Just think, there is a never-ending plethora of music sitting in your pocket right now. If the same everyday music is getting boring to you, it doesn’t have to be that way. Just like learning to swim or training to throw things really far, being able to listen to music and establish meaningful and powerful connections with the music you are interested in is a skill that can grow with you as your repertoire of music also expands.

1. UNDERSTANDING GENRES

Genres are the broadest classifying tool for music. There are also sub-genres which are nice blends of two or more genres at once. Two common genres are Rock and Electronic. Sub-genres of both of those genres would be Post-Punk Rock and Detroit house music. Being able to understand and respect these are your first step to enhancing your listening experience. If there’s a genre you think is interesting, look it up, learn about it and its sub-genres to gain a real understanding for the artists and content involved.

2. USING GOOGLE

Surprisingly, Google has a great system to help you understand and explore new genres. If you go to Google and enter a genre with the word “bands/artists” after it, take “technical death metal” for example. When you look up “technical death metal bands”, you get a list spanning a ton of tech death bands from a range of different years. Click on a band that you think is interesting and read about them. Listen to an album or a few of their best songs and try to pick apart your reactions. Try to think about what you really like and really don’t like about what you’re hearing.

3. ARTIST’S PERSPECTIVE

Obviously, to make an emotional connection with something, you have to establish your own personal associations to your life through words, music and feelings expressed by the artist. For example, if you’re listening to a rapper like Kendrick Lamar, you may not relate to his songs’ messages completely, but you can understand the power and emotion he put into his songs from his perspective and appreciate it more. 

4. RESEARCH ARTISTS

Being able to know everything about an artist can also impact your feelings about their music. The best case of this is perhaps the case of Vaarg Vikernes or “Burzum”. If you stumbled upon his music without doing some light research on Wikipedia, you may just think he’s a normal artist when in reality, he’s played a lead role in the Norwegian black metal scene he helped shape into what it is today, along with many other insane and somewhat unrelated things he’s done throughout his career. Many would have never guessed what else he had done over the course of his career until they look him up. Not all artists are amazing people, but you can take them as an artist and a person in two different respects.

5. DEEP LISTENING

Music is great white noise, just sitting there in the background while you’re chilling, sure. Music is also an art. Many people forget that every song ever made required years of experience and thought just to come into existence. It is nice to take a few minutes and really dive into a song or album and soak up every detail. Focus on the artist’s words, listen to the mixing of the instruments and try to pick apart the artist’s message that they’re trying to convey in the song. It is pretty surprising how much more meaningful a song can become to you if you sit there and read the lyrics and think about how the artist felt as they wrote the song. You may be surprised how sad some of the happy songs on your playlist will sound after you do this.