A few months back, I was in the shower, listening to an electronica playlist or radio station on Apple Music—I honestly can’t remember which—and had my mind absolutely blown by a song I’d never heard before. It had the textures and tones of, say, an Alon Mor composition, just a lot more fun and, dare I say, danceable. As soon as I finished bathing and toweling off, I scrolled back through my recently played tracks, made a mental note to remember this mysterious new musical revelation, and as you might be able to tell from my lack of specifics here, I promptly forgot to do so. I even managed to delete my entire listening history in Apple Music when I went digging a few weeks later in a vain attempt to find that track again.
While all of this was going on, my buddy Michael and I were also diving deep into the mystery surrounding 43 NTSC and PAL VHS tapes randomly mailed to fans of the band Boards of Canada. The whole thing ended up being an elaborate viral marketing campaign for their first new album in 13 years, but neither of us knew that as we shared theories about what various symbols and sounds in the videos meant and dug through the band’s back catalog—which neither of us was overly familiar with before—in search of context.
I should point out that Michael is a good bit older than I am, so our touchstones for new music are often very different, and as we were putting our newfound appreciation for Boards of Canada into context for one another, I also turned him on to Wendy Carlos, with whom he wasn’t familiar, which has since led him down an entirely different rabbit hole of discovery.
At any rate, I’ve since become borderline-obsessed with Boards of Canada, and I’ll never forget their name or any of their older albums that I’m diving deeper into and growing more appreciative of with every passing day. And to be honest with you, I’m not actually sure the music itself is any better than the mind-blowing track fed to me by the Apple algorithm while I was washing my hair and scraping my cheeks. But I know this for certain: the journey that Michael and I went on together, in reinforcing one another’s appreciation for this band and its music, is something that no algorithm could ever give me.
This gets right to the heart of what my comrade Blue said to me when I was interviewing them for a recent story about what young people are listening to and how they discover it. I’ll repeat their nugget of wisdom here so you don’t have to open a new tab.
When I was asking them about streaming-service algorithms and their utility, they observed, “The algorithm robs you of the intrinsic satisfaction and enjoyment you get from putting in the effort, or even the connections you could foster with existing friends over the music they recommend. It’s way more fulfilling to engage in conversations with people who you find tend to align with your taste . . . or push your boundaries in a way you like.”
It’s true. Michael and I do that for one another. Not everything he recommends sticks with me, and vice versa. But I don’t even have to dig back through our chat history to remember any of the bands he’s put on my plate in the past few months. What’s more, as we’ve gotten to know each other better and he’s wrapped his brain around my wholly erratic taste, his recommendations have gotten way better than any algorithm could ever be.
I am, in a lot of respects, similar to SoundStage! Ultra’s Jason Thorpe, who recently wrote about his experiences with algorithms, for better or worse. That man has rarely written a sentence that resonated with me as hard as this one: “I don’t really know anyone else who enjoys klezmer, thrash metal, opera, hard bop, nuevo tango, Rush, John Zorn in all his incarnations, Mr. Bungle, and God knows what else.”
Except, for me, it’s Lyle Lovett, A Tribe Called Quest, George Michael, Tool, They Might Be Giants, Aurora, Hania Rani, King Gizzard, Björk, Fatboy Slim, Waylon Jennings, Gil Scott-Heron, Andrew Bird, the Chemical Brothers, and Grateful Dead. Not that it’s a competition or anything.
I have to admit, I was intrigued to read about Jason’s experiences with the Don’t Stop the Music feature of Logitech Media Server, something I never played around with when it existed. And maybe it would have worked as well for me as it did for him. Maybe.
But by and large, I’m discovering more and more that even when algorithms do feed me things that I like—love, in fact—they rarely stick. Qobuz is a little better for me than Apple Music for discovery, but not because of the algorithm; more because of Qobuz Magazine, with its curated recommendations and thoughtful editorial content. And I mostly use Qobuz in a desktop environment in my listening room, not on the go. That matters because the algorithm only seems to come into play on the iOS and Android apps, not the desktop app, which doesn’t support Qobuz Radio.
But when I do use the mobile app, it doesn’t seem to quite comprehend that my love of the Allman Brothers Band does not translate into the slightest interest in southern rock, which I mostly abhor. Instead, the core of what I love about the band can only be found in a Venn diagram where ABB, Grateful Dead, and Santana overlap.
What I’m really finding, though—and perhaps should have realized a long time ago—is that even if I could connect with an algorithm that was sophisticated enough to understand all of the above, the music that truly resonates with me is the stuff I’ve discovered with, or as a result of, another actual human being in my life. And these days, my most reliable anti-algorithm is my local record-store owner, Travis Harvey.
I’ve often joked that Spotify had a decade to figure me out and still couldn’t make hide nor hair of my musical proclivities, but Travis had my tastes pegged to a tee within two months of the first time I walked through the door of Village Green Records. He’s turned me on to some truly amazing music that I almost felt ashamed for not having heard before, and his success rate is darned near perfect. In the two years I’ve been haunting his shop, I’ve only bought one record on Travis’s recommendation that didn’t work for me: a merengue record by Nando Galan y Su Orquesta that doesn’t quite get the balance of chocolate and peanut butter right in its blend of Latin brass and ’80s synth vibes. Close, but no tacucho. Oh well. I think I paid like six bucks for it.
