The lie of music discovery

Discovering and listening to new music is such a key part of my life. I believe that everybody has a muse, or at least every creator has, and my muse is music. New tunes, new rhythms, new sounds, new combinations. It basically unlocks some other part of my brain that I cannot access otherwise. In fact, I wake up every morning with a different song stuck in my head.

When it comes to discovering new music, though, I found that I fail too much relying on the discovery algorithms, on Spotify or on Apple Music. They are not suggesting new, very interesting melodies. They are finding you the tweaked versions of the songs you already like and, even on your first listen you can predict the melody that’s to come. It is weird and it’s ironic that they call that “discovery”, as it feels more like variations of what I'm already listening to.

In the hopes of finding a solution to my problem, I tried to find a new way of discovery, something to make things a bit more random, as random as it can be with algorithms, but yet that will make sense in our own brain. I come up with an idea of generating playlists from images. Images that you shot on your phone yourself, or that you found on Pinterest, or a painting that you really like and feel inspired by. I developed this tool and I used a generative AI model to generate the playlists and wrote an algorithm to directly create the playlist on your own Spotify.

This tool is serving me very well, even though we can not say truly “random” to any algorithm, this is so random that you do not feel like you are listening to variations of the songs you already know. It is also a very satisfying experience to be able to hear the images that you are so fond of.

I built this app for totally experimental purposes, but I found it so useful that I had felt the need to share it here. If anybody else wants to use it, you can enter your email to the “join alpha” input field. Unfortunately, direct login with your Spotify account isn't available yet as I'm still waiting for Spotify to approve my app for public use. In the meantime, I can manually add emails for those who want to try it.

PS: Make sure the email you enter is the same as your Spotify account email.