"I was definitely in the camp that believes you really need people to help find music for you, algorithms can only take you so far." After a few weeks using Discover, Chasen was a believer. "At first I was a bit skeptical," says Billy Chasen, founder of Turntable.fm. "They're as good as DJs - at scale." "They're as good as DJs - at scale." To Dash, Discover Weekly felt carefully tended, even though it was being produced by machines. It’s better than I thought it would be," says tech entrepreneur and web pioneer Anil Dash. Spotify has found a new way to tap the collective intelligence of its 75 million users, turning their taste into a data layer that can be used to better personalize everyone’s experience. They connected with such force that I didn’t mind the misses. The tracks it suggested weren’t all perfect, but the ones it got right cut through the clutter of stale and timid recommendations I got from most music services. Using Discover for the first time felt revelatory, like the first time I left AltaVista and Ask Jeeves for Google Search. To be exact, it came from a new Spotify service called Discover Weekly, which automatically generates a personally tailored playlist of two to three hours of music for me every week.
But the mix didn’t come from a friend - it came from an algorithm. It felt like an intimate gift from someone who knew my tastes inside and out, and wasn’t afraid to throw me a curveball. That first track was a risky selection, and the rest of the playlist was, too. I got that mixtape a month and a half after I heard Iovine speak. My best discoveries still came from talking with friends.Īll of which bring me back to Aby Ngana Diop. For the most part I’ve found them far too safe and uninspired - the equivalent of a wedding DJ who isn’t going to risk clearing the dance floor. Increasingly, I’ve turned to streaming services for recommendations. Watching a live stream of the event, I found myself nodding along in agreement. You need a human touch." "You need a human touch." "Algorithms alone can’t do that emotional task. Apple’s curation service, Iovine promised, would match the song you hear to the mood and the moment. "It’s a revolutionary music service curated by the leading music experts who we helped handpick," he declared, placing Apple firmly in the human curation camp. This past June, legendary producer and major label insider Jimmy Iovine unveiled Apple Music as the grand finale of the tech titan’s semi-annual product showcase. But increasingly, there is a divide in the industry over which half of that equation should lead and which half should follow. And they all use a mix of human curators and computer algorithms to target their suggestions. With millions of tracks available to a subscriber of Spotify, Rdio, or any other major service - more than you could finish in a lifetime - the battleground is shifting from access to curation.Įvery major streaming service touts its ability to learn your taste and recommend the right song at the right time. Streaming services know this, and since most have very similar pricing and catalogs, curation has emerged as one of the most important areas of differentiation between them. But discovering new music remains a very powerful experience. With a full-time job and two young children, these days I don’t have much time to seek out new artists. It is very weird, very rough music, and I’m not suggesting it’s something most people would, or should, like. She’s rapping and shouting and singing over an instrumental that mixes dancehall, electro, and traditional African drum patterns. It was the first track on the playlist, and my jaw just dropped. I hadn’t heard of Diop until two months ago, when someone put her on a mixtape for me. Discovering new music remains a very powerful experience The record propelled her to superstar status in Senegal. Liital took the traditional spoken word art form and merged it with the raucous modernity of electronic synth and drum loops. Diop’s distinctive vocals made her a sought-after performer at the weddings and funerals of the rich and powerful, but only a single album of her work is widely available - Liital, originally released in 1994. In the ‘90s, Aby Ngana Diop was the queen of taasu, a practice of ritual poetry performed by female griots in Senegal.
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