On the other hand, most of the time Travis nudges me off the beaten path, it’s for new favorites like Jono El Grande’s brilliant-but-challenging Neo Dada, which spins on my turntable at least once a week, but which I can’t get anyone else in my life to give half a chance.
Consistently getting it right the way Travis does is a good skill for any record-store owner to have. But it’s one that’s particularly important for many of Travis’s customers who’ve never even set foot in the store—indeed, who’ve never met him—but rely on his skill for cooking up hyper-personalized music recommendations when subscribing to VGR’s distinctive subscription bundles.
“The subscription program came about during COVID, when I knew I was not going to be interacting with people anymore, one-on-one,” Travis told me one hot afternoon as I was digging through recent additions to his collection. “My former partner Bear and I were brainstorming, and she had this idea to create something that transcended an in-store visit in a way that was safe. So it was equal parts social distancing and also reaching a wider audience. After like three or four months of having it going, though, I think I had 150 members.
“But here’s the crazy thing: 80 percent of those people had never set foot in the record store. I don’t know how they learned about it. I really don’t. But somehow or another, the word got out. And so I had people in New Jersey and California, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico. I had people in Alaska. I had people all over the place, many of whom had never come to the store. Of course, I also had a good fair share of people who were my regulars who joined out of necessity.
“But that’s why I created my listener-preference survey that . . . I think maybe you took at some point?”
I hadn’t before, but I have since.
It’s not quite your typical listener-preference survey, either. It’s far from cookie-cutter. It starts by asking for mood preferences, and in a sense it’s kind of like a better version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, in that you have to select an answer even if the answers don’t necessarily cover the nuance of all possibilities that apply to your unique you-ness.
From there, it goes on to ask questions about how open you are to new music in the most descriptive way, challenges you to name one concert you would attend if you were a time traveler (or just a traveler), asks if each season of the year has a musical vibe for you and which you dig the most if so, and how musically adventurous you are, with specific examples to help guide you.
Honestly, I don’t know if anyone except Travis could make sense of the answers to these questions, but they give him the insight he needs to start personalizing his musical recommendations.
“I absolutely don’t want to be an algorithm,” Travis tells me. “I don’t want to have a relationship, even through the subscription program, that’s like, ‘If you like XYZ, then you’re going to like ABC.’ The survey is kind of abstract, sure, and it’s just kind of fun questions and it doesn’t really seem like I’m gleaning all that much information. Plus, if someone gives me a five or lower on their willingness to explore new music, that makes it harder for me. I can’t expect this person to come along with me on some wild-eyed journey.
“And when I say ‘with me,’ I really, truly feel like my relationship with each and every person that joins a subscription program is a dialogue between us, one-on-one. And so that’s why I can confidently say that no two subscription bundles are alike. And that means for that individual, no two are alike, and also that means that no two bundles are going to be alike between that individual and some other individual. Like, every single collection that the person receives monthly is absolutely one of a kind, individually tailored to them and their taste.”
“I also think about the long game too, though. Like, ‘OK, I’m going to send them these albums this month, this bundle of albums next month, and that’ll lead me to a point where they can graduate to these albums in six months, or whatever seems appropriate for their level of musical openness.’
“That’s another thing I don’t think any algorithm could do. At least not yet. No algorithm I know of can build the groundwork for mind-blowing albums that you’re just not quite ready for yet because they’re just so weird and esoteric that nobody will take a chance on them at first. But I know they’re good. And I want you to love them, too.
“So when I think six months ahead in terms of what I’m going to send a subscriber—when I’m prepping a subscriber for something coming down the road a ways—I’ll write a little note saying, ‘Look out for these things when you listen to this,’ or ‘Start out with track five. It’s gonna blow your mind.’ And maybe that’s the track that I know is going to be this specific person’s touchstone for this record.”
Of course, buying records like this, sight unseen, must come with its risks. I asked Travis how often his subscribers return records they got in a bundle but already owned.
“That’s yet another element of all this that I have to juggle. Sometimes I’ll come across the record and I’ll be like, ‘I bet this person already owns this album. I’m not gonna send it to him.’ As far as I know, though, I think I’ve only had three occasions where someone wrote back and said, ‘Hey, I already have this record that you sent me.’ That’s out of more than 7000 albums I’ve shipped out in these subscription bundles.
“Mind you, that’s only the people who told me. I don’t know how many people got a dupe and just didn’t do anything. But there have even been a few occasions when someone said, ‘Hey, I already have a copy of this, but I do like this album a lot, so I’m going to pass it on to someone else who’s going to also enjoy it.’ So, you know, they technically paid for this record. But now they don’t feel bad because they’re going to pay it forward to someone else. Which is also part of the fun of building community around music.”
