How Did You Hear About Your Favorite Song Of Right Now?

My pal Tom Ewing yesterday put a call out on Twitter asking people what their favorite songs were, and how they’d first been exposed to said songs. People answered with songs ranging from “Tequila” to “Zero,” and from sources ranging from boyfriends to MBV. From that data–compiled over the course of a few hours–he extracted a few thoughts on what he called “Digitally Engaged Music Seekers,” and how they come to the music that they love:

1. Forget traditional broadcast media: it’s entertaining but it’s not a source of anything much – only two people mentioned radio or video channels. 2. Blogs are important, but so’s direct band/artist communication: I was surprised by how many people heard favourite tracks through direct digital connection with artists or labels – no intermediary required. 3. Word of mouth can be casual: music gets transmitted across pretty weak ties – guitar teachers and twitter friends as well as mates and boyfriends. 4. Serendipity matters: I get the feeling that most replies weren’t seeking out new music so much as putting themselves in the way of it and being alert and vaguely open to its possibility. 5. The Long Tail lives!: I am a pop fan and so I was expecting to see more records named which are hits or at least have some chance of it. Instead the bulk of them I’d never even heard of.

I would tend to agree with all of these–especially the point about serendipity, which I think has become less possible in the digital age as people close themselves off to music that they don’t already know or that hasn’t been recommended to them (whether by a friend or an online engine of some sort); the omnipresence of headphones helps, too, as walking down a street while listening to the sounds of cars going by and radios blaring from stores is a very different experience than one with headphones. Then again, my favorite song of this very second is one I inadvertently found while doing an iTunes search for a related track, so perhaps serendipity is there, it just requires a little more effort on the part of the listener. Anyway, I don’t think he’d object to me using that term to describe all of you fine people, who are, after all, reading about music via a digital device, so let me throw the question out to you–what’s your favorite song of right now (don’t overthink, just whatever comes to your mind first), and where did you first hear it? And what do you think of Tom’s theories on how people discover music–do recommendations from artists matter that much? And is there still the potential for a serendipitous path to music in the cold, hard digital world? The way we listen now [Freaky Trigger]