No 10 - Burst your (filter) bubble edition 💥
Wired recently published the article “How to Bust Your Spotify Feedback Loop and Find New Music” which is a subject I’ve struggled with over the years (and kind of the point of this newsletter).
All the music, any time, anywhere is great in theory. But sifting through literally millions of choices can be daunting, even at the best of times. Most of us tend to fall back into old listening habits pretty quickly.
As the story points out, the algorithms Spotify (and most streaming platforms, both music and video) use for recommending new artists tend to be self-reinforcing. It recommends the most popular thing that other people also like; if you listen to that, it will continue recommending similar artists, trapping you in a loop of the same damn music, every single time.
It doesn’t need to be this way.
There are ways to break out of your musical filter bubble. The Wired article suggests that media companies could institute “content-based recommendations,” based on sound - tempo, key, dynamic - rather than listening habits. But this is unlikely to happen since such a function could push users too far out of their musical comfort zones and alienate them.
One way to burst your musical filter bubble is to use advanced search options. Spotify doesn’t make record labels searchable by clicking on the company name (like they do artists’ names), but you can use the search bar.
Advanced search options aren’t limited to labels. You can also use them to narrow artist, album and track searches, or even search for the top played songs from a given year.
Here’s a breakdown of the advance search options with Spotify (apologies to non-Spotify users, most platforms have a similar function - Google for details).
artist: “______”
album: “______”
track: “______”
year: “______”
label: “______”
isrc: “______”
upc: “______”
tag:new
Another option is picking an artist outside your normal listening habits and throwing yourself into the deep end through the musicians Spotify’s algorithm has decided are in a similar vein. This is a great strategy in theory. The catch is that you need to already know the names of artists outside your usual cache of bands, which was the problem you were trying to solve in the first place.
Ultimately you could use any artist that I’ve talked about in these pages and follow whatever musical tangent they might lead you on. But for those inclined to take a deep dive into unknown waters, here are some starting points for musical exploration.
A note: I’ve specifically chosen artists at the extreme end of their respective genres and aesthetics to ensure Spotfiy’s algorithm doesn’t lead you back to the squishy middle too quickly.
Brooding indie rock à la the National
Bartees Strange straddles a lot of genres, but indie rock seems like the best way to encapsulate what results. Following an EP of covers of songs by the National, Strange unleashed Live Forever, his debut album last year, a tight 35-minutes of transcendent energy that defies expectations at every turn.
Hyperpop à la Charli XCX
Trying to pinpoint 100 Gecs centrifugal point is impossible. Pop? Emo? Hip hop? EDM? Ska? It's all baked into the duo’s manic sound. It gives their music a sense of stylistic whiplash but also ensures that you’re always hearing new things every time you drop back in.
Boom bap hip-hop à la Run the Jewels
The Alchemist grew to prominence in the late 90s and is probably best known as Eminem’s DJs. But the California-based artist has worked with everyone in the biz and produced two of last year’s most critically acclaimed hip hop records, Alfredo, with Freddie Gibbs and The Price of Tea in China with Boldy James. It’s easy to get lost in his collaborative projects alone.
Post-rock à la Explosions in the Sky (the Friday Night Lights band)
Mysterious Montreal collective Godspeed You Black Emperor are superstars in the post-rock world - sprawling (usually) instrumental indie rock, capable of capturing a multitude of moods. A walk through the “fans also like” section on Spotify will give you a good primer on the genre’s leading lights.
Genre-defying metal à la Converge
Metal is a genre built around defying mainstream conventions, but the extreme-ends of aggressive music are not for the faint of heart. Currently sitting at this axis of the two are Code Orange, a band who might have started life in hardcore, but who have moved firmly into the metal column on their last couple of releases.
Kool Kids Music Recommendation Club
I’ve written about Toronto band Pony in the past, but the group, the brainchild of Sam Bielanski, recently announced their debut album. Fans of 90s sugar-sweet alt-rockers like Letters to Cleo, That Dog and Julianna Hatfield, or more modern iterations like Charly Bliss’s debut album, will find much to love when the Toronto band drop TV Baby in April.
North Carolinian artists glaive only started making music during the pandemic but has already found a niche for himself, bridging the pop-hip-hop-emo divide. For his 16th (!!!) birthday last month, he dropped this collab with “hyperpop rapper” ericdoa. Their respective verses are like emotional ping pong, with the two artists taking dueling perspectives on a disintegrating relationship. Arguably, glaive wins out delivering the song’s extremely catchy and extremely vindictive chorus.
I highlighted the work of Toronto multi-instrumentalist and frequent sideman Joseph Shabason back in the very first edition of this newsletter. Now, hot on the heels of last year’s Philadelphia, the great new age-y record he made with Nicholas Krgovich and Chris Harris, is The Fellowship, Shabason’s third solo outing. The record, out at the end of April, explores Shabason’s youth growing up in a dual-faith household and the effect that’s had on his life.
Boston-based Really From have been around for a while, but haven’t released new music since their 2017 sophomore record. “Try Lingual” will hopefully open the floodgates though. The quartet covers a lot of ground in just over three minutes and I’m very excited to hear the forthcoming full-length in March.
Born in Wales, raised in Toronto and now splitting her time between Hogtown and LA, ELIO caught the ear of Charli XCX who is serving as something of a mentor to the young singer Her soft-focus futurepop has a world-weariness quality that the singer turns into resilient anthems that make the most out of small moments. Also, I love the line “So sick of feeling salty.”
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
Hit up koolkidsmusicclub@gmail.com for questions, criticisms and submissions
A good way to explore genres is to search an artist in https://everynoise.com which is linked to the Spotify database. You can then start exploring the genres and neighbouring genres.