To really get what makes Travis such a great algorithm alternative, though, you have to understand that he steers me away from music just as frequently as he turns me on to it. And it’s not a matter of it being good or bad—he handpicks every record he sells in his shop, so if he’s slinging it, he digs it—it’s a matter of whether or not it’s right for me. Or maybe just whether or not it’s right for me right now.
I noticed, for example, that Travis’s recommendations for me changed a lot last year when my wife and I lost Bruno, our beloved 15-year-old American Staffordshire Terrier, to prostate cancer. “I think that because the record store has always been primarily faced by me,” Travis says, “I’ve been able to build a relationship and a trust with a lot of my clientele over the years. And so I’ve had a lot of interactions where people came into the store dealing with death, dealing with a divorce, dealing with cheating, or dealing with who knows what? Dealing with just life. And I think, as you step into the store, there’s this vibe check that happens. But yeah, knowing what not to recommend is as important as knowing what to recommend, and it’s not always a value judgment, you know? It’s just about tailoring my recommendations for that human. Or even just that human on that day.”
Another neat trick that Travis performs is illuminating preferences I wasn’t even aware of myself. One day I held up an interesting-looking LP that was within my $10 record budget for that month and asked him about it, because Travis can write a freaking novel about every LP on his shelves. “Oh, yeah, that’s exactly the sort of ambient and atmospheric post-rock thing you dig.”
Wait. Do I dig ambient and atmospheric post-rock music enough for it to be a thing someone would notice? Now that I think about it, yeah: 65daysofstatic, Mogwai, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor are way up there on my list of favorite modern bands. But I’d never really lumped them together under one umbrella, and doing so has now unlocked a new avenue for me to explore.
What’s more, one day when I wandered into VGR, Travis was like, “Hey, I know you’re into Norwegian music! Check this out,” and then he played me the Jono El Grande masterpiece referenced above.
But wait. Back up. Pause, please.
Insert the sound of a stylus scraping across a record here.
I’m into Norwegian music? Is that even a coherent thing? And indeed, it is. Thomas Dybdahl and Aurora are in heavy, heavy, heavy rotation on my turntable. And the first time I heard the Tronosonic Experience at Travis’s shop was like a religious experience for me. So, yeah, there’s another road to explore that had never been labeled for me so overtly.
I couldn’t resist the urge to ask Travis how and why he zeroed in on that geographic connection between such disparate artists. “You have to observe patterns to run a record shop,” he shoots back, “and there are periods of time when, for example, Swedish pop might get huge for, I don’t know, maybe six months, a year, something like that. It turns into a trend. So I think I just picked up on that and I recognized time after time, people kept coming in being, like, familiar with Sondre Lerche and, you know, asking for Jens Lekman records or whatever.
“And so seeing patterns like that became a way to, you know—not compartmentalize people, but rather to understand taste. Hearing, like, wow, there’re similarities here, even though these are two completely divergent things, just became a tool in my toolkit.”
Getting back to Jono El Grande, though: I couldn’t resist asking if that album was something of a challenge he threw at me to see if I’d pass, or maybe so he could mentally assign me a number on his ten-point openness scale.
“Um, I guess it was a little bit of a test, yeah,” Travis says with a sheepish grin. “Like a playful test, right? Not like to, I don’t know, test your knowledge, but more like to see if we’re on the same wavelength. Like, if you dig this, then I know you better. And if you don’t, I still know you better.
“But I’ll be honest: in addition to the Norwegian thing, that was also a case where I did the pretty simple algorithm thing that any good algorithm could do. I know you’re a Zappa fan, and there’s not a lot in the world that sounds like Zappa, but that album just happens to sound kind of like Zappa, while also managing to be its own thing. But it usually scares people away when I first play it for them. It didn’t scare you, though.”
Actually, that’s not true. It did sort of scare me. That’s what hooked me. That’s why I wanted to delve deeper. I’m drawn to things that scare me. I feel a compulsion to investigate them to assuage my discomfort. When I tell Travis that, I can see him making a mental note.
And look, sure, there’s an element of consumerism to all of this. Yeah, this magical anti-algorithm of Travis’s helps him sell more records and keep his shop open. But you can tell that’s a byproduct for him. His life’s mission is to find your new favorite record for you, no matter what your musical tastes might be. And if he can expand your horizons, all the better.
You might not have a Travis Harvey in your town. You probably don’t. And your local record store may not be as good a fit for you as mine is for me.
But you still have people in your life who are passionate about music, who couldn’t care less about the Top 40 charts, or whatever (likely AI crap) the Spotify algorithm is trying to cram down your throat this week.
Talk to those humans. Have real conversations about music. You haven’t forgotten how to; you might just be rusty. Challenge them to listen to something they wouldn’t normally. Reciprocate.
Ask the young kids in your life what they’re into. You’ve probably heard of some of it, and some of it is likely nowhere near your radar.
Ask the older people in your life if they’ve found anything new lately that they love. Have conversations about how it relates to the stuff from their youth, if at all. Turn them on to stuff they might not have heard of even if it comes more from their era than yours.
Find your anti-algorithms and you’ll have also found your people. And we need that human connection every bit as much as we need music in these dark times.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
