How Algorithmic Convenience Eroded Music Discovery
We traded the curated chaos of the piracy era for the frictionless convenience of the algorithm, and in the process, we lost our taste. There was something about the hunt back then, the risk of a corrupted file or a mislabeled track, that made finding a great album feel like an achievement. Now, we just let a black box decide what we like based on a set of probabilities. It's efficient, sure, but it's boring. Streaming has become a series of banalities. We've reached a point where the act of listening is almost passive. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this with the team at Pigeons & Planes, specifically how we actually surface new artists without just leaning on the same recommendation engines everyone else uses. We're trying to figure out if genuine curation can still exist in an era of infinite, effortless access. It's a strange time to be talking about discovery, especially when you realize how much of our current digital culture was buil...