Algorithms killed music discovery
just like video killed the radio star.
For a few years now, academic research and think pieces have talked about the decline in music discovery as we age, particularly after the age of 30. Several factors are known to contribute to this behaviour, such as shifting priorities like jobs, families and other responsibilities, a stable routine that isn’t conducive to spending much time on new music, and an attachment to music we listened to in our adolescence as our identities were still forming. This book is a fascinating one if you’re interested in the neuroscience behind music discovery and age.
But a more recent, terrifying factor is contributing to new music discovery and active listening declining in people as young as 24. Algorithms on streaming platforms. Algorithm-driven music is making people apathetic to new music at an alarming rate, as it promotes less than 5% of the music available on them based on number of streams, and this too ends up as background music most of the time anyway. To add to this, listeners are overwhelmed by the mass of choice available at their fingertips so they fall back on the algorithm to suggest music to listen to. It’s a terrifying loop, and reflects on us as a society shifting to becoming lazy music fans.
We have prided ourselves on being music nerds at Neon, but this got us reflecting on some of our own behaviours around music discovery. While some of our relatively young team have still not hit the average age where scientific evidence backs the decline in new music discovery, we do often go to algorithm generated playlists and put it on in the background while working, excercising and so on. We could be doing more to actively discover, listen to and share new music with our community. So we set ourselves a challenge to kickstart our playlisting initiatives again, and this time we are relying on good old-fashioned curation by the team (who have to actively listen to new music to share it with others), while also welcoming submissions from artists releasing new music across India because of the sheer volume of new releases everyday!
So, without further ado, we are introducing Neon’s Curated Playlists. This is our effort to discover new music and challenge the status quo of algorithm-driven playlists by putting forward human-curated playlists that put the spotlight on artists in a few different ways.
If you are an artist, check out our submission form below, share it with your fellow artist peers and send your music through - we are listening 👇🏼
If you are a music fan interested in discovering new music and not letting your curiosity die as you age, save the playlists here and tell your friends about them, too. After all, each save is a new listener for the artists who are sharing their music with us. We’d love for more people to listen to them 🎧
If you are a label, collective or other music community, please spread the word to your artists and community as well. Join us in this mini-movement/experiment to defy the algorithm and keep music discovery alive, even while corporate structures, neuroscience and societal factors stack the odds against us as we get older!