Weirdest ways you've gotten into music

R&B is a genre that has been popular since the 1940s and has changed sounds many times while retaining that genre name and not really spawning any major subgenres that I know of. I'm an outsider to the genre, so I don't know how the R&B community views things, but the only genre label distinction between older and newer R&B I've seen is that the newer (80s onward) stuff is called "Contemporary R&B". The result is that what's called R&B these days doesn't really sound anything like the type of music that started the genre, something I'd say is also true of Country Music.

edited 12th Apr '15 5:26:42 PM by djbj

Got into Gorillaz because one of their songs was in a Sims machinima.

Wikipedia and music documentaries (especially those produced by BBC 4) are usually my starting points when it comes to the internet (especially if they talk about what bands mattered the most, using timelines and other stuff).

edited 13th Apr '15 11:55:31 AM by Quag15

Well-cited Wikipedia articles are usually fantastic for learning about genres. Allmusic is a pretty good resource for this stuff too.

RE: R&B: That term was just a term coined by Jerry Wexler to market music by African American artists without using the then-common term "race music."

@Odd1: I think I did try to look up goth rock bands online, but Wikipedia's articles about subgenres just intimidated me then (the most they taught me was "this genre is characterized by prominent bass guitar, polyrhythmic drum machine lines, and Looks Like Cesare aesthetics"). I got a tumblr later that year and it was from tumblr that I learned about the more successful post-punk bands.

I wasn't into music videos at the time, but I guess if I had thought "oh no I can't find this band on You Tube" I would have realized how unintentionally hipsterish my tastes were getting.

I discovered Kavinsky through Birgirpall's Poonikins Grand Theft Auto IV videos.

I discovered Touhou music arrangements, and by extension, doujin music by an equivalent of wiki walk in YouTube while listening to music. The song in question is Heart of Glass by Lili-an from Liz-Triangle.

edited 1st May '15 7:33:19 AM by murazrai

Thinking back, the video game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" was my gateway to classic rock. Anyone who has played the game would agree with me that it has brilliant soundtracks, especially the ones belonging to the rock genre. I don't think I would even know Grand Funk Railroad and America (the band) if not for "GTA". Video games are a common medium to introducing unfamiliar music.

Of all the "X brought me here" type Youtube comments I've seen, "GTA brought me here" is the one I see the most often.

How I was introduced via "GTA" isn't the weirdest part. The weirdest part is how quickly it made me a new fan of an unfamiliar genre. I don't even need time to warm up to the genre. It's love at first note.

edited 12th May '15 10:41:35 PM by tropeslave

I got into trailer music (or "epic music", or whatever it's called), especially Two Steps from Hell, because Joueur du Grenier made a parody trailer of MLP as a blockbuster movie. I tracked down the song he used for the soundtrack (Protector of the Earth), discovered Two Steps from Hell and other similar studios... and that's pretty much all the music I have now.

NSFW answer:

I first heard "Until We Bleed" by Lykke Li and Kleerup in an AMV someone made for a terrible pseudo-hentai OVA. I watched for the boobs, I stayed for the great song.

I got into some music by watching the Irish tv show Reeling in the Years.

Comcast's "Music Choice" stations got me into oldschool funk and R&B as a kid.

I got into Italo Disco because of my fascination of bootlegs.

My introduction was this song by Sophie that is used in many a Shoddy Knockoff Product. I don't know what about that song it was that made me stick to it, especially since there are many italo songs I like way more than it now. But it made me dive into other songs in the recommended section. I kept clicking more and more of them and it couldn't stop.

All because of crappy, potentially dangerous toys from street vendors.

Got into Aphex Twin because of a chance cover of it in a PlamzJoker YTP named "Tim Gets His Own Episode".

I got into At the Drive-In due to a Video Game Magazine. It was Game Informer and there was a section where they talked about the most wanted songs for Guitar Hero III. One of these songs was "One Armed Scissor" and I ended up listening to that song and that's how I became an ATDI fan.

Edited by pointless233 on Feb 13th 2019 at 10:06:47 AM

I got into Metallica because one of my collaborators wanted to include "Enter Sandman" on the soundtrack I was compiling for a school project. By itself this isn't that weird except that I went from a fan of 80's synth-pop to a metal fan practically overnight.

I discovered Cage the Elephant by writing the Wikipedia article on their producer Jay Joyce.

I was unable to find any good music for a while, so I randomly searched for "you're searching for something that doesn't exist" on YouTube, and found this and Viza.

Edited by modrapetka on Aug 9th 2019 at 7:03:08 PM

There was a song I was trying to find the name of for a while but couldn't because I didn't know much about it. But one day I was listening to one song on Youtube, but autoplay did its thing before I could stop it. The song autoplay had on was the song. It turned out to be "Clarity" by Zedd.

My brother and I designed a... let's say "charmingly naive" fighting game about 20 years ago. We sent it off to a few companies, including Acclaim.

They tactfully said that they "had a full portfolio at the moment", but sent us a few free games. One of them was Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX - that game's soundtrack includes Don't Drag Me Down by Social Distortion. An incredible song by a band that became my favourite artist for a very long time! (Until I heard the Afghan Whigs).

x 5: I feel like there's actually a surprising connection between the two genres, at least if you count Alternative Metal - in the late 90s up to the 2000s it was kind of a recurring thing for alternative metal bands to do a Cover Version of a synth pop song, I guess because members of the bands grew up in the 80s and were into synth pop and new wave as teenagers: Examples include Disturbed doing "Shout" (originally by Tears for Fears) and System of a Down doing "The Metro" (originally by Berlin).

Edited by MikeK on Mar 7th 2020 at 6:09:53 AM

I got into my undoubtedly favourite band, Nine Inch Nails, because one of their songs was used in two PS 2 games (Rock Band, and Midnight Club 3), and then several years later I heard another NIN song used in a YTP, and was like "Hey, I recognize that band. Both those songs are cool, actually, I should check out more by them." The rest is history.

I listened to Selected Ambient Works Volume II followed by Global Communication's 76:14 while taking a dump. They're now two of my favorite ambient albums of all time.