Speaking as a Billboard-reporting, Nielsen-tabulating, A&R-wrestling radio DJ... 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. 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. 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 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 THE CRITICS JUST WANT YOU TO FUCKING LISTEN 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.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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
"Oh yeah, I'll have to see it, but my list of shows is so long!"
You know... this is still bugging me two days later. Like it personally insulted my daughter or something. - I worked a closed-door "futurist" session for Warner Brothers some years ago, where the c-suite drones of every duchy of the far-flung Time Warner empire showed up to learn what the hell they were all supposed to do about this "internet" thing. The VP for programming of HBO was there, as well as the content directors for DC Comics and Youtube (he had just been hired away). And we had this one "futurist" who took to the stage to discuss torrenting. He turned to the audience and said "do you guys really believe that some kid with 80,000 MP3s on his hard drive was going to buy those tracks? Do you honestly think he'll even listen to them all? Of course not! HE'S CURATING!" and everyone nodded thoughtfully. - Trent Reznor once called Oink.me.UK the best site on the internet. Sony was caught seeding their unreleased shit on there, while also demanding it be shut down. The guys into music enough to be on a private tracker, to pay for a seedbox? They're your influencers. The ones who decide "yes, I will listen to this once and seed it forever because this is how my tribe reaches each other" are the ones keeping the system running. When I need new music to play on the radio I pull down every torrent within a laundry list of micro-genres published since the last time I was dry. Anything good enough that someone else goes through the trouble to create a torrent of? It may not be to your taste but you know it reached someone. - Jeron Lanier basically predicted NFTs in You Are Not A Gadget by pointing out that physical music sales will never come back, and if bands want to make money they need to focus on collectibles and the fan experience. - I don't often purchase music off Bandcamp. I purchase shirts. Nearly everything is on Tidal and Tidal integrates with Rekordbox so it's easier just to stream it. But that doesn't make anyone any money except Tidal and AlphaTheta. That's just fandom. The act of curation is the act of appreciation. Seeking out things you like and sharing them is the whole fucking point. The manifesto I wrote that saved my radio show relied on a "push/pull relationship" with music, stating that there were people who sought out new music and propagated it to their friends ("push") and there were people who were more comfortable listening to things that had already been vetted for social acceptance via MTV, Rolling Stone or television licensing ("pull"). I went further and pointed out that goth-industrial was entirely push because the path to mainstream acceptance had exactly one bridge on it - my show. But I think the reason this bitch really bugs the shit out of me is because of a conversation I had 25 years ago. I dated this girl who was awful, who had a father who was awful, who had two kids with one of his students (she was not awful). 20 years his junior, she was within 10 years of me and the girlfriend, which means her siblings had young children. They tried to relate to us as peers rather than as youth, which was nice, but they were also young parents, which was interesting. I was talking to one of them about mixing in clubs and she said something that hit hard - "oh, sure, you listen to a lot of music now but trust me, once you have kids, you won't anymore. You'll just want the silence. I haven't listened to a band in five years." Fuckin' haunting, yo. Also absolutely untrue, no basis in fact, etc etc etc but at the ripe old age of 22, here was a lady going "I have turned old and you shall as well, it is inevitable." I think of the "pullers." The ones for whom Columbia House existed. The "album of the month" club for people who don't want to decide for themselves what they like, who want someone in authority to tell them that they won't be mocked at a cocktail party for liking the wrong things. The ones who had a subscription to Spin Magazine because their friends had subscriptions to Spin Magazine so they could all stick to what they read in Spin Magazine and rest assured that their lives were Spin Magazine approved. And those of us who considered it the anathema of music appreciation? Well, we just never crossed paths. THAT is what this column is bitching about: - There's no authority to assure people like this of what's cool - If they wander out into the wild wooly world they might encounter people who didn't care for Spin Magazine - They aren't sure what they should enjoy if there isn't someone to give them permission IT HAS NEVER BEEN EASIER TO CONNECT WITH THE MUSIC YOU LOVE... BUT YOU HAVE TO LOVE MUSIC. Spin Magazine, ironically enough, ran a feature entitled "Top Ten Albums Owned By People Who Hate Music." Their argument was that there were some albums that were so universal that people with absolutely no connection to