James Murphy on the subject of music discovery and taste.

(courtesy of m ss ng p eces)

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My favourite of the hacks that came out of last weekend’s Music Hack Day in San Francisco was Huesound, which lets you explore music by the colour of the album a song is from. I appreciate how orthogonal it is to exploring music by similarity (or difference) in the music.

(nb: in order to get full tracks, you need to be an Rdio subscriber; if you’re not, you’ll get 30s samples)

"There’s probably exactly the same amount of talent out there but for the consumer it’s so much harder to pick through. I find it so daunting that I tend to shy away from the thousands of new bands you read about on Pitchfork every day and just end up listening to Revolver again."

Lawrence Arabia, in “Come Back, “The Man”, All Is Forgiven!” (Mojo)

While I understand the point that Lawrence Arabia is making, the truth is that many people routinely skip the whole ‘see what’s on Pitchfork’ step and just listen to Revolver again. So the question is not only, “how do we choose what to listen to?” but also, “can we encourage people to explore new music?”

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Related to the last post: xkcd on the brave new world of music discovery.

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Ghostly Discovery:

American electronica-oriented label Ghostly created this tool to explore their catalog: set the sliders to match your mood, pick a tempo, and whether you want to hear something organic or digital, and Ghostly Discovery will present you with streamable music from their roster of artists. What an excellent alternative to the usual artist/album/song approach.

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My guess is that most people find new pop the same way I do: you hear about things from friends, you find a few critics you trust, and you keep your ears open….[But] no matter what you do, you, the listener, are still at the center of all this: your friends, your trusted critics. How do you step outside yourself?

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So my vote goes to the Hype Machine randomizer, if you’re a music fan trying to get out of your own way. Short of printing out the Allmusic database and throwing darts at it, I can’t really think of a better way to go about exploring new fiefdoms of pop. You should still talk to friends and read your critics and do everything else you’d normally do—after all, using the Hype Machine puts you in a room too. But in this case, it’s a room where the walls and ceiling are so far away that sometimes it’s possible to believe you’re outside.

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Anthony Volodkin (fascinated), founder of the Hype Machine, writes:

From the first part of Atlantic’s series on music discovery. This one features the Hype Machine.

If you want to understand music discovery outside of ‘hit prediction’, ‘social tagging’ or ‘twitter regurgitation’, read the other two as well.  Part 2 on Daytrotter, Part 3 on Torrents.

I’m really enjoying Shuffler.fm for much the same reason; getting pushed out of my comfort zone, and with easy access to thoughtful information about new artists that catch my ear.