to listen to this kind of music" and there was another friend who once said, "You could play such beautiful classical music why would you listen to any Madonna stuff?". For me if I like the music it is relevant to me. I don't need to build a framework around it.
So the question remains - how could I continue to expose myself to new music? Maybe I just need to find time and make the effort, as with all things you love, you need to work hard to keep the love going.
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