5 Benefits of Exposing Yourself To New Music
By Space Coast Daily // April 24, 2022
In the age of streaming, many find that while new music is right at their fingertips, they mostly end up cycling through the same songs and albums that we’re used to listening to and love. While there’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, it limits our world view and ability to make new connections with people and the world around us.
Listening to new music is a great way to expand your mind, and there are many benefits to listening to music as a therapeutic practice! Today we’ll discuss some of the benefits of exploring new music and some different ways to listen in general to help you bring value back to the albums and songs you choose to listen to. Keep reading to learn more!
Vinyl Records
The Sound of Vinyl is an online marketplace for music fans to explore new pressings of some of the most amazing music in the world! You can find new albums, old classics and fresh music that you’ve never heard of before. Vinyl is a great way to listen to music not just because of the warm audio quality, but because it supports the artist more than streams do. Streaming services have made music and art less valuable to us as a society.
We can stream a hundred albums in a day for a small monthly fee, making buying an album seem like a waste of money. But owning music in a physical form of media makes it more tactile, more enjoyable and puts dollars into the pockets of the artists you love to keep doing what they’re doing!
Music Reduces Anxiety
Music is known to have a number of therapeutic qualities and by many is considered to be an essential part of life. Exposure to new music can help us reduce anxiety and get excited about hearing something we’ve never heard before. Particularly music that is instrumental, slow and calming can have a great impact on someone’s anxiety levels.
Expand Our Knowledge
Exposure to new music can also help us expand our knowledge both of music itself and the world around us. Music is everything. It’s history, science, math and culture all wrapped into one expression. Listening to music from different time periods, countries and cultures can help us widen our perspective on the world around us and help build connections and knowledge that will not only enrich our musical lives, but our day to day lives as well.
Discover New Bands
If we consistently stream the same albums over and over again, we’re never going to discover new bands! Your favorite band could be out there right now, and you wouldn’t know if you don’t try something new occasionally! There’s always a risk buying a new album that you may not like, but that’s part of the fun of the journey!
Discovering new music is about exploring your own tastes and that means determining what you like and what you don’t. Again, if you don’t explore new things, you may never discover how versatile your tastes are!
New Music Activates More of the Brain
In addition to being a way to discover potentially amazing new musicians and artists, listening to new music also has a great effect on your brain! An article on Huffington Post by Adam Bloodworth explains that listening to new music activates your entire brain and can help support better cognitive function and memory as we get older.
New music is like an exercise for our brain, which is in fact a muscle that needs to be exercised! New kinds of music help stretch those muscles and deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
Teaches Us to be More Open-Minded
Last on our list is the simple fact that the more open you can be to different kinds of music and art, the more open minded you can become overall. It’s been observed that willingness to experience new things can mean that a person is more open to other opinions, cultures and lifestyles than those that stick to the same old patterns and habits. Exposing ourselves to new ideas is something that we need to practice, and music is a great avenue to do so!
Listening to new music has many benefits, and almost no down sides! The only risk you take is possibly not liking something, in which case you can put it aside and move on to the next thing you’re interested in listening to.
Exposing ourselves to new music helps us discover new artists, expand our mind and exercise our brain to make new and deeper connections with the world we live in. We recommend listening to music in a physical form like vinyl to help support artists and bring value back into the music we consume as a society. Good luck and have fun exploring new styles of music!