music whatsoever ended up with a copy. I thought of that article when I saw Icona Pop for sale on vinyl at Whole Foods. The article, of course, predated Whole Foods and Icona Pop by decades; their list included Pearl Jam's "Ten" and Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours." This is a woman demanding that Bjork be less confusing for the ease of her musical fandom. I ran lights for Gary Numan once. It was the Exile tour, well after Cars. And as I came out to the lighting console, all sixteen channels of it, and moved a pair of drinks out of my space, a couple yuppies grew outraged with me. "This is our spot!" they said. "This is the lighting guy's spot," I said. "Well we were here first!" they responded. "Well you aren't anymore," I said, and they wandered off to find a bouncer, then came back in a huff and glowered over my shoulder. Until the first song, anyway. The second song was Cars, but they didn't even stick around long enough to hear it. They came for that song they heard on the radio, won't it be fun to think back to that time when everyone took their musical instruction from Rick Dees or Casey Casem? This is a lady who wants Bjork to explain the riddles, who wants entertainment to be a puzzle she can solve, who doesn't "fully trust other people's recommendations" unless, apparently, those people work for Viacom. She doesn't want to order a Bedless Bones t-shirt off of Bandcamp because Kadri Sammel's cat might have left cat hair on it. One of the things I found in the attic was a nasty-gram from Columbia House. Dude was delinquent on some 8-tracks; the one that really stuck with me was Burt Bacharach's Lost Horizon soundtrack. Now - there were a lot fewer ways to connect with music in 1972. It was a pretty forgettable year. But still.Bjork is currently promoting a new concert film being released called Cornucopia. She's been releasing new photoshoots and interviews almost every day for the past two weeks. For a musician who normally goes into hiding and only emerges when it's time to promote something, it's been a pretty exciting time to be a fan. However, all the information being put out, promoted on social media and reposted on places like Reddit, have all been a little confusing.
It makes art (music, film, tv, etc.) seem like one big sludge pile. It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of things that you'll never get to the end of. I've been noticing this sentiment with society, this feeling of always being mentally exhausted. 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!" The reality is we're not going to watch it because we feel like we have no time to get through everything and we don't fully trust other people's recommendations.
You've at least made me realize that I for too long have approached music like incels approach the other gender: why won't it just come to me, I'm over here doing nothing right. I used to be much more into music when I went to college, listening to indie and college radio stations. Actively seeking out new music for my own music collection on Google Play Music. But the radio stations became worse over time and my [favourite (government funded!) music site](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3voor12) had a few bad years drowning in the social media algorithms and shittier writing. Then they deleted their weekly curated playlist and moved to a weekly radio show and they lost me completely. My usual avenues of exploration didn't work for me anymore so I mostly gave up. And I think that's what that author's capital sin is, too. At some point when Google shat the bed on GPM I finally capitulated and moved to Spotify. That transfer was rough enough that I still feel like I'm missing at least a third of the music I used to listen to. Spotify allowed me to listen to more music (without user-ripped mp3), but The Spotify algorithm had been absolute shite at finding new music for me. Discover Weekly for years would serve me either music I already knew ("hey do u liek Fleetwood Mac?") or music that didn't stick. I only found out the other day that Spotify has an internal KPI for the licensing cost per million streams. They heavily favour their algorithms to push you to music that you might like that is also the cheapest for them to stream. I feel like it explains why I dislike their playlists so much, but it's hard to prove. The underlying mistake both that author and I were making is holding on to the idea that there is some common, shared Good New Music that will just come to you without being active. Our feed-wired brains have been gradually eroded to the point we're now thinking "but what do you mean you seek OUT things??!??" I think it also doesn't help that whatever music media landscape there was is now well and truly dead. You can't just sit back and let the zines decide your taste for you, because there's almost zero chance that your friends will find the same bands in the same way. Curation isn't centralized anymore, and that's great! But it means lazy people have it harder. I just spent a good hour going through a few of 3voor12's recent articles and new music. Already found more new music today than in the past weeks. whoddathought!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.
i can recommend a few radio stations if you’re looking for that sort of that. heck maybe we can even get a bluesreviews of them.