The Serendipity Engine

A deep dive into how Darkchart works with you and your friends to make music discovery fun again.

For years we’ve watched and waited for someone to recreate the experience of simply stumbling onto great music. When we’d realized it just wasn’t going to happen, we decided to build it ourselves. Here’s a look into the experiences we’re trying to blend together to create a music discovery platform that is just as beautiful as it is fun.

Part 1: The Radio

There are tons of things to be said about the radio of both the past and present. For one, it sucks. It certainly follows the 80/20 rule — about 80% of all stations are playing the same genres and about 80% of the songs played are the same across every station. There are ads, you can’t skip songs, many of the DJs just plain suck, I can go on. What I do know is that up until the past few years, everybody was finding their music from it. There was a reason payola existed in the first place — if you wanted to get someone heard, they needed to be on the radio. Sure, people bought records, but they were buying the records that they’d liked on the radio. Here’s where serendipity comes into play. In both the radio and record store scenarios there’s a whole lot of rough and a tiny bit of diamonds. But when you come upon those diamonds — oh man. Have you ever had that feeling when a song knows more about you than your friends and family? Every beat, lyric and note sounds like it was made for you in that very moment. That’s serendipity. You might argue that serendipity is when you find something beautiful that you’re not looking for (since the definition above literally says that) and that by listening to the radio or going to a record store you’re actively looking. Well, you’re probably right by definition but stfu. The point is that you should feel warm and fuzzy feelings often, without having to listen to a million average songs first.

Part 2: The Record Store

In the recent documentary on Tower Records, CEO Russell Solomon said something along the lines of: you could walk into a Tower Records anywhere in the world and there would be someone, an employee or a visitor, who knew exactly what you should listen to next. This wasn’t because Tower Records had created some secret algorithm to determine your music taste, it was because they had created thousands of stores built for people who loved music.

There are two things I’ve found to be absolutely true about music lovers:

1. They want to know more about music than you
2. They want to prove it

This type of person hasn’t gone away. Trust me, I’m one of them. I started a music blog with one of my best friends in 10th grade built on these two principles. At the time, we had no idea. We just wanted to give our friends a place to find great new music — it just so happened that we also wanted to prove we’d found it first.

Part 3: The best friend

There’s probably a proverb somewhere that states: we choose friends who are similar to us because we like people who like what we like. If there is, it’s definitely stated better than that but stick with me here. Most of our friends have similar movie, music and food taste. Of course we don’t agree on everything and that’s equally as important but we usually choose to surround ourselves with people who have similar enough tastes and interests. That’s why when you do hear that AMAZING new artist, you know exactly who you need to text. We love sharing great things with people who will like them because finding cool things makes us cool by association. Your best friend knows to text you the new Kanye song, but he texts the new Chet Faker song to his girlfriend. There’s a reason for that. Not only is the context different but so are your tastes. Don’t you wish something made that distinction for you?

Part 4: The Internet

The internet, once said to be the greatest democratization of information in history, is actually just the greatest confirmation bias machine in history. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s just a product of our psychology. We want to see stuff that we like and we ignore the stuff we don’t. Instagram’s new timeline anyone? The result of this psyche is that platforms like the blog came about. With the blog, we were able to let some dude with similar music taste sitting in his parents’ house (me) go out and find our music for us! Dope concept in theory. Actually even in practice it was dope. Blogs helped create a whole underground world of music discovery that couldn’t have happened without the internet. There was a small problem though. The bigger your blog got, the more writers you needed and the more music tastes you had to appease. The more writers you brought on, the more your blog turned from a collection of your music discoveries to a giant clusterfuck of tracks for all sorts of people.