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jasoncomely's review against another edition
5.0
This book is epic in both size and scope. The audiobook is phenomenal and includes lots of musical "exhibits". I listened to about 80 percent of the audiobook then switched over to the ebook to highlight (many) passages on music psychology. I tell ya, this book has everything.
riotsquirrrl's review against another edition
3.0
Be prepared: this is a Music Appreciation 101 college class in book form and is best for people with some background in music. The book is very long; as an audiobook it's about 40 hours of listening. Do not go into reading/listening to this book thinking that it will be a fluff nonfiction work. There is a lot of content in this book that requires a fair amount of concentration.
Ultimately this books tries to do too many things and doesn't quite succeed in all of them, and I admittedly tuned a good chunk of his discussion out because it became too technical. Also Gasser has an ax to grind with using genre as a way to find new music to like and over-sells his point. That said, I did learn a lot from this book as a person with very little formal music education, especially regarding jazz and classical music, and I learned a good amount of musical history along the way.
What are the books smushed into this one tome?
1) A book about Gasser's work with Pandora's Music Genome project
2) A book about music theory and history
3) A book about the science of why we like music
4) A book about the limitations of genre and the power of music in our lives
5) A book showing how to use music theory to analyze various works of music
Gasser should have really picked two of these books or he should have greatly reduced the scope of the music theory he covers. With an audiobook it was difficult to do as the author suggests and go back and reference terms while he used them to talk about individual works, so I think it would have been much more helpful for Gasser to recap the meanings when discussing the works.
What I learned most from the chapter about Pandora is that if you don't sue a startup for your illegally withheld wages, you can use the experience to go and write a book like this one. I think that Gasser also simplifies what other music services are doing , choosing to rail against their use of genre rather than acknowledging that his system is time-intensive and requires songs be analyzed by highly trained musicians, limiting its scalability. Versus Spotify, which uses machine learning to chug through large amounts of data to figure out what people want as an aggregate group. The latter is a much more cost-effective approach, especially given Spotify's 360 million users worldwide compared to Pandora's 55 million listeners, confined to the US due to copyright issues. I think that the Music Genome project would become untenable given the sheer volume of music added to streaming services daily. I respect how Gassner is trying to get people to listen outside of the box and discover lots of music they would love, but given Pandora's rapidly diminishing market share, it's being eclipsed by other music services willing to cut corners to maximize profit.
The book also heavily relies on referencing content available via the author's website for the book, which does contain a good deal of supplementary material and even more discussion about individual works for each uber-genre. The quizzes and projects tabs on that site are still "under construction" which, given that this book is several years old, are likely to never materialize.
The most interesting part of the book is, of course, the discussions of the songs in each uber-genre. That said I don't think that they were quite rewarding enough to overcome all of the other material that Gasser absolutely needed to cover before he got to this analysis. I also commend Gasser for having hired a DJ immersed in hiphop culture to teach him about it. It shows because Gasser does not mince works about the role systemic racism against Black people has had on the development of hiphop as a way to cope with that oppression.
Gasser also dances around but never specifically names genres that people avoid due to cultural bias, namely hiphop and country, and I wish that he had addressed these issues directly rather than making overarching comments about how it's important to overcome one's listening biases.
General pet peeves:
Gasser overuses exotic when he could use a different, less value-laden topic like novel.
Dear God, someone should have worked with Gasser about pronunciation of non-English words, or they should have hired a real voice actor. Although given the length of the work, all they could probably afford was Gasser himself.
Ultimately this books tries to do too many things and doesn't quite succeed in all of them, and I admittedly tuned a good chunk of his discussion out because it became too technical. Also Gasser has an ax to grind with using genre as a way to find new music to like and over-sells his point. That said, I did learn a lot from this book as a person with very little formal music education, especially regarding jazz and classical music, and I learned a good amount of musical history along the way.
What are the books smushed into this one tome?
