Weirdest ways you've gotten into music

I got into the Eurovision Song Contest through finding it on Wikipedia.

And for the person who mentioned that they find "GTA brought me here", there’s a reason we used to have a trope called "The Grand Theft Auto Effect".

Okay, this one isn't that weird, but I got into Oliver Tree just this month. Because of Life Goes On, right? No, it was actually because of that collaboration with Little Big and Tommy Cash, both of whom I was already a fan of. Little Big because I enjoy the Russian Rave genre, and Tommy because I found him from their song Give Me Your Money. Oliver was the only one in that collaboration that I had never heard of, even though he is the most popular and well known out of all those artists!

A lot of the ways I've gotten into music was actually from my high school music class. Most notably, I actually got into Soft Cell when our teacher was explaining the concept of song covers to us, using Tainted Love and then Duffy's cover of it as an example. Also, learning Damon Albarn worked on Gorillaz during this song guessing game thing was what got me into his other projects, mainly Blur and his solo career.

Edited by Routeferret on Oct 14th 2021 at 10:32:51 AM

This Very Wiki has been a surprisingly big influence on what I listen to. Until I actually checked out their page on the wiki, I had a pretty big Hype Aversion towards Pink Floyd, which this wiki helped me overcome. Same with Jimi Hendrix. Tv Tropes also introduced me to several web musicians, including Your Favorite Martian (for better or for worse), Man On The Internet, and, of course, the absolute madlad that is Ken Ashcorp.

I'm not sure if this counts but I almost got into Korean Pop Music through Inuyasha. If I'd Googled BoA back then, that would have been my gateway rather than being shown SHINee by my best friend. (why are you even here Reiko, they didn't ask for almosts)

Today I streamed Skin, a whole album by some obscure 90s Italian rock band called Mother Nature, as a failed attempt at finding a personal piece of lost media: I've been trying to find a certain song I once heard on a Boston rock radio station in the 90s, but all I had to go on was that a DJ announced either the band or song as "Mother Nature", and the song had an odd Big-Lipped Alligator Moment where the song stopped for a few seconds, a high pitched synth or possibly harpsichord started playing this fast, spooky music box-ish melody. and then the song picked right back up where it left off ^note something similar does happen in "See Emily Play" by Pink Floyd, but I remember this being announced as a new song, and while that station did play Floyd, they wouldn't have played any of the really early stuff. Nothing of that description happens on this album, but the title track felt weirdly familiar, and it does seem like the kind of Led Zeppelin-indebted hard rock that particular station would have played - my theory now is that the radio station did have something by this band in rotation, but either the DJ messed up and announced their name before some other band's song, or else they were actually announcing the next/previous song and I misheard it. Anyway, at least the album is pretty good, and I may even end up buying it.

Edited by MikeK on Jan 5th 2022 at 9:29:04 AM

Many moons ago, I stumbled across a particularly striking bit of art for an artist on Bandcamp while listening to a friend of mine's work, and bookmarked that record.

Later on, I was extremely bored and watching one of those silly YouTube iceberg meme videos… and the same artist was mentioned. I was amused. Went back to Bandcamp, found their actual page, made a note to myself, decided I'd listen to their work soon.

Finally, another friend of mine invited me to a small Discord server, and one of the members had that artist name as a user name. They seemed chill, we got on well, but I didn't want to bug them. Then they posted something and I went, "Wait, you're that [artist name]?" And so they were!

I listened to their most recent EP. It was, thankfully, extremely good. :P

I think the weirdest "awareness of the musician's work/existence → being a fan of their work" pipeline I've gone through is getting into the Peter Gabriel discography because a classmate in elementary school kept going on about some song about having to shock monkeys.

I brushed it off as one of his regular eccentricities, since he was really fond of monkeys, but it stuck in the back of my mind for years. So because of that, it pretty surprising when in college, I found that exact song he was talking about, "Shock the Monkey" (in which said monkey-shocking is a metaphor for obsession), and learned that it was by the guy from Genesis.

Edited by bowserbros on Jan 1st 2022 at 4:00:05 AM

I bought a punk/post-punk themed grab bag of pins off someone's Etsy, and ended up with a few pins for bands that I'd never heard of, and now I'm trying to check some of them out - the first such group is Lima 13. They're a Peruvian group who kind of remind me of Joy Division (Well if Ian Curtis sang in Spanish)

[Sorry, new accounts cannot post external links.]

How did I become a fan of Armored Core music? Seeing used in gacha game videos (namely Arknights, and Dr. Silvergun's 4* only clears specifically).

I was first introduced to Yellow Card during high school, when one of my classmates used "Fighting" for a video-editing project.

It probably would have happened another way a bit later on, given its increasing omnipresence, but my journey down the K-pop rabbit hole officially began as I was coming up with a series of "AU" DC Extended Universe movies existing only in my head as my interest in Batman resurged after a period of dormancy (despite me having lived in the real-life Gotham City for most of that period). I thought that the only way the executives would allow the existence of a movie that would retcon the In Name Only version of Cassandra Cain from Birds of Prey (2020) as a separate character with the same name as the "real" Cass would be if a popular K-pop idol were cast as the "real" Cass. This led to me approaching the rabbit hole by listening to BLACKPINK's The Album, though it still took a couple of months to go much further than BP before getting completely sucked.

I eventually decided that the idol to be "cast" as Cassandra Cain would be TWICE's Tzuyu, who would eventually become my bias in Twice as they was starting to overtake Blackpink as my favorite K-pop group.

On a side note, the resurgence of my interest in Batman came as I was moving to a new house in a place that gets bats during the warmer months.

Edited by AnotherOnlinePersona on Feb 25th 2023 at 3:41:08 AM

I somehow got into beatbox loopstation through Carmina Burana, of all things.

Basically, I was going through various "O Fortuna" covers/arrangements just because, and fell in love with Luc Arbogast's particular rendition of the song. Then I came across one of his performances in The Voice, which led me to find MB14's audition for the show. Then I watched MB14's battle against Saro in the GBB2017 and the rest is history.

Edited by Adept on May 4th 2023 at 5:34:14 PM

I think I would probably had ignored Radiohead in their best moment until...

Before that day, my idea of Radiohead was Creep and a misconcept that also they played a cover of Cat Stevens´s Wild World (only to learn later that it was Mr. Big, but sometimes you don´t have time to watch the credits of the videos in the TV when they put one song exactly after another), even they went to my town to play their hits for the first time in Mexico and very few noticed them...

Then I got into a party back in 2000, it was a very stoney party where everyone tried to play any record they had at hand, I tried to not get into the stoned guys and took some soft drinks as long as I never told my parents I was into a party...

Then the hostess change the record and while the first song of the record left me unimpressed, then it began the weirdest, awesome song I ever heard in my, then, short life...

the notes of Paranoid Android were entering and taking my non-stoned neurones by surprise!!! It was impossible to resist..., the song was so awesome and I felt the need to stay (despite it was late) and hear the rest of the record...

From then, Radiohead open my ears to a very weird way to experience rock music...