How do you pick songs to listen to?
 

Basically what I am referring to is say you find a new band... some people for instance would get their hands on the entire discography of that band, and listen to every single song and select the favorites.

Or at least that's what I do... Just wondering if its my own psychosis showing or if anyone else has similar habits :)

Well, if one of my friends tells me to listen to a band I've never heard of before, I'll usually ask what album they recommend and listen to that. If I like what I hear I'll try some of their other albums, if not, well at least I listened to one album and gave that a fair chance. If it's a band I know of but only one or two songs I've heard of I'll usually do the same thing - pick an album and listen to it. And if it's a band I KNOW I really wanna get into I listen to their first album and work my way up from there.

A lot of my friends will just go for the singles first or maybe a best-of compilation before digging into deeper tracks though. That's great for some people but for me I feel like I'm only scratching the surface of the band's music if I do that and am missing out on a lot of potentially good songs. To each their own I guess xP

I usually look at the artist's last.fm page and look at the top two to three albums and I look at which of the artist's albums are highest rated on rateyourmusic.

I usually go in reverse, getting album recs via Rate Your Music to start and then before or during the first listen to a work of theirs, I'll read some literature on the project (be it band history for poppier stuff or musical history contextualization for older performers or conceptual info for artier pieces) and whatever pops out that sounds interesting might get checked out. Usually I need to be super impressed to really dig deeper with artists than the two or three albums of theirs I get indirectly recommended by my friends on RYM the first time around, but I'll usually make it back around to full discogs for anything I rate highly.

i often use jango radio. it's an app. basically you program a few artists in (i program three or four artists of a similar genre and just have several different stations) and it finds "similar" artists. like a spiderweb kinda thing. it constantly surprises me. when i come across something i really like i usually get the whole discog and listen chronologically. if i didn't find an artist there, i was recommended by a friend, randomly saw them live, or came on music banter and prowled successfully. oh, and stumbleupon.com is pretty neat for random finds too. anyway... yeah... if i like a song a lot, i'll do the gamut.

Start with the hits, the best-knowns, etc., and if I'm intrigued enough to dig deeper, I will. There tends to be a point where I decide, on a whim, to get an entire artists discography - normally, this results in me enjoying that artist even more.

It depends. If I've been recommended an artist to listen to, I try to listen to the whole discog in chronological order. If I personally heard a track I really enjoyed from an artist I'm not familiar with, I usually start with the album which features that track, because I want to see how that piece fits into the puzzle, as it were. Then I start from the beginning.

Well for me it depends if the band in question has a large discography of like 10+ albums. Usually then I check out a few songs from that band and if they sound good enough to me then I go get the entire discography of that band. However if the band in question has for example only 1, 2 or 3 albums only, I would probably not bother with it at all as I prefer bands with large discographies so I have enough material to listen to from the band in question.

There are exceptions to this though. For example, theres this Canadian band called Winter Rose which has only released one album, but I still got their album because I really like the singer of that band. Its the band that Dream Theater singer was part of by the way.

I'm not sure I fully understand the question. What do you mean by "select the favorites"?

If I hear about a band I want to check out, I usually get their most recent album or whatever album I've heard the most good things about. I listen to it, and if I like it, end up listening to it frequently and probably also get a hold of other albums by the band.

I'll pull them up on RYM and look at their top rated albums. Pick whichever of those tickles my fancy and listen to the whole thing.