1) A book about Gasser's work with Pandora's Music Genome project
2) A book about music theory and history
3) A book about the science of why we like music
4) A book about the limitations of genre and the power of music in our lives
5) A book showing how to use music theory to analyze various works of music
Gasser should have really picked two of these books or he should have greatly reduced the scope of the music theory he covers. With an audiobook it was difficult to do as the author suggests and go back and reference terms while he used them to talk about individual works, so I think it would have been much more helpful for Gasser to recap the meanings when discussing the works.
What I learned most from the chapter about Pandora is that if you don't sue a startup for your illegally withheld wages, you can use the experience to go and write a book like this one. I think that Gasser also simplifies what other music services are doing , choosing to rail against their use of genre rather than acknowledging that his system is time-intensive and requires songs be analyzed by highly trained musicians, limiting its scalability. Versus Spotify, which uses machine learning to chug through large amounts of data to figure out what people want as an aggregate group. The latter is a much more cost-effective approach, especially given Spotify's 360 million users worldwide compared to Pandora's 55 million listeners, confined to the US due to copyright issues. I think that the Music Genome project would become untenable given the sheer volume of music added to streaming services daily. I respect how Gassner is trying to get people to listen outside of the box and discover lots of music they would love, but given Pandora's rapidly diminishing market share, it's being eclipsed by other music services willing to cut corners to maximize profit.
The book also heavily relies on referencing content available via the author's website for the book, which does contain a good deal of supplementary material and even more discussion about individual works for each uber-genre. The quizzes and projects tabs on that site are still "under construction" which, given that this book is several years old, are likely to never materialize.
The most interesting part of the book is, of course, the discussions of the songs in each uber-genre. That said I don't think that they were quite rewarding enough to overcome all of the other material that Gasser absolutely needed to cover before he got to this analysis. I also commend Gasser for having hired a DJ immersed in hiphop culture to teach him about it. It shows because Gasser does not mince works about the role systemic racism against Black people has had on the development of hiphop as a way to cope with that oppression.
Gasser also dances around but never specifically names genres that people avoid due to cultural bias, namely hiphop and country, and I wish that he had addressed these issues directly rather than making overarching comments about how it's important to overcome one's listening biases.
General pet peeves:
Gasser overuses exotic when he could use a different, less value-laden topic like novel.
Dear God, someone should have worked with Gasser about pronunciation of non-English words, or they should have hired a real voice actor. Although given the length of the work, all they could probably afford was Gasser himself.
maireoverthere's review against another edition
4.0
while this is clearly a text book, my failed music major brain really enjoyed it
marypmcg's review
2.0
This book is just far too dry to achieve what it set out to do. I love listening to music, enjoy musical theory to an extent and have a little bit of a musical background. Gasser managed to make me not care about any of this at all.
talapowis's review against another edition
1.0
DNF. Interesting topic, but dense book. Gave it a try for an hour or two (audiobook) and didn't even make it through the first chapter. As others have said, if an author is spending entire pages excusing himself for his writing // explaining his master plan for the book and why he chose to write it that way // listing his resume, maybe he should just focus on being a better writer???
kmg365's review against another edition
4.0
This is a topic I am fascinated by, and although I have a modicum of musical knowledge from piano lessons, school band, and community choir, I have never studied music theory. This looked like exactly the right book to describe in layman's terms why I loved John Denver when I was in high school, but a good friend preferred Elton John, and those weird kids in French class were obsessed with Kiss. An additional layer of anticipatory excitement was added when I got my hands on the audio version-- instead of just looking at musical notation on a page, I was going to hear all the examples! When I started listening, I was even more excited to find out that the author was instrumental in the design of the listening algorithm for Pandora, of which I am a fan.
It didn't take long before my excitement turned to that same rock-in-the-gut feeling I had when I realized I had accidentally done too well on my advanced placement tests for undergraduate French class, and found myself in a room where I had no idea what was being said.
Near the beginning, he cautions the reader that they might find the early chapters on music theory and the history of music rough going, but he sprinkles in pep talks, and congratulates you for making it through when he's at the end of that section. Then he launches into the science of sound and physiology of the ear, followed by the neuroscience angle of listening to music. Gee, thanks for the breather.
