music

The goal of this series is not to present music as disposable background noise to be mostly ignored or tuned out , but the complete opposite — the goal is to present music that can engulf the listener, carefully selected works that can be fully appreciated (perhaps even enhanced) despite sometimes only having peripheral attention paid to them.

I often quote the example of a metal band who produced this one acoustic ballad. That ballad was great and ended up in a big editorial playlist, generating a lot of saves and listenership. However, the band suffered algorithmically. Algorithms learned that their music was adequate for ballad lovers, recommending it to more of them. When that... See more

But labels and rights-holders see the same tools as built on an enormous act of industrial-scale theft. Decades of copyrighted recordings, the fruits of 100 years of human artistry, have been scrapped and repurposed as training data without so much as a licensing check or a royalty paid.

Music has no purpose, it merely brings together people’s dreams, fragilities, licentiousness and weirdness. It can bring masses of people together through that. As much as those in the underground find each other, so do the Swifties and The ARMY. Scale, here, doesn’t stop the human capacity of bonding through music and the exchange of identity.