Blog1 min read
On finding music
Where the playlists actually come from, when no algorithm is involved.
The algorithm doesn't build any of these playlists. It can suggest tracks, sometimes useful, often not, but the actual sources are smaller and more personal. It's worth being honest about where the music comes from.
First source: friends who care. The single best discovery channel I have is people I trust who, on no schedule, send me a track because they thought of me. Three or four of them, over a decade, account for a disproportionate amount of what survives on the playlists. None of this scales, and the playlists are smaller for it.
Second source: small labels with a sensibility. There are independent labels — modern classical, ambient, lo-fi — where the curation upstream is already strong, and where a release I haven't heard is a good bet to be at least adjacent to what I'm looking for. Bandcamp Friday, a couple of newsletters, the odd radio show.
Third source, often overlooked: the back end of an album. A single from a record I've already listened to half a dozen times turns out to have a B-side or interlude that fits a room exactly. The deeper into a record I look, the less crowded the candidate list gets.