I especially hate how the curating institutions are so dominated by English and Amerikan artists.
I got hit hard by the “locked into music you listened to in your early-mid 20s” thing. I blame what.cd collapsing and being too busy to keep up with new music/go to shows.
I got into one of the what.cd successor sites. But nothing uploads for me so I’m limited to the biannual freeleech tokens.
I actually have a routine where I require myself to listen to at least one album I’ve never heard before every single day. It took a while for it to become a habit, but doing so has helped me discover a lot of music I like. When listening, I often write down tracks that I’d like to revisit in particular. I either listen to 1 LP (full studio albums) or 2 EPs (extended plays) to meet the daily “requirement.” The problem then becomes knowing which of these albums you want to listen to, but for me, it’s easy to narrow it down by genre. I like a lot of progressive metal/djent projects for instance, so I can go diving for those, a lot of which are instrumental, and I fuck with that too.
That’s incredible. I was writing out a lot about how it’s one of those things where if you’re not great at it, you can just glom on to somebody who is, but was having some difficulty with the wording and scrolled down. So are you feeding @Gorillatactics album recommendations now and if so, can the rest of us get in on that?
For a little while algorithms actually made it easier to find cool new music but now they’ve all gone back to profit profit profit.
Music needs a tiktok algorithm.
The best music curation algorithm was on Google Play Music back before they canned it, and, hot insider information here: they didn’t actually make a music algorithm, their team was full of music nerds who kept making playlists, and they just made a bunch of folders of their nonsense.
It wasn’t the algorithms, it was the external resources that people were using that led people to find albums that boosted them in algorithms. You’re not gunna’ algorithm you’re way out of mass-conformity and blandness.
I don’t see why a tiktok algo couldn’t effectively find what you like and what you don’t like just as well as it does for video content based on how much of the video you watch, what you skip, whether you “like”, etc.
Yes it’ll steer people that like mass-conformity and blandness towards mass-conformity and blandness. It will steer people that don’t like those things towards other stuff though.
You need a more holistic, complex view of why people listen to music other than viewing some people as categorically different and ignoring the relationship between them and the art they’re shown and more specifically the contexts of it. Borderline techbro understanding of art and humanity.
Listening to the same songs on repeat for 8 years gang.
You’re not wrong. I always hated the cultural imperialism that kept me from enjoying music from the world over.
That said, if you follow a college radio station or find a niche subculture, stuff opens up pretty fast from there. While Bandcamp isn’t the best in terms of quality, upon discovering a new genre just search there based on tag. For example, the anarcho-punk genre tag has a lot of Slavic stuff.
