Hey all,
I have to admit I have thought about this a long time and didn’t know how to tackle it… and now I finally have been able to sit down and put my thoughts to words.
A little post about what is fair and how it would be possible to introduce fairness into the process of discovering new music.
Have a look, if you like. I’d be interested what you think.
That’s a really interesting read, thanks! Completely agree that music discovery should be introvert-friendly, after all introverts often make the best artists I reckon.
What do you think of the radio format for this? Like, Indie Beat FM’s “firehose feed” concept, or the way RFF worked.
I read your post with great interest. In fact, it’s quite captivating. And I can really hear what you are saying. There should be equal opportunities for silent introverts, autists, depressives, and extroverts and “normies”. The platform you are describing sounds like it has some really interesting barriers and funnels - I mean how it shaped behaviour, blind listening - wow - you don’t see that on online platforms.
At the same time, it also feels like a strong meritocracy, somehow? I think such a platform should also offer extensive educational material, so that it is fair also to those who produce really obscure lofi, just ‘weird’ material too. Well, maybe I’m just too cautious.
I think the idea is good and it’s a shame such platform doesn’t exist.
I agree, very interesting reading! I don’t have better ideas about how to introduce this kind of fairness at scale. Maybe it would be worth to “spec out” what GarageBand did (you are already doing most of this in your post) and post it here, only the list of features, to increase the chances that someone interested and with the developer skills picks it up? Could look like Overview of Bandcamp features (probably simpler).
About not getting feedback about the music you/we publish, I remember you bringing this up some time ago and I responding, but… I never followed up, and the problem starts with the difficulty of just noticing when someone publishes something new, even if the post is in our busy communication channels, somewhere. While the tech for a scalable system is missing, we could use the still unused Members > Our music space to review each other’s music.
I pledge to listen and comment on new and wip music posted on Members > Our music. 
And I encourage others to do the same. It takes only a handful of peer listeners to break the silence and maybe (just maybe) start a snowball effect.
Tough question. I don’t think the concept can be translated to radio as a whole, because it was mainly about gently forcing musicians to explore the works of other musicians. The fact that this resulted in a body of really good music from all possible genres that also attracted ‘normal’ listeners was a secondary effect.
One possibility I could think of: A special format where music gets presented that was reviewed / curated through the mentioned review process; i.e. whoever wants to participate and get their song played on the show has to rate and blind-review 10 tracks in a genre of their choice. The top ten songs get played on the show.
Or something to that effect. I’m not a radio operator so I can’t say if this would work. Maybe radio people want to chime in at this point 
My memory of those days is a bit hazy, but as I remember it, there was a lot of really constructive criticism going round which definitely served an educational purpose.
Of course “weird” and “experimental” material is always hard to bring across, but I vividly remember listening to ambient and drone stuff also, there were channels for that. Now with garageband there was the problem that the platform was built on the “if you’re successful enough here, we’ll get you in touch with the big labels” promise, and that never worked well for the more experimental stuff.
But I think that wouldn’t be the case here. It wouldn’t have to be a competition about who gets to talk to Geffen Records. Which in itself would make it more fair
That said, I often experience social media platforms, even the open ones (which is not meant as a reproach!), as influencocracy. Those who are able to sell themselves get heard; the others tend to fall by the wayside. Personally I’d take a meritocracy over that anytime.
But I don’t think it has to be that way. I would hope that with a little careful planning there could be a place for everyone.
Writing a specification is a good idea. I’ll see if I have the time (and the mind to remember how it all worked ;-))
Revwiewing each other’s music in Members->Our music is a start, but the whole magic of garageband was that you had no idea who or what you were reviewing. You were assigned a number of random songs and then you had to work your way through them.
I view myself as an open person, but I’m not free from sentiments like “oh, this track is from XYZ, I know their stuff, I’m not in the mood for it today, let’s skip this” or “oh this is from my good friend ZXY; I really don’t care for the vocals but I won’t let them know” or even “oh, there’s something from YZX, they have positively reviewed me in the past, so I’ll write something nice about them, too”
(ok, this was all exaggerated to the point of being satire, but I think you know what I mean. I dare say that none of us is really free from such tendencies)
But maybe that’s just me overcomplicating things again…
You spoke about GarageBand the music website in your post. The whole - to upload music, you had to listen to 5 random bands with no cover images or band names - just music.
I always thought that was such an interesting concept. After you did that, it would show you the names of the bands and the album covers, and you could follow and download them. It was amazing the difference in stuff I liked musically with this audio-only showcase.
