Speaking as a Billboard-reporting, Nielsen-tabulating, A&R-wrestling radio DJ...

I discovered interesting music like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Portishead, Tricky, Orbital, Takako Minekawa, Hooverphonic, Poe, Veruca Salt all from sporadically listening to one college radio station in my hometown and, once a week, watching one music program on MTV (usually 120 Minutes or AMP). Then, once a month, I would sometimes flip through a music magazine while at the hair salon (usually Rolling Stone or Spin). And that was literally it.

Everything that ran on 120 Minutes or Amp - a 14-year and a 5-year run, respectively - was on a major label. 120 minutes was the product of the music juggernaut turning to "college radio" when they discovered that they could shove REM down everyone's throats as effectively as Beastie Boys, so long as they shoved it down the right pipe. Amp was the product of Crystal Method and Chemical Brothers colonizing the dance music channels more effectively than the college music channels. Anyone casually referring to Amp is speaking in an extremely specific '90s kid register of speech, an era where online culture was dominated by college kids on dialup. It died about the same time as TRL reverted MTV from countercultural juggernaut to corporate panderbear. If you're sitting there longing for the days when some dude at Columbia told you what to listen to, your problem now is that you've aged out of the demo not that Columbia can't figure out how to shove music down your throat.

The rise of social media has killed the art of curation because, these days, things are rarely curated. Criticism is dead (with Fantano3 being the one exception) and Gen Alpha doesn't know how to find music through anything but TikTok. Relying on algorithms puts way too much power in technology's hands. And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen before. It'll never surprise you with something different. It keeps you in a little bubble. Oh, you like shoegaze? Well, that's all the algorithm is going to give you until you intentionally start listening to something else.

To the contrary, my daughter, all of twelve years old, has gotten pretty damn good at tricking new music out of Tidal. That's because the algorithms don't predict content you've seen before - GraceNote has been doing things the exact same way since nineteen diggity two and it's got sound scientific data saying "this song and this song are similar along the following dozen metrics that decades of focus groups confirm track affinity." Spotify and everyone else have a preposterously large corpus saying "since 9/10ths of our listeners who like Nirvana also like REM, we're 100% going to shove REM down your throat." The author is absolutely right in that it's not going to suggest gregorian chants to go along with your REM because it assumes that rogue appearances of Randy Travis are negative for your listening style - "Aphex Twin" and "Squarepusher" are a pairing, "Portishead" "tricky" "Hooverphonic" "Poe" and "Veruca Salt" are such an agglomeration of major-label "indie" acts that I can basically know exactly what year your Spin Magazine subscription expired.

BECAUSE THAT'S THE PROBLEM: You forgot that you used to pay for curation.

Any streaming service worth their salt has a million curated playlists. You can listen to them. Not your cup of tea? Then you need to find a different curator.

Same with movies. Once a week I would watch Ebert and Roeper, who would discuss and review all the releases of that week, including indie and foreign ones. I would also sometimes flip through film magazines or randomly stumble across something cool being aired on the IFC channel or Bravo2.

Fuckin' nothing on Ebert & Roeper was outside a major studio's distro network. If it was on Ebert & Roeper it opened on a thousand screens. That metric has become so useless that nobody bats an eye when Tom Hanks releases a $150m movie on frickin' Apple TV, when Jeff Bezos somehow squanders $90m an episode on Hobbits. I love me some Lola Rennt as much or more than the next guy but (1) it was Sony (2) it had a six month theater run. I subscribe to the Washington Post and the Seattle Times and they both have theater critics. I ignore both of them because fuck you, that's why, but I mean for fuck's sake

How many times have we had a discussion with a friend who was recommending a show and our response was, "Oh yeah, I'll have to see it, but my list of shows is so long!"

What do you want here, lady

If you pivoted from "I read it in Spin Magazine, it must be good" to "I don't have time to check out a show my friends are recommending" that's a you problem, not a culture problem. Like,

- You can literally stumble across a song on Spotify

- Look it up on Bandcamp

- Find every single person who bought it

- Pick somebody at random and look up every single thing they've favorited or bought on Bandcamp

- See every single person who follows them and see the same thing

- Listen to every single track six times before Bandcamp even asks you for money

But yeah if you're gonna sit there and go nobody is telling me what to listen tooooooooooooooooooo then I know exactly what happened:

1) You gave up everything in favor of social media

2) That was building affinity in order to demonstrate its value to advertisers

3) And now that the advertisers are questioning the metrics

4) Social media is milking you like a goddamn cow and you don't like it.

Anbody sitting there pining for Spin Magazine and waxing nostalgic about Portishead is (1) old (2) tasteless and you know what? If fuckin' Spotify isn't serving you up new shit to go along with your Portishead it's because you don't like it. Here's a Portishead-adjacent band whose new album came out last year:

And I mean... fuck. That's some nostalgic shit right there. 353 whole views! 54k plays on Spotify, 200 album downloads off Bandcamp. Goddamn song is called "Mixtape Days" so it's straight-up pandering to Portishead whiners. Sure doesn't have 47m views, though. If you want the true flavor of this discussion, read the comments on that video, by the way, but hey - how did I find that song? I (1) stumbled across one of their older albums on Tidal (2) followed the band (3) let nine years lapse (4) got a surprise in my "new music" section. GO ALGORITHM This is how you get exciting discoveries like holy shit new Bel Canto or, despite the fact that I almost never listen to Coil and have never played Coil in Tidal, it tells me that The Wraiths and Strays of Paris has been remastered.

I'n'I probably listen to six hours of new music a week. Not "new to me", "came out in the last couple weeks" music. I air about 40 minutes of new music a week. I R A tastemaker. And it's not that fucking hard! All you have to do is have an epiphany like this:

"Huh, it's 2013 and I'm listening to Orb's 'Live '93.'"

"Huh, it came out 20 years ago."

"Huh, the time horizon between me listening to Live '93 when it came out and me listening to Live '93 now is the same as me listening to Live '93 when it came out and the fucking Dark Side of the Moon"

"Holy shit I better find some new fucking music"

And you know what? It's fucking easy. Find a podcast you like. Find a Mixcloud DJ you like. Find a Soundcloud DJ you like. Find someone to follow on Spotify. Find someone to follow on Last.FM. ASK YOUR FUCKING FRIENDS.

And that's where curation comes in. We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't.

AND THE CRITICS JUST WANT YOU TO FUCKING LISTEN

"Oh yeah, I'll have to see it, but my list of shows is so long!"

Speaking as someone who grew up without a college radio station, without MTV's "Amp", who used to have to drive an hour to buy CDs without the opportunity to listen to them, the threshold for discovery has never been lower. here's fucking Angolan industrial music on Youtube. All you gotta do is be willing to go down the rabbit hole instead of bitching about how Spin Magazine isn't telling you how to think anymore.

FFS.

I fuckin' mixed Poe. Nice lady. She's... okay. She added... nothing. If you're nostalgic for this shit?

It's not the industry, it's you.