High on my list of esoteric forgotten things that I still love is ’70s and ’80s electric jazz fusion and the more esoteric reaches of prog rock adjacent to it. Return To Forever, Brand X, Billy Cobham, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, that sort of thing. Also its modern descendants like Planet X and Protocol.
I’ve spent years trying to encourage the YouTube algorithm to find me more stuff like this. Fairly successfully, until recently it seems all I can get is repeats of stuff I’ve already heard.
Could be the algorithm is stuck in a rut and underweighting novelty. Or it could be that YouTube’s coverage is inadequate. But this morning the truly horrifying possibility occurred to me. That YouTube’s coverage is complete, and …
Maybe … maybe I’ve heard it all.
ESR, Twitter, 2025-04-14.
July 15, 2025
QotD: Music on YouTube
1 Comment
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
For those truly interested in finding new music:
Boil the Frog allows you to find gradual transitions from any two musicians/bands. Want to know what’s halfway between Enya and Johnny Cash? Or what 2/3 Nirvana and 1/3 Bach would sound like? You can find an answer there.
EveryNoise is a map of music. Go there, type in the band’s name, and it shows you bands around it (based on various metrics, but the net result is pretty good). Easy to find new bands that way. Then type the name into YouTube or Spotify or wherever. Obviously it’s limited to the development team’s understanding of music, but I’ve not found that a tremendous limitation; only a handful of the people I listen to aren’t on there, and the ones that aren’t are fairly niche (self-published Scottish filk singer, Bardcore singer who translates pop songs to Latin, that sort of thing).
Pandora and the more random parts of Spotify also help. You get a certain amount of stuff that you’re not interested in, but if you don’t overly-curate the playlists you also get some random new stuff. The benefits outweigh the annoyances.
Frankly, YouTube is really only good if you know the band or have fairly narrow preferences. The website favors long-form video over music videos. Not necessarily a bad thing, it just means that YouTube is more useful for playing a pre-established playlist than for discovering new music.
Comment by Dinwar — July 15, 2025 @ 14:49