Sometimes I would see the name and artwork afterwards and realize I never would have chose to even click on the track otherwise. So I ended up finding some cool music that way.
I always thought that was kind of fun. I don’t know if it’s still a great idea, but it does drum up interaction and discovery.
Also, I have a weird connection with Garageband. My bass player, Cliff, was in the band Monovox that won the record deal contest they had back then.
Although it went south. 
Let’s just say they got to go to record the album in LA with Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads) producing it. Then GarageBand went bankrupt, and the album was never released. They actually just got the rights back to the album a few years ago.
So Garageband didn’t know how to be a label, but I still think that was an interesting concept for joining the website.
@lorenzosmusic thank you for sharing this piece of net-music history!
Searching for information about a 20-year old website whose domain has been recycled by a GAFAM company for a totally unrelated product is hard. But… luckily Wikipedia was there.
@schall_und_stille Yes, I understand that the “killer feature” is the ability to review music semi-randomly offered without context, and Members > Our music doesn’t offer that at all. Still, if we want to get / give reviews, we could us that space for now.
the feature set doesn’t need to be complicated given that what we are interested here is the “blind reviewing” part – not so much the “who wins” part (although that could be a formula for a scalable FediVision – a successful music contest which isn’t happening this year because of it’s success growing too big to keep being fair under their initial and rather manual paradigm).
If I understood well…
yep, the article on my blog also includes a link to the “GarageBand dot com” wikipedia page in (but I should probably have labelled the link more clearly as such).
My mind struggles to remember the particular features, but fortunately the wayback machine and some people on today’s internet still remember.
From that I can deduce:
Of course, what algorithms exactly were used to compute the chart position is lost to history now; I also don’t know if “charts” are really that desirable.
But doing this little research I realised that a lot of people dearly miss this site and the associated discovery of new music. I really think if someone could revive the concept and get it into the 2020s, they’d have quite something on their hands.
(as it turns out, from https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=9054506&sid=9194c1af936231d2d9e7e182f657d957#p9054506 we can see that there were also annoying kids abusing the service, but that’s another topic)
A new version of the site would require some heavy moderation, and probably some new rules. I can see people filling it with ChatGPT reviews in order to spam it with their own music. So there would have to be some way to discourage that.
Yeah isn’t it nice how AI keeps on making the world a better place? 
I agree, moderation would be a must in today’s world. Also maybe a rule that ensures that the review mentions at least one specific of the track. Which is going to be hard to enforce.
(optimisticSelf ON)
I don’t know, maybe agreeing to terms and conditions which state that “using AI to write reviews (or to create music for that matter) will result in a lifelong ban of the user and the music in question” would be enough…
(optimisticSelf OFF)
If the expectations are clearly defined, and it’s built around the idea of discovering music, it would maybe work out fine. It’s something that is technically quite easy to make, but making it work as intended is more of a social engineering and design challenge. I’d say it would be important to remove any form of competition. I would be up for contributing some time doing technical work on such a project, but it would need someone with proper design skills to make it good.
I used https://groover.co/ once, a commercial service that includes a system to get feedback you pay for. This is intended to be professional feedback from people in the industry, not peer musicians or music fans. I mention this because they have a system to give feedback to artists quickly… and also a system for artists to give quick and structured feedback about the quality of the feedback you receive. It’s been a while and I forgot the details, but you could rathe 1-5 stars the overall feedback from one person, but also check / uncheck boxes like was the feedback useful, actionable… I found this useful to keep some checks and balances.
Or maybe I’m mixing features with https://repostexchange.com/ which is also a platform that includes reviews, but this time from peer musicians. What I remember about this one is that you also get feedback as a reviewer (even if only happy/unhappy, 
) and this feedback plus your number of reviews can push you to higher levels, and being at higher levels somehow pairs you with artists who are looking for more qualitative fedback. Again, sorry, I might be misremembering.
I agree with @defaultmediatransmitter that removing the competition aspect would relax the whole setup. If people don’t gain much for cheating, people will cheat less. And if reviewers can be reviewed with a couple of simple indicators that can affect their “karma”/ reputation / level in the system, that also helps deterring (or flagging) those that just want to game the system.
i am very inspired by the question of ‘what is fair’, and also a recent experience at SubmitHub (I’m not necessarily recommending this peculiar ecosystem), and eternal thorn in the heel of “how to do fair music discovery” (I always “hear” @Mel saying this). i wrote the following on my gts, but thought, it would be better to have it here…
i think the main cog in a vision of fair and at the same time automated music discovery is convenience. the problem with this is that everything in tech moves in direction of growth, scale, algorithmic automation, and an effort to maximise convenience following paths of least resistance (echoing Aldous Huxley again here). i feel this is at its source incompatible with efforts for equitable and fair society of solidarity. i have doubts that lifting disadvantaged, begginners, experimentators, radicals, niche and outsider artists can ever be automated “at scale”. how can we move beyond the “cutting through the noise” imperative of contemporary “diy music promotion” landscape? for now, the only functional strategy still seems (human?) curation.
