Subvert – Collectively owned music marketplace

I think this is great, but I do hope thought is being put into solving the hardest problem of all IMHO: Music Discovery

I have bought a lot on Bandcamp, but would have bought 10x more if I could just find stuff I liked. The existing system makes discovery nearly impossible unless you happen to like the stuff being mainly bought and curated or are in a lucky genre.

Discoverability is especially hard because 99% of the music people create sucks. This may not seem true if you mainly listen to "radio" and playlists, but if you ever get access to a large catalog of independent music, try picking stuff at pseudo-random and take notes. As much as I love good art (and I do), most art is not good art. You can't go on popularity because some of the great artists (especially on Bandcamp) are relatively unknown and therefore are not popular. For example, Thousand Needles in Red is a phenomenal band with great albums, and almost completely unknown. These Four Walls is similar (but at least they are on Youtube Music/Spotify/etc). I'd buy the crap out of similar albums, but discovering them is very challenging. I mainly found those two out of random luck.

Anyway I'm rambling, but I do hope you can figure out a good means for discovery. I think finding and grouping people with similar tastes is among the best ways, and also having artists that a person likes recommend other artists can be super valuable.

What's wrong with discovering good art out of random luck?

I have discovered at least as much good music on Bandcamp as I did in the early years of Beatport and before that in real-life record stores. You start with a genre you like, then just flick through all the new releases. If a cover or title catches your eye, pop it in and have a listen, if you don't like it, move on to the next. Maybe you missed a bunch of good stuff because it didn't catch your eye, but who cares? The point isn't to collect every amazing piece of music ever written, it's just to buy enough music that makes you happy.

After a while you might start to build up a mental map of which labels tend to release more stuff you like so you prioritize listening to their new releases over other labels. Or you find an artist you like and follow them onto different labels. Even indie artists who self-release everything often still do collabs with other artists, so you can find connected/related stuff that way too, or look at the way they self-describe and tag their own music then search round for those keywords too.

In my opinion it's much easier to discover music now than it was in the brick and mortar days primarily because of hyperlinks and search, but also because the new releases rack doesn't get cleaned out by the early birds, records aren't held behind the counter for favorite customers etc. Not to mention Discogs is still there for more mainstream stuff to drill down on aliases, guest appearances, producers etc. Every Bandcamp Friday I end up with a full cart and dozens of open tabs and it feels like an embarrassment of riches. I wouldn't know what to do with a recommendations engine on top of that.

I am thrilled with my music collection these days, it's got everything from janky noodlings by bedroom musicians who I was perhaps the only person who they ever got a sale from, to established artists with a couple decades of releases under their belts, to weird little microscenes centered around cities or countries I'll never visit. Sure, I dug through a ton of trash to get there, sometimes checking out reams of tracks by a promising artist only to find a single gem worth tossing over a few bucks for, but now I have it, and I treasure it! I love having a personalized collection that's entirely made up of tunes that I think are awesome. It's the fulfillment of teenage me's dream. I don't think discovering 10x as much music would make it any better - on the contrary, I wouldn't have time to really focus on and appreciate it all, in which case I might as well have just put a streaming playlist on in the background.