The End of ♾️

Another year and once again I find myself in a similar situation: banned from Reddit.

That's right. For the 2nd consecutive year I have managed to find myself ejected from both the /r/music sub and /r/letstalkmusic sub. The former, for hitting such a low karma threshold that I was deemed unfit for society, the latter for highlighting the chauvinism inherent with believing Jim Croce is a talented musician. This was in record time compared to my previous account which took over 5 years of self-promotional bombastic posting to get my first ban for calling King Gizzard fans a bunch of pasty White boys. Apparently speaking the truth is cancellable these days.

As I tried moving social media platforms, creating an account on the Leftist bubble site Bluesky hopeful to discuss high-culture, and non-drug topics too, with some open-minded individuals. However, once again, I found myself at the wrong end of a slew of silencers, and much more quickly than on Reddit. Blocks for disagreeing (mostly politely), users aping the same BS about streaming: it hurts independent musicians, Spotify pays nothing to musicians (only kind of true) while supporting the development of weapons to kill...fascists (i remember when building machines to kill fascists was in vogue), and AI is coming for our lo-fi (very true)! I quickly realized the world isnt really looking to have their minds changed on music.

I said what I said

These conversations inducing anti-Spotify sentiment have not all been abstract, hurting me in a real way with dozens of artists I listened to pulling their music from the platform, Some, well before the CEO Daniel Ek military technology financing scandal, like Cindy Lee (2) and the eminently tolerable Chad VanGaalen (5), then a further slew leaving post-scandal: Deerhoof* (10), Xiu Xiu (6), the aforementioned King Gizzard (4 + Infest the Rat's Nest + 3 from PetroDragonic) + side projects, Sylvan Esso (6), and a handful of artists for whom I liked a few songs leaving gaping, heart-hurting holes in several of my playlists, e.g 1, 2, 3.

But you know what you'll also notice on all those playlists? The rest of the artists stayed. Why? For the same reason I did. Because Spotify still is the best streaming platform for independent musicians to get their music heard. I hope eventually some of the leavers will come to their senses and restore themselves to the platform many of them first made their name on.

Now 3 years ago, after Spotify's Discover Weekly went HAM, I made a prediction: that by continuing to use Discover Weekly (DW), I would continue to unlock the keys to musical transcendence, both past and present, and with ever improving efficacy. And for 2.5 years that prediction bore out: DW continued to send me the best of the independent underground across an increasingly wide variety of genres, while freely mixing in oldies from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s!, and almost oldies 2000s. I divided this music up in many ways from progressive soul to arguably political to global indie to thoughts on God, all the while continuing to shamelessly promote myself on Reddit in the various music subs with many of these playlists racking up scores of followers as listeners could not deny the uniqueness and quality of what I was getting. By the end of 2024 I had amassed 10,000 followers across all of them.

Of course the culmination of this since the beginning has always been my marquee and, until recently, my perennially second most popular playlist: Take ♾️. Though it wasnt always called this. When it started it had the name Take 🖐️ (5), because it was a combination of 5 weeks of my selections from DW + it was roughly 5 hours in length. As my DW evolved, Take 🖐️ evolved with it. Eventually, once DW began its peak run at the beginning 2022, I realized the sheer quantity of music I had to put on it would no longer fit within the confines of 5 hours of 5 genres. Instead I turned it into its final form of 18 genres, often incredibly obscure artists with a maximum popularity threshold of 1,099,999 listens taking the playlist up beyond 6, 7** and then ♾️ hours. I had no choice but to change the name to reflect its prolonged length and diversity: Take ♾️, adding additional fingers as necessary.

Over the years this playlist grew bit by bit until made its way to 869 followers, which is not funny at all. Yet despite this overwhelming onslaught of insane indie music from 60 years and around the world, the playlist did something else with remarkable consistency: lose followers.

No matter what I did in between every tri-weekly update I would lose 1-2. This echoed what was happening across all my hundreds of playlists, randomly losing followers like a decaying radioactive element. Occasional gains would quickly be offset, often by the new listener becoming so overwhelmed with musical ecstasy they had to reject it so as not to be consumed; or the next poser clicking "unfollow" deciding they would rather get their music suggestions from some stupid magazine or e-blog promoting "the next new thing" in between ads for American Spirits and Hennessy or even worse: from their friends and family. In essence, a rejection of pure quality in favor of their own judgement.

