9 Best Articles in 2021
HackerNoon
Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds your new music
HackerNoon
9 min read · 878 saves · From 2017 · The science behind personalized music recommendations
The Pudding
How Bad Is Your Spotify?
The Pudding
742 saves · 2020-12-22 · Our sophisticated A.I. judges your awful taste in music.
OpenAI
Jukebox
OpenAI
7 min read · 463 saves · 2020-04-30 · We’re introducing Jukebox, a neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles. We’re releasing the model weights and code, along…
Quartz
The magic that makes Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlists so damn good
Quartz
8 min read · 436 saves · From 2017 · Thirty songs that feel like a gift from a music-loving friend, but were cooked up by an algorithm.
Spotify Engineering
Spotify engineering culture (part 1)
Spotify Engineering
~12 min read · 378 saves · From 2015 · Here's part 1 of short animated video describing our engineering culture (here's part 2). This is a journey in progress, not a journey completed, and there's a lot of variation from squad to squad. So the stuff in the video isn't all true for all squads all the time, but it appears to be mostly true…
The New York Times
The Day the Music Burned
The New York Times
325 saves · 2019-06-11 · Jody Rosen · It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business — and almost nobody knew. This is the story of the 2008 Universal fire.
medium.com
Design Doesn’t Scale.
medium.com
8 min read · 289 saves · From 2016 · Stanley Wood · Design Doesn’t Scale is a statement that has bothered me for the last four-years.
NPR
How The Brain Teases Apart A Song's Words And Music
NPR
2 min read · 223 saves · 2020-02-27 · Jon Hamilton · Brain scans show that when people listen to songs, an area in the left hemisphere decodes speech-like sounds while one on the right processes musical information.
Spotify Engineering
Spotify Unwrapped: How we brought you a decade of data
Spotify Engineering
4 min read · 214 saves · 2020-02-18 · The Spotify Wrapped Campaign is one of Spotify’s largest marketing and social campaigns of the year. It enables our users to see a detailed breakdown of their listening habits over the past year.…
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WIRED UK
How to break out of your Spotify feedback loop and find new music
WIRED UK
4 min read · 87 saves · Jan 13th · Does the algorithm know you too well? Here’s how to shake up your recommendations for a more diverse listening experience
Mashable
12 ambient music sources to stream free online
Mashable
4 min read · 62 saves · Jan 17th · Background music to work, study, chill, and relax to.
Guardian music
'His life is a rebuke to cynicism': what five years without David Bowie has taught us
Guardian music
5 min read · 56 saves · Jan 8th · Lynsey Hanley · In his song Five Years, Bowie imagined a dying Earth. Five years on from his death, it seems to have come true – yet he continues to uplift us
Vulture
Hip-Hop Needs No Other Supervillain After MF DOOM
Vulture
7 min read · 42 saves · Jan 4th · Speak not just to his greatness but also to the closed-mindedness and cruelty that complicated his life and necessitated his dark turn.
Rolling Stone
New Radicals to Reunite for First Time in 22 Years for Biden Inauguration Parade
Rolling Stone
1 min read · 28 saves · Jan 18th · Long-dormant band will perform 1998 hit “You Get What You Give” – Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s walk-on music during presidential campaign – to close out “Parad…
The Guardian
Sea shanty TikTok: how a 19th-century seafaring epic inspired a Covid generation
The Guardian
3 min read · 28 saves · Jan 15th · Elle Hunt · Rediscovered song, which has a ‘cheerful energy’, was likely written by a teenage sailor or shore whaler in New Zealand in the 1830s
Brain Pickings
Dignity, Daring, and Disability: The Pioneering Queer Composer and Defiant Genius Ethel Smyth on Making Music While…
Brain Pickings
5 min read · 28 saves · Jan 12th · Maria Popova · …with a side of Virginia Woolf’s elated infatuation.
Vulture
It Makes Total Sense We’re All Into Sea Shanties Now
Vulture
3 min read · 20 saves · Jan 12th · “Wellerman” is a great, boisterous bop of a song in any century.
youtube.com
Jazmine Sullivan: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert
youtube.com
20 saves · Jan 8th · The Tiny Desk is working from home for the foreseeable future. Introducing NPR Music's Tiny Desk (home) concerts, bringing you performances from across the c...
Esquire
David Bowie Death 5 Year Anniversary Essay
Esquire
5 min read · 19 saves · Jan 8th · Alan Light · Seventy-four years since his birth and five years since his death, Bowie's impact on today's music looms large, even as it continues to evolve.
