[read in your best 90s movie trailer narrator voice]
“In a world where the average music listener teeters on the brink of mediocre playlist overload, one man’s newsletter is all that stands between background noise and pure audio bliss.”
Late last year, I realized how unfulfilling my music consumption habits had become.
Despite being fiercely passionate about discovering new records beyond what the playlist gatekeepers and algorithms determined I’d like, I felt I wasn’t connecting with much of it. A track here, a dope beat there, but it didn’t go deeper than that.
After considering the issue from all angles (it literally kept me up at night), I pinpointed several underlying me driving the problem:
The playlist-centric consumption model benefits specific genres, like ambient music, because most are meant to be used as background noise for other activities and not for active listening and engagement, which is what I’m interested in.
I’m not sold that music streaming algorithms are designed with the best exploratory experience in mind. Sure, “daily mix” and “radio” functionalities are great if you want more of the same defined by pretty narrow parameters, but what if your tastes can’t be confined to one or two genres? What happens if those genres evolve?
And don’t get me started on tagging and metadata issues that can make the “daily mix” and similar experiences a nightmare.
Similarly, even with all the supposed curation measures in place, music streaming subscribers still have to do a lot of work to discover a wide range of new music. It’s not just the genre or mood-hopping that increases the degree of difficulty, either. Playlist gatekeepers can be limiters too, especially when they manage the likes of RapCaviar or another collection that boasts massive monthly listening numbers. It can’t not become a race to the lowest common denominator of mainstream appeal.
All of those factors contribute to the content overload most folks’ attention spans struggle to keep up with. As a result, I was often back to where I started: listening to the same songs over and over and over again.
I decided it was time for a change. I challenged myself to listen to 400 new albums this calendar year—more than one a day. So far, I’m exceeding this goal. I may even get to 500.
And it’s all due to tripling and quadrupling down on bridging my music knowledge gaps. Communing with tons more new music, not just from my 3-5 favorite artists on the release schedule, and slowly crossing off the many, many unexplored titles on various “greatest of” lists.
A month or two in, I decided I wanted to take this journey to the next level and transform it from a solo mission into a gateway to a larger, music-sharing community. After a lot of trial-and-error on the ideation and production side, the result is a newsletter that delivers daily recommendations to your inbox every weekday.
No exceptions. All for free.
My goal is to build a community for fellow music obsessives. Beyond the daily recommendations (which will never take you more than 5 minutes to read because I know you’re busy), there will be long-form essays and other content that’ll eventually be part of an (inexpensive) paid tier.
The daily music picks will be a combination of new releases, celebrations of essential album anniversaries, and some deep cuts from discographies you may or may not have ever heard of.
Check out more info on the About page for more specifics. If you like what you see so far, consider subscribing so you don’t miss any posts.
The fun starts July 3—hope you’ll join me then!