My first love, long before I discovered prog rock, was classical music. Still is. Now imagine I have never discovered prog and was still a “classical music” fan and had spent the last 30 years listening to one genre: classical music.

Ok. That’s 900 years of music, with more recorded output than you could actually listen to in one lifetime. And despite being one genre, the *breadth* of that genre is undeniable. Bach sounds nothing like Brahms sounds nothing like Boulez.

Now look at prog. Ok, that’s a narrow genre, right?

Nope, despite only being around for 50 years (only???), when I look at a random issue of the eponymous magazine that exclusively covers the genre I find reviews of Soft Machine which sound nothing like Steeleye Span which sound nothing like Marillion which sound nothing like Graham Bond.

You could listen to prog for a lifetime and still find something unexpected at the end of it.

If anyone ever uses the phrase “narrow genre”, it probably means they don’t know anything about the genre they’re describing.

I agree with Ade about following-up tangents being the most productive and it probably being better to investigate a new genre slowly rather than to try to sample it all at once.

Amadan’s last comment about not trying to force yourself to like something is spot on. I think we’re hardwired from birth to like particular types of music. I can remember my earliest memories of music from the late sixties/early seventies listening to the radio always preferring rock to pop and the heavier the better – there was something about that crunching guitar sound. And I was certainly not influenced by what my parents or anybody else was listening to – it just seemed to be something innate.
Like Tim I know that there are whole swathes of music that I will never like.

About five years ago I made a conscious decision to revisit every album I had in my collection (the first ones being purchased in the late seventies) and I was surprised by how few of them made me think “This is unplayable. I never want to listen to this again. Why the hell did I buy it?”. Mainly the reaction was pleasure at being reacquainted with old friends, particularly as a large proportion of them hadn’t been played for 25 to 30 years. Why so if they were still good? Well for a long period I didn’t have access to a turntable. Also many of these were from the punk genre and in the interim I discovered prog and realised I preferred it. That doesn’t mean that I now dislike those old punk records, they’re just not my favourites anymore. And in the last three years I’ve discovered symphonic/operatic metal which is now right up there with prog as my favourite genre.
Who knows what the next few years will bring?

To be honest, I think I’m willing to miss the odd gem in a mine full of tailings because there’s simply so much music out there that I’ll never be able to hear it all, even if it is excellent. So I do a bit of both, I potter around the fringes of different genres, and expand the comfort pile when the feeling takes me.

Until a few years ago, I was almost exclusively a SF/F reader. I would occasionally read a mystery or something non-fiction, but other than that, the only books I was interested in were sci-fi and the occasional fantasy, and I still had the lingering disdain from high school of anything “literary” or “classical.”

Then on a whim, I started picking random books from Peter Boxall’s “1001 Books to Read Before You Die” list (which is not by any means a perfect list, but it is pretty broad), as well as sometimes listening to books outside my usual range when they were on sale at Audible.

I discovered I like a lot more genres than I thought I did. I am still a SF/F fan and those genres still make up the majority of my reading, but no longer the overwhelming majority. I also discovered I really like Dickens and Austen, have a taste for Trollope, loved The Hunchback of Notre Dame but could barely get through Les Miserables, and that I just do not get on well with Russian authors.

Furthermore, broadening my literary and classical reading made me better able to appreciate my genre reading (because the best genre authors are also well-read and stuff allusions and references into their work, if you are able to recognize it).

So yeah, I think there is definitely something to be said for going outside your comfort zone.

On the other hand, once you realize what you don’t like, I don’t think there is any need to keep trying to force yourself to appreciate it.

I’ve more or less put away a lot of the albums I loved thirty years ago because I’ve played them to death. They still sound good if I stumble across them accidentally, but they have no surprises left.

That’s what I tend to do with review promos; have them on in the background while working, and the get a proper listen in the evening if they make any sort of impression.

Never suggested that you had said or implied that. But I have heard that from others.