My List of Upcoming Live Music in San Francisco

I have a Google Doc that I try to update about once a month, listing out all the upcoming shows that my friends and I might be interested in. I guess I should share it here – you can find it at this link.

As an aside, I was super excited when the Castro Theater was turned into a music venue, seeing Waxahatchee there was our first live music experience after the pandemic hit. However, they now seem to be pricing it like an actual theater – I tried to get tickets to see CMAT next April, but the regular floor tickets were $87! You can get shitty upper balcony seats for $50. I thought that was a one-off, given that CMAT puts on a pretty elaborate live show, but I just saw that The New Pornographers are playing there, with Will Sheff opening, in May, and those are $58 for floor tickets (with the loge seats going for more than $100)! I’m all for musicians getting paid, but that $58 includes $15 in Ticketmaster fees (eyeroll).

Dumping Spotify for Tidal, Finally

As a music lover, Spotify was a godsend when it first started. Most of my listening is to newly-released music, which I constantly cycle onto and off of my Current Rotation playlist, and I love having access to so much more music than I would if I were limited to buying albums or even downloading music off of Napster and Limewire as we did back in the day (I still buy albums on Bandcamp, but not everything I listen to).

But Spotify has become more and more reprehensible. Lately, there has been the problem of their running ads for ICE and giving millions of dollars to Joe Rogan. But what finally put me over the edge was this excellent post by Los Campesinos! in which they break down their album revenues from all sources. Going over the list, I saw that Tidal paid out almost triple what Spotify did. Still not enough, I know. But so much more – presumably because Tidal is not wasting money on podcasts and audiobooks and everything that Spotify has added in the past few years.

I checked the pricing and, while we paid $20/month for our family Spotify plan, the Tidal family plan was only $3 more per month. When I set up my trial account, they had a tool that seamlessly transferred all of my (extensive) Spotify playlists over to Tidal. I don’t use the library feature on Spotify, but it would have transferred that too. The big test was making sure Tidal worked with our extensive home Sonos system, and it did, no problems. The Tidal interface and app were very intuitive and similar to Spotify. My only issue was that some of the very obscure bands I tried to find were missing, but I can find those tracks on Bandcamp – and they are few and far between.

So I made the permanent switch! It felt good to finally let go of the guilt of funneling money to Spotify. If you’re considering making the switch, I hope this post helps encourage you! If you do it, here’s my profile if you want to friend me.

How to Discover New Music in Your 50s

A lot of these posts end up being responses to questions I get asked often, so I think I’m writing them to memorialize the answers somewhere, so that after I’m gone, the “wisdom” (???) will live forever somewhere, on the internet, where nothing ever dies.

Adam and I have been recording a music podcast for 11 years — we’re currently at 230-something episodes — in which we find one recently-released album to discuss in depth. I do most of the work of finding potential candidates, because I already spend a lot of time and energy on discovering new music. People sometimes ask how I discover new music, because they find themselves listening to the same old albums over and over again. I always say, first off, that it kind of has to be a hobby that you’re willing to devote time to, and if your main hobbies are raising children and/or working too much, it might just have to be something you leave behind for the time being (or just listen to your friend Gaelen’s recommendations!). ;) Anyway, here are my methods:

REVIEWS AND BLOGS

I follow a lot of websites (via RSS or social media, like Bluesky) that review and recommend music. I’ve gotten pretty good at being able to read a review and determine if it’s something I’m probably going to like. Sites I read religiously are Pitchfork’s new album reviews, Stereogum’s “Heavy Rotation” section, Paste Magazine’s Music section, and the See/Saw “Punk This Week” newsletter. Sites I read less religiously are NPR Music, the “indieheads” subreddit, Rolling Stone, and Brooklyn Vegan.

PODCASTS

I listen to a few music review podcasts, including All Songs Considered, See/Saw, Rolling Stone Music Now, and KEXP’s In Our Headphones. Of course, I think Adam’s and my own podcast, For the Record, is a pretty good listen!

RADIO STATION PLAYLISTS

I don’t actually listen to the radio much, but I look at certain radio station’s charts to see what’s popping up. In particular: KEXP, BFF.fm, and KCRW.

LIVE MUSIC

For more than a decade, my biggest avenue of musical discovery has been going to the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas every year. SXSW is not a “festival” the way most people think of it, it’s about 1,000 mostly-unknown bands coming from around the world to play at roughly 100 small venues across Austin, to industry people and tastemakers. I spend months in advance listening to the artists who have been invited, and deciding, on the basis of a handful of songs, whether to add them to our schedule. We can usually only see 90-100 artists over the course of the week, but I always leave with new discoveries I’m really excited about. Unfortunately, they are significantly scaling down the music portion of SXSW next year, and making the whole thing overlap with SXSW “Interactive,” which is all the worst tech bros with whom I hate having to share space for the one night it had previously overlapped. So the future is uncertain.

Here at home, I look through the music calendars of every local venue once a month, and put the ones that I think I or my friends might be interested in into a shared Google doc. When someone I’m interested in comes to town, I try and see them live.

PLAYLISTS

Certain radio stations and programs, like NPR’s All Songs Considered, curate “New Music” playlists on Spotify that you can follow. Personally, I have my own “Current Rotation” playlist, which is pretty much all I listen to. As I gather music from the above sources, it goes onto the playlist, and what doesn’t resonate with me gets removed in regular prunings. You can “follow” it on Spotify if you want to see what I’m listening to.