Discovering New Music in 2024 ⇥ technologyreview.com

Tiffany Ng wrote a fantastic article for MIT Technology Review about the gradient of recommendations that runs between the automated and the more personal. I think the whole thing is worth reading — call it a personal recommendation — but I wanted to highlight a few specific things in no particular order. First:

Music enthusiasts are creating new ways to reinvigorate this sense of curiosity, building everything from competitive recommendation leagues to interactive music maps. Before streaming, discovering music was work that brought a distinctly emotional reward. […] Sharing music was a much more personal, peer-to-peer exercise, and making a mixtape for a crush was a substantial labor of love. […]

This is followed by an immediate comparison to today’s automated systems which allow anyone to generate a playlist with little effort or emotional investment. This is an agreeable argument, but I also think much of the emotional connection comes from the personal connection the giver — and, ideally, the recipient — are hoping to achieve. Put another way, if you found someone else’s mixtape on the ground, you might treat its recommendations as barely more consequential than those from Apple Music or Spotify.

Next:

Similar to Music League is a private Facebook community called Oddly Specific Playlists, a group that connects users from all corners of the internet with playlists inspired by (as the name suggests) very specific things. […]

“If a social network is any good, then it has to have some actual people putting new content into the ecosystem and organizing it in a coherent way — like someone making a hand-curated playlist,” says Kyle Chayka, a New Yorker staff writer and author of Filterworld: How Algorithms Flatten Culture. That’s just what the members of Oddly Specific Playlists do, even if the results can be hard to manage.

Oddly Specific Playlists reminds me of a long-defunct service called the Yams. The Yams allowed members to text one of their operators with playlist requests using as specific or as vague language as you wanted. When I asked Shannon Connolly, CEO of the Yams, about scalability she mentioned having a larger staff, but I still had concerns about its longevity — concerns that were, it turns out, sadly justified. A Facebook group of hundreds of thousands of people sure is one way to achieve a similar result at scale.

Also, I just finished Chayka’s book, and I did not love it. The premise is very good: how our world is shaped by automated recommendation features created by companies with their own motives. But few of the examples felt complete and I did not feel like I was learning much. Chayka spent too many pages on the interior design trends of coffee shops and Airbnbs. You may like it more than I did, and if you are looking for something along similar lines, I preferred Tom Vanderbilt’s “You May Also Like” and especially Cathy O’Neil’s “Weapons of Math Destruction”.

One last thing:

Alex Antenna, who has created a website called Unchartify to offer a more manual way of navigating Spotify’s database, attributes these pigeonholes to Spotify’s push for personalization. He built his site to bypass the plethora of “made for you” playlists and highlight lesser-known corners of Spotify’s database.

Unchartify is extremely cool, and you do not need to be a Spotify user to take advantage of it — just click “continue as guest” on the homepage. You can browse by genre or, more helpfully, begin with an artist, album, or label you already like and fall down a narrowing genre rabbit hole.