I’m live brainstorming here, but how about a good analysis of some of bandcamp’s ‘features’ (resisting to implement playlists, investing in curatorial content, artists recommending other artists), and current system at SubmitHub, and adapt it to fediverse (perhaps via bandwagon/mirlo et al. federated music ‘platforms’) to encourage equity, solidarity, and quality writing, honest reviews, music blogs, but without monetary incentives (of SubmitHub) and with floss and coop principles ensuring ‘exit to community’.
I appreciated this post, thanks for sharing it @schall_und_stille !
I came across this article today about discovery that felt pretty relevant to the conversation:
Some quotes cause there’s a login wall:
My source has started paying a fan to post hundreds of these AI videos — generated in seconds using OpenAI’s video tool, Sora — to TikTok to promote their artist’s new single, with the hope that at least one of the videos will go viral. And they’re not the only ones experimenting with AI to automate digital marketing. I also recently met with RHEI, a company that claims its proprietary AI agents — AI systems that can make decisions and take actions — can generate lyric videos and populate fan pages for artists without anyone lifting a finger. Already, music companies like Symphonic, Lyrical Lemonade and MNRK use RHEI’s products.
[..]
More is also more in the world of streaming. In 2018, Luminate reported that about 45,000 songs were uploaded to Spotify daily. Five years later, in 2023, Luminate said that number had grown to 120,000. In some ways, it’s a beautiful thing — it’s easier to release a song than ever before, allowing countless DIY artists chances at success they never would have had otherwise. But it’s also led to what Lucian Grainge, chairman/CEO of Universal Music Group, has called a “content oversupply,” of which he said, “AI has already been a major contributor.”
[..]
Major artists are also trying to capture attention in the age of “content oversupply” by releasing alternate versions of albums and songs, and more remixes than ever.
[..]
This strategy has bled over to vinyl, too. Over the last year, Taylor Swift, for example, released 36 different vinyl editions of varying colors and contents of The Tortured Poets Department to continue to engage fans and to further its monetary (and chart) success.
I never knew GarageBand but the whole process s_u_s described was basically an educational system itself ! it rewarded valuable reviews with your ability to get your own music reviewed. It’s also a virtuous circle because, as you learn how to give good feedback, you also learn on how to receive it ! It may have even worked a some sort of (hopefully positive) gatekeeping process. Getting you more invested in the process and the community
I may be a bit opportunistic here, but the sole idea of discovering good music should be enough for random peeps, whether they be musicians themselves or not, to invest their time and energy in the process.
If the commercial purpose of Garageband was to sell “objectively good music” out to the music industry, no wonder it felt meritocratic - and destined to fail !
What i’m hearing here is that it served as a wonderful discovery tool for actual people and music lovers, coupled with a fantastic music review community. And if anyone wants to recreate the same experience, it should limit its scope to exactly that. No charts, no central hub of what others did or liked or shared, no way inside the system to compare each other’s experience or performance: only your own reviews and the music you listened to.
Let’s not try to transform this into some sort of advertising tool, because they tried, and it failed. Merit should hopefully only be measured on your own personal terms, so let’s instead try to create a space that echoes this feeling 
Addendum (re Garageband features): I just stumbled upon an ancient blog post of mine (The Crow Song – Schall und Stille …German only, sry) where I reminisce about the garageband time, and there’s one little piece of info in there which which I had forgotten:
The user reviews were rated. I think it went this way: Each time you logged in you were presented with a random review which you could rate. You were encouraged to listen to the reviewed song in question and give a star rating about the quality and accuracy of the review.
That also was a nice way to make people interested in new music and get them to participate (and take some load off the admins’ shoulders).
I really love how this challenges so many of the “common” conceptions of what a social media website should work like.
I remember a while ago some folks tried to stand up an alternative social media site who’s name I don’t remember that was started by some indie web adjacent people and the way it worked was when you signed on you get 10 random posts from people you didn’t know, and you were encouraged to comment on them. I forget what the long term relationship building was.
It’s striking how much our imagination has been captured by the social media sites that became appealing to capital.