Some Indie Record That's Much Cooler Than Mine
Performing "being cool" for myself only.
Something had come over me in early 2023 to make me really want to spend time finding some new music. Though I certainly wasn’t bored with my old favorites, Kelly Clarkson had promised a new album in 2023, TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year was active as ever, and I even had a newfound interest in my “all time favorites” playlist which features these two gals heavily, among a couple hundred other tunes mostly from the 2000s.
Perhaps it’s a bit of a now-I’m-in-my-mid-thirties-so-I-needed-to-reflect-on-aging crisis. In the past, should I be required to perform karaoke in a pinch, I wouldn’t even need the on-screen lyrics for most of Billboard Hot 100’s top 10 list. But that confidence decreased over the years and my new music discovery had become stagnant, really only adding new music when established faves released something new. Luckily we live in a time when tech billionaires absolutely have my best interest in mind and went ahead and created tools to combat this lack of discovery.
To better take in the features of my subscription, I started listening regularly through Apple Music’s1 customized “New Music Mix”, 25 songs recommended to me by an algorithm based on my listening history, updated each Friday. I had planted the seeds for this journey a few years ago as I took a long time “updating my library”2 to give more data to the service because any good thirty-something knows internet privacy is a lost cause, and I’m a giver, so if Apple wants any of my info, they can have it on a pretty Crate & Barrel platter.3
Cut to 2023, delving into these new music playlists, one genre popped up overwhelmingly more than others: pop punk by thin boys with too many accessories that could blend in had it been released in 2005…
And I LOVED it. Reminiscent of panicking at discos or boys falling out or soup bowling. Among the playlists, some bands to whom I had not lent any brain cells in a decade popped back up with newer songs that I enjoyed (hi there Plain White T’s). There was also a lot of ambient generic spa-like music because I started listening to sleep sounds playlists at night and I did not appreciate these. I started utilizing the “Suggest Less Like This” toggle on songs like “Pacific Dreams (Meditation)”.
Repeat artists and trends showed up before too long. By February, one song had stuck in my brain more than all the rest. joan, a band made up of two greasy goblins had dropped this first song off of an upcoming debut album and I just couldn’t get enough! Like LFO (sorry) but one rung down on the pop ladder. The absolute chokehold this had on my early 2023; I’m sure my 10-year-old Honda Civic was ready to accidentally short circuit its bluetooth functionality.
On the fervor of this song on repeat, the weeks went on and I added and listened to more pop rock slash rock pop, and the algorithm just tried to keep up. Out of 25 new songs each week, I’d add a few to my library, and to an ongoing playlist highlighting some “new to me” songs I’ve collected this year.
So when a song discovery led to back catalog discovery led to an Instagram follow led to info about an upcoming tour… well, did you know you can have an evening out in Los Angeles for $25 plus a convenience fee? On the heels of securing tickets to a certain Tour of Eras and lamenting over the hardship and increasingly steep prices of concert tickets, I discovered this is not a universal purchasing experience, especially for artists and genres with a smaller following. Given all of this, I knew by summer that they would top my end-of-year listening recaps.
But again, this was also the year of that aforementioned Eras Tour and with that, my Apple Music Replay was poised to be dominated too by Taylor Swift. I did not need to “study” any Taylor prior to her tour stop in Los Angeles to be 100% off-book, but I’m not sure a day went by where Taylor wasn’t in rotation (what’s a boy to do when she drops a fancy repackaging of two of her top three albums in the same year?).
I came to empathize with Troy Bolton’s hardship in High School Musical as he was torn between his past (basketball) and his future (musical theater), but my internal push and pull took shape in the form of wondering what this silly little app would tell me my 2023 musical personality would be: was I cool because I discovered something new or was I cool because I was a level-headed (read: not unhinged conspiracy theorist) fan of the biggest pop star of our current time (to be clear: yes, both options are cool in their own right)? When one cannot find an identity on his own, let the internet dictate it instead! That’s how the era of the Buzzfeed quiz was born, I have to assume.
Just kidding, I fully thought I’d outsmart the data as I sunk to the depths of trying to game the system; forcibly spending days listening to all of this new stuff and putting Taylor and Kelly on pause. The “gaming” of this personal streaming data really just manifested as “Hey Siri shuffle my ‘New in 2023’ playlist” or “Hey Siri shuffle songs by joan” and I bopped along as if I wasn’t corrupting myself.
The funny part to me is that I don’t think I’ve ever shown my year-in-review results on social media— zooming out of this experiment, who am I impressing but my own tortured pop-coded brain that has enough to worry about in life outside of this? I had to step back and check myself because I indeed love Taylor Swift and Kelly Clarkson and all of the pop girlies circa 2006-2014 and I don’t believe in the concept of a guilty pleasure, nor in feeling guilty for liking what’s popular.
I may be out of touch with current hits, but I’m proud for having built the habit this year of not staying musically stagnant. As soon as the Apple Music Replay results came in, I breathed a sigh of relief at the diversity in my playlist this year, and spent the much needed catchup time with Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version) that I feel I slighted them in July and October respectively. And in the end, what I thought was neck and neck between artists was about four thousand minutes of listening apart. Absolute flop behavior, people can’t really change, etc etc.
Nothing extra this time, but if you’re inspired, here’s a link to my 2023 new to me playlist on Apple Music and Spotify, should one be curious. Here’s to listening to more new stuff in 2024!
As an Apple Music user I am better than everyone. Merry Christmas!
I painstakingly took all of the music I had purchased on iTunes from about 2003-2014 and deleted them and then added the version from Apple Music to my library so that any future listens would be “tracked” and that data used more for recommendations. I can’t have any future Stacy’s Mom listens go unnoticed by the servers!! I promise I have friends and hobbies.
I went down this train of thought for a joke but in actuality I believe Apple is better at privacy practices than many other tech giants and I say all of this out of the goodness and naiveté of my heart.