While the playlist still stands at 850 followers today, I know its only a matter of time before it falls below that critical threshold meaning I will have to promote it as 800+. It would appear that entropy cannot be reversed, only slowed.

The first playlists theorized to have been placed on Take 🖐️

Still, despite the loss of followers I carried on, diligently updating the playlist every 3 weeks with new tracks, though pushing the popularity threshold to 2 million listens, and thus increasing the playlist size even more. Whether this made me a total-fucking-sellout i dont know, but it sure as hell didnt help me keep followers. Yet, 800+ is still a decent amount of people, even if you assume only a fraction actually interact with it.

This was all until last June. Apparently Spotify got it in its head that just because the vast majority of users had significant problems using Discover Weekly, that was cause to change the algorithm.

Over the course of one week it went from recommending me mostly post streaming era music, to nearly half pre-1990s music. Not only that, there was a dire shift towards more world progressive music, so rather than the 2 weekly-genres being say, desperation post-punk and blues beat, 1 genre would always be classic/prog world/reggae dub/folk. At first I found this change interesting, but as the weeks went on I noticed that the majority of the music I was now hearing was no longer in-line with the first 9.5 years of usage, or even past 3.5 years. 6 months later I find myself awash with hundreds upon hundreds of great and forgotten, well really barely-ever-known, tunes in genres far from the madding norm, and even the indie genres would have a fair amount of older/non-Western stuff (and ill admit some AI music I had to sort out) indicating the hidden roots of a lot of movements.

Maybe I should ask my Discover Weekly the same question

Of course I know that there were other "channels" inserted into Discover Weekly including an "indie" channel., but I found this music to both be: excessive (as in too much to evaluate each week) and not as good or well structured as the default 30 song channel that I had been using going on 10 years. So I kept listening to only the default, making precise judgements based on quality, even managing to create a response playlist to the hopeless Gen-Z's favorite classic (remember that's before 2000) album***, but after months and months with no sign of this global world onslaught relenting I realized something: I was running out of tunes for Take ♾️. Now, thanks to some brilliant strategic moves a few years ago I actually have been updating Take ♾️ with a near 9 month lead. This meant the tunes I placed just last week at the end of December reflect music I first heard all the way back in March, or two months before the DW-pocalypse. Thus, I have 6 weeks, or two full updates, left.

Over the months I battled with this, even at times attempting to redirect my Discover Weekly by only selecting the modern music, just to have it roar back with even better prog world music the next week. It seemed there was no way out of this sonic rabbithole I had dug myself. I certainly couldnt deny myself great tunes, regardless of the genre or time period, and it wasnt like there was 0 modern indie, or that it wasnt still being presented in an extremely interesting way combining music into niche genres no person would ever realize fit together. I simply had to accept this is how I was finding music now.

So after much consideration, I came to the inevitable conclusion:

It was time for ♾️ to end

(The sounds of women feinting)

That's right. The playlist that marked perhaps my most important impact to the promotion of obscure music could no longer be sustained.

Now to my dozens of adoring fans I am sure this might come as a bit of a shock. Hopefully some of you have enjoyed this journey with me, and maybe even did come to rely a little on getting your new tunes from the algo that I controlled to a T. Alas, after almost 7 years, this will be no more. No longer will I every 3-4 weeks pull out the ether recommendations from 6 unique playlists, then sort them so that 2 microgenres never touched. Never again will you wake on a Monday morning like a kid on Christmas to see what blend of genres my algo has furnished me and the funny names I wrought. Once I have placed the final update, an event that will fittingly occur on February 8th (IYKYK), it will be frozen in time.

This is (nearly) its final form

But this isnt the full end, I have no plans to stop updating the blog, to stop discovering great new music with Discover Weekly (even as I write this post) and aggregating it along new and untold dimensions while still keeping each microgenre firmly sectioned-off in its own playlist. I shall continue to go to and document indie concerts near NYC and far from NYC (but I prefer near). I plan on eventually returning to reddit, though not /r/letstalkmusic. If they want to be an echo chamber where 3x a week someone posts their thoughts about how a landfill-adjacent album saved their life without anyone challenging what kind of life that is, so be it. There are plenty of subs where music is discussed.

Until then, much like Nicolas Flamel and the Elixir of Life after the Philosopher's Stone was destroyed, I have enough indie tunes to set Take ♾️ in order. Then to quote MickCartney:

Let it Bleed

Though I think I have an idea for my next big playlist...

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*https://open.spotify.com/track/1EWPcVxHc4qGQnmDTDiIoP

***Do your own research