Just when he was finally getting to the good stuff-- specific examples of what seemingly unrelated songs might have in common in the pop genre, he segues into an extended metaphor about cell division, which I'm still trying to figure out. Ultimately, it was the last few chapters that I enjoyed the most. Heck, if he'd mentioned in the preface that he was a dedicated Dr. Demento listener as a kid, I would have had a more forgiving attitude through all the music theory and science, but he saved that tidbit for near the end. The single most interesting fact in the book for me is the number of thumbs-upped songs of the average “highly active” Pandora listener-- just under 500. This fact is in the last chapter, so I feel like I really earned that knowledge, having made it through about 700 pages to get to it.
An immense amount of work obviously went into writing this book, and a person with zero musical background could learn a lot from it, if that person had a great deal of tenacity and patience. I think I would have enjoyed-- in my undergraduate days-- taking a course for which this book was the text. Lectures could provide context, and having the material spread out over a few months would be helpful, I think. Of course, the book couldn't have existed then, as neither Pandora, the music genome project, or indeed, the internet, existed. If you really want to master this material, I would suggest acquiring both the audio version and the ebook, supplementing both with the website the author created for the book. And take it slow.
As for me, I'm going back to the tried and true method of quantifying musical taste, courtesy of American Bandstand. “It's got a good beat, and you can dance to it. I'll give it a 91.” If you want a more modern method, and this book has defeated you, borrow Facebook's relationship status-- “It's complicated”-- and leave it at that.
TL;DR: It's good, but challenging. If nothing else, skip to the last chapter so you don't miss the “Oh, God, I like Celine Dion” anecdote.
mahimaher's review
If you’re having a ton of trouble understanding/ are just uninterested in the music theory part of this book, I’d recommend skipping to about the page 300 mark or chapter nine where it gets into defining music genotypes, it’s probably more what you’re here for
imbabyyaga's review
challenging
informative
slow-paced
2.75
I'm sorry to say that this very ambitious doorstop of a book is ill-served by its marketing/editorial direction. This book, written by trained classical musician and architect of Pandora's Music Genome Project Nolan Gasser, is framed as a complete guide to musical taste for non-musicians, but it doesn't feel like that's actually what the book is doing. There's really just one chapter near the end that really delivers, and even there Gasser spends most of his time on definitions of metrics before a relatively short discussion of the affective experience and reasons behind enjoying different kinds of music. After 600 pages, that was a borderline maddening letdown! Opportunity after opportunity to stay true to the name of the book passed by on the way there, and it felt like Gasser's academic training ultimately did him dirty in writing for a general audience.
The actual project of the book seems to be as much about the what of music as the why—which I get! Which is helpful! The book as it actually exists works as a cross-disciplinary guide through general musicology, with the idea that knowing about music will help you the reader dissect what you like, and encounter new music with more tools to enjoy and understand it. But there were a few major flaws in even that project, which made this an incredibly unsatisfying read. One was a glaring content gap—we'll get into that later. But even among what content was there, I found the analysis and connective tissue of this book so wanting that huge portions of the musicology failed to come together. Gasser would spend paragraphs and paragraphs explaining why he was going about the book the way he was, teeing up the different discussions, and then the actual discussions themselves would feel thin and overly technical, much too much what without ever getting to a proportional why. There was page after page calling out things that are happening in various songs without really letting us know why those things are surprising or typical or potentially likable. They simply remain things!
I will caveat that I wasn't able to look at the Why You Like It website alongside the book, and I'm sure that would have given me a better experience, especially in playing the music that was being shown in notation on the page. I otherwise had track the piece down on YouTube (without being able to match it up exactly to the notation being referenced), get my boyfriend to hum for me based on the notation, or just try and imagine based on the written description.
