I’ve been working hard on a local calendar of all the music shows in Denver. I don’t have all the venues listed just yet, but I’m getting there!We have lots of plans for making MusicRex/Denver the best place to find live music. If you have any of your own ideas let me know! 

Do you listen to albums that you have to hide from your friends? When people are going through your CD collection do they laugh? Do you have no clue how to find good music?

What is good music anyway?

The obvious answer is “music you like to listen to.” But if that was true you wouldn’t care whether somebody thought your music was bad and you wouldn’t be reading this article.

We all have been guilty of liking music that other people think is bad. We all have different taste in music. However, we are desperate to have other people approve of the music we listen to. It must be some sort of caveman thing.

Be honest. You listen to certain music partly because you want to be considered cool. Most of us are just sheep following the cool music tastemakers. Even the tastemakers have their own gurus. So if a certain respected person in your life says a particular album or artist is good, you generally believe them, even if you have to listen to that album 20 times before you also like it.

Radio is partly to blame for us being music sheep. It used to be that everyone listened to the radio and there were relatively few songs played. DJs told us what to listen to and what to buy. MTV came along and took over the role of chief tastemaker. But now we are all adrift. There is so much music that is available and played on genre-specific radio, tv commercials, movie soundtracks and of course the internet, that we don’t know where to begin to narrow all those choices down to something we like. There is music for every taste. Who is to know what is really good?

I have come up with a few recommendations for making your music collection seem more acceptable to those that matter.

Follow These Steps to Better Music:

1. Listen to albums no more than twice unless somebody else who is cool says they like it first. This will help avoid falling in love with a sucky album just because you played it a bunch of times.

2. Pick a well-known music blog and worship everything they recommend. Use musicrex.com to find respected blogs, music critics and music podcasts.

3. Match your music collection to the friends you are hanging out with. So if your friends like country music, only bring country music with you when you see them. Hide those jazz CDs when they come over for a visit. Perception is everything.

4. Read Pitchfork to find what all the jaded music lovers think is cool. You can say you don’t like an album if you mention “pitchfork” in the same sentence and still be considered cool. For example: “I saw pitchfork gave that album an “8″ but I just can’t get into it.”

5. Make sure you have the top five albums on Metacritic in your collection. This will ensure that you have a wide variety of music and your friends will see how enlightened you are.

6. Go through your last.fm playlist and delete the artists your friends laugh at.

7. Go to live concerts. There is nothing like seeing someone play live to understand whether they are really good and truly appreciate their talent.

If you follow these steps soon your friends will begin to respect your taste in music. Then when you recommend that album they used to think was sucky, they will actually give it a listen. They might even like it!