Streams of Music

As mentioned in a previous post, a marvy benefit of music streaming services is how handily they help one discover new music and artists. As mentioned in that previous post, Caroline Polacheck was a stunning new find for me. Sure, some of you already knew of her, but how was I, a 70-year-old Baby Boomer to learn of her? Certainly not the way of my formative years, by spending a few hours scouring album covers in a record store. Even though vinyl has mysteriously resurfaced as an in-the-know fad these days, it’s still not a great way to discover new artists. Broadcast radio won’t help either; at least not much. Most radio stations are narrowly focused on a specific style or demographic and they dare not stray far from the brand they’ve sold their ad sponsors. Worse yet, the range of choices on my FM radio are woefully limited, focused merely on the very largest possible pools of listeners; low-hanging-fruit, so to speak.

On contemporary streaming platforms, with nothing more than the name of one artist (or even just one song) acting as seed to an algorithmic incubator, one may float along a stream of music, most of which, will faithfully serve up similarly enjoyable music. And by similar, I mean nuanced similarities leading to intriguing playlists that, although related, are not mind-numbingly repetitive. As stated elsewhere, Pandora’s algorithm (for example) is based on the “Music Genome Project“, an effort to “capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level using various attributes to describe songs and mathematics to connect them together into an interactive map. Any given song is represented by approximately 450 “genes” (analogous to trait-determining genes for organisms in the field of genetics). Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music. Huge capacity for nuanced correlations!

So, by seeding the platform with the name Caroline Polacheck, I was able to float in a stream of mostly new music from mostly new artists, most of which I liked. With this post, and at least a couple more, I’ll highlight some of those artists.