Probably the most discrete and early (50 pages in) strike against the book for me, though, was when Gasser warned us that he wasn't really going to talk about lyrics. First of all, this comes literally four pages after making a point of how Pandora added text/lyrics into the established Sound-Harmony-Melody-Rhythm-Form framework for analyzing music. Gasser is very proud of how exhaustive they were at Pandora, saying how of course you couldn't break down musical taste without getting into the lyrics, so the whiplash alone was enough to make it a weird move. But the idea that, in a book that is 645 pages before acknowledgments, in a book written by someone who says that if he were a genre he'd be encyclopedia, in a book that has more throat clearing than a phlegm convention, the idea that we couldn't get so much as a discussion of rhyme scheme and stresses was laughable. It made every overly technical aside feel so self-indulgent and removed from the project of actually helping the reader understand music that I was determined to finish the book out of spite alone. And now I've done it so that you don't have to!
***
I'm trying to get more systematic about coming up with star ratings for books, so here's some of the math on how I got to my score:
The actual project of the book seems to be as much about the what of music as the why—which I get! Which is helpful! The book as it actually exists works as a cross-disciplinary guide through general musicology, with the idea that knowing about music will help you the reader dissect what you like, and encounter new music with more tools to enjoy and understand it. But there were a few major flaws in even that project, which made this an incredibly unsatisfying read. One was a glaring content gap—we'll get into that later. But even among what content was there, I found the analysis and connective tissue of this book so wanting that huge portions of the musicology failed to come together. Gasser would spend paragraphs and paragraphs explaining why he was going about the book the way he was, teeing up the different discussions, and then the actual discussions themselves would feel thin and overly technical, much too much what without ever getting to a proportional why. There was page after page calling out things that are happening in various songs without really letting us know why those things are surprising or typical or potentially likable. They simply remain things!
I will caveat that I wasn't able to look at the Why You Like It website alongside the book, and I'm sure that would have given me a better experience, especially in playing the music that was being shown in notation on the page. I otherwise had track the piece down on YouTube (without being able to match it up exactly to the notation being referenced), get my boyfriend to hum for me based on the notation, or just try and imagine based on the written description.
Probably the most discrete and early (50 pages in) strike against the book for me, though, was when Gasser warned us that he wasn't really going to talk about lyrics. First of all, this comes literally four pages after making a point of how Pandora added text/lyrics into the established Sound-Harmony-Melody-Rhythm-Form framework for analyzing music. Gasser is very proud of how exhaustive they were at Pandora, saying how of course you couldn't break down musical taste without getting into the lyrics, so the whiplash alone was enough to make it a weird move. But the idea that, in a book that is 645 pages before acknowledgments, in a book written by someone who says that if he were a genre he'd be encyclopedia, in a book that has more throat clearing than a phlegm convention, the idea that we couldn't get so much as a discussion of rhyme scheme and stresses was laughable. It made every overly technical aside feel so self-indulgent and removed from the project of actually helping the reader understand music that I was determined to finish the book out of spite alone. And now I've done it so that you don't have to!
***
I'm trying to get more systematic about coming up with star ratings for books, so here's some of the math on how I got to my score:
Information: 3.5
Ambition: 4
Execution: 1.5
Enjoyment: 2.5
Returnability/referenceability: 3
pharmdad2007's review against another edition
4.0
As a music history and theory buff, I loved this. But it's far too dense and texbook-ish to widely appeal.
alex_ellermann's review against another edition
2.0
'Why You Like It' is a heavy lift. It's a bit scattershot. I'm not entirely sure whom it's for.
It's a heavy lift because, hey, it's a 39-hour audiobook (720-page hardcover) about music theory. It's a bit scattershot because it seems like four different books crammed into one. I'm not entirely sure whom it's for because I imagine that music aficionados would rather listen to 39 hours of music than 39 hours of a guy talking about music.
The length part speaks for itself: this thing is a real doorstop. This is not a book you pick up if you're trying to hit some arbitrary "x books per year" type of goal. You commit to this book.
