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How Do We (and did we) Discover Music?

How Do We (and did we) Discover Music?

Public Opinion
April 17, 2024

A Note From Jack

We’re trying something new on this week’s newsletter, interviews with artists. Not the interviews you’ve already seen on our show, other interviews. It takes about ten minutes to film an episode of Track Star and then we hang out for a while and talk about other things that are on our mind. Like how people discover new music, or whatever’s happening in pop culture at the moment. If you like this new segment let us know and we’ll keep doing it. Also - Quinn’s got a great piece down below so keep reading!

How Artists Discover Music

It’s the 30th Anniversary of Weezer’s blue album, and we got to ask them some questions…

Jack: How has the world changed in 30 years?

Pat (Patrick Wilson): Phones. Phones changed everything. No boredom. No incentives to find something stimulating other than your phone. Or a video game. Uh, I don't like it. I think we need to get rid of them somehow.

Jack: Okay, what about like musically?

Rivers (Rivers Cuomo): I mean for us, nothing's changed. Still pick up a guitar every day, try to write a song, piano, melody, whatever. It's the same thing I've always been doing. And then, you know, get together with these guys and rock out. Get in front of a big crowd of Weezer fans. It's like the 90s still.

Jack: What about music discovery? That's changed. Has it changed for you guys? I mean you (Rivers) have a Spotify playlist where you're posting new stuff all the time. You couldn't have had that in ‘94.

Rivers: Right, yeah, I have this Python script that goes all over and gets, downloads all this new stuff and assembles it into a playlist every morning for me. And then I go on these long walks and just listen to all kinds of stuff. I didn't have that in 1992, that's true.

Jack: How does that work its way into new music that you're working on?

Rivers: I don't know. I don't know if it does. I just enjoy it.

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De La Soul got their start sampling music they discovered in record stores.

Jack: We were talking about going to record stores, and now everything is right there on your phone. So do you guys still like going to record stores? Or is there a new way?

Pos: We take part in all the new ways of getting music, too

Maseo: I take part in the new ways, but I still like going to the record store. One thing I’m definitely aware of, not everything is online. Not everything at all. There’s so much music that dates so far back, that they’re still not caught up with it yet. I travel a lot. Everywhere I go internationally, I try to hit a record shop. And I’m always coming up on some really obscure stuff. I even had the dude in the record shop, when they find out who I am, they like to take me to the back, to a whole ‘nother vault. So I like that exclusivity. And I’m really well aware that not everything is not the internet. Not yet.

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We asked Charli XCX for a song everybody should know. She named Uffie’s Pop the Glock.

Charli: This is the song that got me into music.

Jack: You hear this for the first time…

Charli: I’m in my parent’s house, on the family computer, on myspace. I’m like obsessed with the record label that this artist was signed to at the time. I hear this girl going off over this beat, and I’m just like, wow, I’ve never heard anything like this before. It’s so fresh. And I kind of fell in love with music and production and partying, all at once from my computer screen…It’s a cult classic…

Blog Era Titans Are Still Standing Strong

By Quinn Moreland

A few songs into his career-spanning NPR Tiny Desk concert, Big Sean paused to set the record straight. “Some of ya’ll don’t know, I’m a blog era mixtape rapper, I’m somebody who came up in that blog era and got blessed with a cosign from Ye and then had to build my fanbase organically,” he said. “It wasn’t no playlist, it wasn’t no streaming like that. It was a tough time.” He shouted out his peers who were in the trenches with him, especially those still doing their thing today. As Sean wistfully recalled the days of pow chains, his backing band launched into the piano part of Gucci Mane’s “Lemonade,” a song Sean sampled on his own “Supa Dupa Lemonade.”

It’s a sweet moment from a guy who definitely deserves his flowers, but what really stood out to me was Sean’s allusion to the state of the internet during the first decade of the 2000s. It was a golden age of music discovery built around community, not algorithms, and there seemed to be amazing new music coming out constantly. Platforms like HotNewHipHop and DatPiff allowed artists to distribute their music without the backing of a label and the devoted curators behind blogs like Fake Shore Drive and The Smoking Section championed rising stars like Drake, Wiz Khalifa, and Curren$y.

Of course, with great curation comes great responsibility and bloggers made plenty of enemies. After the popular rap blogs 2DopeBoyz and Nah Right supposedly refused to post about Odd Future, the young collective skipped the gatekeepers and uploaded dozens of free mixtapes onto their Tumblr. But they didn’t forget the slight. Tyler, the Creator calls out those blogs by name on the opener of his debut mixtape, Bastard, and Earl Sweatshirt followed suit on his breakthrough “Earl.”

Blog coverage or not, to Big Sean’s point, the real ones have managed to stick around. I caught some videos of Tyler, the Creator’s Coachella set, he clearly got the last laugh.