Why is it so hard now to name a favorite musician?

Compared to 10 years ago, this question has grown a lot harder to answer. In the old days, songs were indexed by song-writers. Prior to the digital age, the most popular media was physical cassettes, and it’s natural to group the cassettes by artists. Moreover, artists used to be the primary mechanism to discover new music. The cost of listening to new songs was usually high, since there were few ways to try new music, so fans tended to buy music from the same artists for quality (and taste) assurance.

With the evolution of music streaming and the decline of the recording industry, the granularity of “listening to music” has refined significantly. Listeners no longer need to buy whole cassettes, but can pick songs individually. Moreover, recommendation algorithms allow fans to discover music by popularity, genre or even mood.  As a result, music fans now sample from such a wide range of artists that it’s hard to name a single favorite. And due to the insane number of accessible songs, Even if you listen to a specific artist most frequently among your collection, you may still only like a small percentage of all the songs he/she wrote, which leads to the shaky conviction that you actually have a “favorite musician”.

On the other hand, I believe the palette for music depends a lot on “environment”. It could be a physical environment (eg. beach or gym), an action (eg. working or cooking), or a mood (eg. chill or psyched). The like or dislike towards a certain piece of music changes drastically when these variables change. To some extent, I view music more as a tool than as an art form, in that I seek certain utility from music at different times. However, music judgment for me is also not 100% a rational or utilitarian process. It still very much comes from intuition, though that intuition is heavily biased by environmental factors.