'Why You Like It' seems like four different books because it comprises four distinct sections. It begins with a lengthy section on the history of the founding and early development of the music listening and recommendation service Pandora. Author Nolan Glasser, who designed the "Music Genome Project" that serves as Pandora's backbone, hired the initial analytics team, and still maintains a relationship with the company (of which he is, clearly, very proud), is uniquely well-positioned to tell this story. I found it to be the most interesting part of the book, revealing to me that I'm fascinated by modern internet history. I want to read more of this sort of thing - about Yahoo!, eBay, Google, and so forth. The second part is an introduction to music theory. This section broke me: I couldn't f0llow it, it made me feel like I'm musically hopeless, and it nearly led me to give up on the book. The third section explored the "taste profiles" of various subjects, seeking to illustrate the connections among the various titles a given listener might choose over the course of a day. It devolved, however, into a series of biographies of various musicians and composers. It felt like filler in an already overstuffed book. The fourth, and final, section actually gets into "why you like it." Spoilers: you like the music you like due to a combination of your unique nature and nurture. Instead of listening to this very long audiobook, I'd have preferred to read a pair of short features on the founding of Pandora and the actual "why you like it" part of 'Why You Like It.'
As I wrote earlier, I'm not entirely sure whom this book is for. While the author assumes a degree of musical literacy on the reader's part (a literacy in which I do not share, and in which this book has led me to believe I'm hopeless), but that reader probably already understands music theory. He assumes a deep degree of interest in music qua music, but I think people who listen to all 39 hours of 'Why You Like It' are probably more interested in the psychology of music than the music itself - otherwise, they'd spend those 39 hours listening to music.
Ultimately, listening to 'Why You Like It' is like striking up a conversation with a guy at a party. He asks whether you're interested in, say, baseball. You catch the occasional game; you even have a team hat: you tell him, "Sure." He goes on to spend 39 hours explaining to you why Lewin Diaz is a better first baseman than Josh Fuentes. It's all just too much.
Recommended for: musicians. I think my wife would enjoy this book. She already speaks its language.
It's a heavy lift because, hey, it's a 39-hour audiobook (720-page hardcover) about music theory. It's a bit scattershot because it seems like four different books crammed into one. I'm not entirely sure whom it's for because I imagine that music aficionados would rather listen to 39 hours of music than 39 hours of a guy talking about music.
The length part speaks for itself: this thing is a real doorstop. This is not a book you pick up if you're trying to hit some arbitrary "x books per year" type of goal. You commit to this book.
'Why You Like It' seems like four different books because it comprises four distinct sections. It begins with a lengthy section on the history of the founding and early development of the music listening and recommendation service Pandora. Author Nolan Glasser, who designed the "Music Genome Project" that serves as Pandora's backbone, hired the initial analytics team, and still maintains a relationship with the company (of which he is, clearly, very proud), is uniquely well-positioned to tell this story. I found it to be the most interesting part of the book, revealing to me that I'm fascinated by modern internet history. I want to read more of this sort of thing - about Yahoo!, eBay, Google, and so forth. The second part is an introduction to music theory. This section broke me: I couldn't f0llow it, it made me feel like I'm musically hopeless, and it nearly led me to give up on the book. The third section explored the "taste profiles" of various subjects, seeking to illustrate the connections among the various titles a given listener might choose over the course of a day. It devolved, however, into a series of biographies of various musicians and composers. It felt like filler in an already overstuffed book. The fourth, and final, section actually gets into "why you like it." Spoilers: you like the music you like due to a combination of your unique nature and nurture. Instead of listening to this very long audiobook, I'd have preferred to read a pair of short features on the founding of Pandora and the actual "why you like it" part of 'Why You Like It.'
As I wrote earlier, I'm not entirely sure whom this book is for. While the author assumes a degree of musical literacy on the reader's part (a literacy in which I do not share, and in which this book has led me to believe I'm hopeless), but that reader probably already understands music theory. He assumes a deep degree of interest in music qua music, but I think people who listen to all 39 hours of 'Why You Like It' are probably more interested in the psychology of music than the music itself - otherwise, they'd spend those 39 hours listening to music.
Ultimately, listening to 'Why You Like It' is like striking up a conversation with a guy at a party. He asks whether you're interested in, say, baseball. You catch the occasional game; you even have a team hat: you tell him, "Sure." He goes on to spend 39 hours explaining to you why Lewin Diaz is a better first baseman than Josh Fuentes. It's all just too much.
Recommended for: musicians. I think my wife would enjoy this book. She already speaks its language.