I care a decent amount. I won’t spend insane amounts on equipment because I simply don’t hear a quality difference, but both my pairs of headphones were around 250€. I can honestly tolerate most 10€ trash for a bit with some eq adjustment but it’s just noticably worse.

I often spend half an hour or even two hours in the evening just listening to music when I was supposed to just go to sleep. In that case I usually click from youtube video to youtube video, I find that MVs can also add a lot to the experience. Otherwise I mainly have one playlist that I put most songs I like into, if they fit the general vibe of what I want for my generalist playlist.

I always feel a need to share the music I love with ppl but everyone I know either doesn’t care or follows the same artists anyway. So since you asked… (this is gonna be mostly japanese, and mostly metal)

Probably my current favorite artist is Release Hallucination, japanese prog metal with jazz influences. The drum patterns tickle my brain in the right way. Sisters is probably my favorite from them.

There’s also Utsu-P, who imo is an incredible songwriter and lyricist who in his newer songs does all sorts of metal genre fusions, usually but not always with vocaloid vocals. Musically, I love Gorgon the most (best genre description would be… trap metalcore with a speedcore breakdown?). I also always find myself coming back to An Alien’s I Love You because I just find the song very touching, in spite of my japanese being very basic and thus only understanding like a fifth of it without subtitles. He also has a pretty cool band called Ohayo Gozaimasu.

Then there’s this great german metalcore band (very poppy and catchy sound, but high variety in song styles and meaningful lyrics) called Future Palace, we’re on lemmy so I’ll just link the song that’s not-so-subtly about the palestinian genocide.

Then there’s kobaryo who does just about every EDM genre under various aliases, though his main thing is speedcore. His entire latest album is just great - all the credited featured artists are just him under different aliases.

Honorable mention to the little subcommunity of metal vtubers doing mostly covers, many of which I like better than the original, such as this cover of make them suffer’s song contraband which was apparently my most listened to song last year.

Last but not least my favorite singer is also a Vtuber, by the name of Roca Rourin, who does regular karaoke streams that I enjoy so much I try to schedule other things around so I don’t miss them, and then I just listen to her sing for an hour. She does a lot of 80s songs, classic rock, and jazz, but also a little bit of everything. By nature of them being karaoke streams there’s often a little scuff, but imo that just adds to the charm and my god the voice on this woman. This is a good example of one of those. She also has a great cover of The Pretender.

I could continue but this would go on forever lol.

In spite of the obvious genre bias, I enjoy a wide variety of music when I’m in the mood for it. The only hugely popular genre I can’t get into is hip hop/rap, but even that has a few exceptions.