Be Your Own Tastemaker
Music discovery’s not dead. You just have to give it a try.
You’re probably listening right now to Spotify, a Sweden-based streaming music service that makes millions of albums available on-demand for around $5 or $10 a month, placing it at the heart of a debate over the economics and livelihoods of recording artists. You may not know Rdio, an American-bred company created by Skype founders that does the same thing — with one killer app. If you’re having a hard time finding new music online — or, lured by the YouTube charts or a favorite Pandora station, too busy to look a little harder — you should get to know each other.
See, Rdio is now the home of the Internet’s best bargain bin. Let me stop for a moment and explain that: there are almost certainly teenagers, busy owning iPhones since middle school and listening to One Direction on YouTube, who have never seen a CD in person, much less a table of them (or a Tower Records, R.I.P.). As a late ‘90s teenager in the days before broadband and Mac vs. PC commercials with an obvious winner, I’d go to Salzer’s Records each week to trawl through the dollar bin for used CDs. It was like panning for gold too many months after Sutter — row after row would be filled with bogus compilations and copies of R.E.M.’s “Monster,” but occasionally, I’d run into a band name I recognized from the back pages of SPIN or an guitar player message board. For a dollar, it was always worth the gamble. Over the years, I picked up albums from Nicolai Dunger’s This Cloud Is Learning (classic) to Fleming and John’s The Way We Are (less classic), but half the thrill was the hunt.
As digital music’s transitioned from legally risky blogs to label-backed Vevo premieres and NPR streams, the hunt’s become a turkey shoot. We have too many listening options for any to matter. Last year, a roundtable of bloggers and industry veterans gathered at the Awl to discuss the rise and fall of obscure music blogs, sites that would upload, say, out-of-print Afrobeat or forgotten folk for a niche audience of music sorta-pirates. A response on Crumbler argued that such blogs had fallen victim to digital music’s transition to legal, mass-appeal sources: “A music blogger might object to these points by saying well, sure, but show me the curation on YouTube! … It turns out most people don’t want that,” blogger Casey Newton wrote. On Sidewinder.fm, a music industry think tank, Kyle Bylin made the separate case that discovery-focused apps, even the mighty Pandora, were doomed to fail. (Spotify, for one, bleeds millions of dollars a year.) The Spotify charts—generated, presumably, by the choices of actual consumers—might as well come straight from ClearChannel.
Some critics have long worried the Internet’s taken away the serendipitous aspect of music discovery, the excitement of cracking open an unheard album for the first time. Imagine taking that dollar CD or a flea market LP home to your room, the rush of putting it on the stereo. What if it sucked? What if it, in Braffian terms, changed your life? Music’s power hasn’t changed. But its availability has, growing to unstoppable Kaiju-like proportions and rampaging across social networks while smart writers lament the uselessness of once-crucial curators and the increasing shortness of the long tail.
As a music writer who listens to hundreds of albums a year, I’d nearly given up on organic discovery myself. Trendier music sites exist in an echo chamber of hype, expectation and careful press campaigns, seemingly arbitrarily picking different combinations from a pile of 100 or so albums to fill out their year-end lists. Pitchfork Best New Music picks have become as surprising as M. Night Shyamalan movies. Such consensus drives the Hype Machine, which gathers MP3s posted by hundreds of music blogs, to wind up catering toward faux-indie — though worthy — major label acts such as CHVRCHES and Haim over bands without stacks of cash behind them. Which is not to say plenty of gratifying albums aren’t getting attention, critically and otherwise. But it’s like picking the ripest tomato at Whole Foods. That thrill — the slightest twinge of risk — has gone missing, and no app can find it. But Rdio, alongside other innovative, consumer-friendly services, has created a flashlight. All you have to do is pick it up and look.
Where New Music Lives
Every Tuesday, the Rdio new releases page opens like a minimalist white carpet, topped by the day’s biggest releases — its Jay Zs and Coldplays — but the exciting stuff lies below. The Spotify app’s shameful “What’s New” landing page, by contrast, is still showing months-old albums by Daft Punk and Macklemore in its puny carousel. You’d be better off shopping for new albums at Starbucks. Unless an album’s too willfully obscure for digital distribution or held back by, say, Taylor Swift trading streaming attention for potentially bumped record sales, Rdio’s weekly updates include everything. Indie rock records, unpromoted emo debuts, EDM compilations — it goes for what feels like forever. There are literally hundreds of new albums each week, perhaps more — scroll past the first 20 or 30 sets and it starts to look pretty bleak, full of SEO-gaming anonymous compilations (“Xmas in the Club”) and loved-by-Mom sets from the likes of Chewing on Tinfoil (144 plays) and Lindsay Lowend (36 plays). The music industry has its problems, but supplying new records is not one of them.
As any seasoned bin hunter knows — and as a new generation may have intuited from cruising YouTube for the very best Harry Styles interview — one blogger’s trash is another fan’s treasure. Rdio, smoother than a Dove commercial, allows for instantaneous listening and skipping or queuing right from the new releases homepage. I’ve taken to spending Tuesday mornings skimming any album with a cover that looks interesting — unlike books, you can absolutely judge a record by its cover, or at least by title font. And the treasures have appeared, glimmering. A charming indie pop set from Garlands. A punk debut from a group called Carbon that’s reminiscent of Paramore and nearly as good. Submerged deep in one list from last winter, I was astounded to find a new album from Saturday Looks Good to Me’s Fred Thomas, a musician I own a half-dozen albums by and have blogged about for years. Turns out he’d found a new record label and the label’s publicist hadn’t found me. It felt like — what’s that word? Serendipity.
Rdio’s not the only service like this, but it’s my favorite. The best alternative is Bandcamp, an independent retail site which pays musicians better than iTunes and the like and offers bands set-your-own prices that brings its offerings closest to the bargain bin: pay-what-you-want here, pay $4.99 there and support bands instead of some record store’s landlord. Bandcamp’s taken to curating its own material with a weekly radio show, but clicking through genre tags will release you back into the wild, elephant gun in hand.
So be your own tastemaker next Tuesday. Scroll past the names you know. Click play. Give it a minute. Try the next track. Scroll down again. Skip the ones with bikini-clad cover babes or ones with titles like “Best of Club Session 2013.” Unless you’re into that stuff — and who knows? Maybe you are. Let me know when you find out, though. Even the richest gold panners get lonely.
David Greenwald is a Portland-based journalist who covers music and culture. Find him at Rawkblog and Twitter.
