Curation was non-existent at Borders, but at least there was a "new releases" section that I could browse on Tuesdays, which, fortunately for me, was the day I got paid for my line cook job every week. So there was an order of operation--pick up check; cash check; go to music store. And usually I'd be on the lookout for whatever the local college radio station was playing for the previous few weeks. I know people find new music now, but I honestly don't know how, and I think I'm too old to care to figure it out. We've gained so much with the ubiquity of the internet that I am not at all nostalgic for the days that came before, but I think there is a lot of good that comes from being at a particular place at a particular time, record shop or otherwise. Example, I work remotely. I fucking love working remotely. I put in a solid 15 hours of work per week, get paid for forty, and spend the rest of my time working on my side business or running errands (or going to the gym, playing tennis...whatever I want, really). It's awesome for someone like me who has a lot of contacts and is very comfortable in his career. The woman who works for me? The 28 year old who jumped directly from post-doc to this company? Not so much. I fear that she and all like her are siloing themselves into a really bad situation. People need to get to know you and you need to get the know the world around you. Record shops were just one of a bunch of ways to get out and meet real people and make human connections that are more difficult to do in online only environments.
excerpt from the manifesto that saved my show It's really funny. Tidal hooked up an AI to their recommendation engine. You can type requests like "give me an hour's worth of music that goes well with Prodigy's 'Firestarter'" and it will give you bizarre r&b tracks you've never heard of. "genre" was this thing that fans did by hand and there's no real collation. Soundprinting? GraceNote does that automagically, that's why your Android phone tells you what song is playing in the background on your lockscreen. But GraceNote has never bothered to pull in ID3 tags, standardized or otherwise. You wanna see the search string I use to find new music? That's for Gazelle, which drives most torrent sites. The ! means "fuck off don't give me any of that shit." I'd totally "!alternative" if I could, but anything to the left of Journey gets labeled as alternative. I probably listen to ten hours of new music a week. It's work. Streaming services won't do it for you. Your friends will. My kid went through the pandemic remotely. She figured out how to sneak into her teacher's assistant's Google Meet room when the assistant wasn't there because she was (and is) an idiot. She'd go hang out with her friends in the "secret meet" and there'd be five of them, locked down in a pandemic, figuring out how to watch netflix together or play video games or who knows. We did bring it to the attention of the teacher just to keep her out of trouble? And she promptly deliberately forgot. They kept using that "secret meet" for as long as they had school laptops. Would she rather play in person? Every time. There are better games to play and it's much more interactive. But we've got a whole generation of kids who had to figure out how to pass time in the digital, which makes passing time in the real easier. I think some people don't make friends well, and that the situation can make things more challenging? But nature finds a way.I know people find new music now, but I honestly don't know how, and I think I'm too old to care to figure it out.
Goth/Industrial music is grossly under-represented in today’s streaming landscape. ID3v1 held 80 genres, five of which overlap with On The Edge’s typical playlists (Industrial, Euro-Techno, Gothic, Darkwave, and Techno-Industrial). Spotify, on the other hand, has over fifteen hundred. From a curational standpoint, Amazon and Tidal have none. Discovery of Goth/Industrial has become nearly impossible, partially though commerce and partially through design as the music has become exclusive enough to be invisible. It has become necessary for someone to push music at the pullers. That someone should be us.
industrial, industrial.techno, synthpop, witch.house, IDM, shoegaze, !experimental, !pop, !psychedelic, !minimal.house, !freely.available, !hard.techno, !art.rock, !retrowave, !metal, !black.metal
Bandcamp remains a very good way to find new music, for anyone else reading kbs comments. Kind of cool to search by region using tags on that site.
I don't know that I agree. To make Bandcamp work you need to set yourself up to follow every label or artist that's interesting, and often the labels worth following are 70-90% garbage. Bandcamp does have "ratings" but they appear to consist of "top downloads, of the past few hours, within our narrowly-defined genres." I have a buddy who "topped the charts" last week on Bandcamp. LAST WEEK. This week, if you search for his name and spell it exactly, you are on the second page of results - not on the charts, within general search. If you look up the album that "topped the charts" (and I mean, he was between #5 and #1 for a week) for his genre, it has 40 downloads. On the other hand, I can go "discover - best selling - any format" and today, the second thing it throws up at me is a single released two days ago with twelve downloads. Last week, the first thing it threw up at me was an album from nineteen-fucking-ninety-TWO. Meanwhile, the whole "scene" if you will is trying really hard to like that shit new VNV nation album and it's nowhere on the charts. Yeah you can buy it on Bandcamp - and it's got 1200 purchases. And that doesn't include every DJ who got it free whether they like it or not; it's been fairly compulsory to play a couple spins whether you like it or not, because it's VNV Nation (unless you're lucky enough to live in a locale that hates VNV nation on sight). I'm probably a thousand dollars into Bandcamp because I think artists should eat, and I'm $20 a month into Tidal for five years because I think artists should eat, and I'm a seedbox into torrenting because I do discovery my way, and the fuckin' torrenters actually use taxonomy. I know a guy who was in the room when Jerry Yang turned down Larry and Sergei when they tried to sell Google to Yahoo for one.milllllllion dollars (pinkie ring). Guy confirmed what I already knew: Yahoo, at the time, was a hand-tuned hand-selected hand-curated list of useful links while Google was "here's an algorithm." Yang couldn't see automating his life-blood so he passed. He shouldn't have? But if your whole business is around hand-fit non-scalable curation, the bots are never going to do it the same way. You wanna see how an algorithm picks a hit song?
To me, the discovery from Bandcamp is in the followers feed and nothing else. I add people I know, or who have already bought an album I love and sometimes they'll have something interesting. Certainly a lot of noise to signal, I'm sure your torrent system is better. But what I like about it most is that it is definitely not an algorithm.