Archives (page 4 of 21)

The 2025 UCLA Women's basketball team on an airplane reading a USA Today promotional newspaper celebrating their BIG10 tournament win

March 10, 2025 / 1 Comment

Bleed blue

After completing our first year with season tickets for the USC and UCLA women’s basketball teams, I have learned the truth: I bleed blue and gold. The signs were there last year when I was broken-hearted for the Bruins in their double-overtime loss to the Trojans during the semifinals of the Pac-12 Women’s basketball tournament. It was cemented this year as I couldn’t stop myself from rooting on Betts and Rice in their loss at Galen Center and left early to avoid the Trojans’ celebration when they won again at Pauley.

I root for most Los Angeles teams including USC, but my heart is in Westwood when it comes to this head-to-head matchup. Fandom is illogical. I am more impressed by Juju Watkins and Kiki Iriafen of USC. Lindsay Gottlieb is a cooler coach than Cori Close (though I like them both). There are far more LA Sparks fans rooting for USC than UCLA; yet, I know the UCLA fight song by heart and cheer along with pride. You rarely catch me raising my two fingers in a V for victory.

I figured the two teams would meet again in Indianapolis for the BIG10 tournament championship and the game didn’t disappoint. UCLA had their first good start to a game against the Trojans before Juju and the Trojan bigs imposed their will and pushed out to a ten point lead at the half. The Bruins didn’t crumble as they had in the previous two games and fought back. It helped that they had a much easier semifinal game than their opponents, who had to fight with the Michigan Wolverines until late in the fourth quarter the previous day. As the game closed with the Bruins up by five and Betts throwing a “V” down at the Trojans bench—USC did a whole lot of “Fours” down when they won the regular season title on the Bruins home floor just a week prior—I teared up with pride.

I don’t know what to tell you. Most of my friends who went to school locally went to UCLA. I have never attended, but I was once a regular guest/co-host of a late-night radio program on campus when a friend was in graduate school. I have a relationship with one of the graduate analytics programs. I love the Hammer Museum and the CAP UCLA programming. During the Pac-12 tourney last year, I would say to other attendees in Vegas that my allegiance lied with whichever California team playing in a game was closest to my house.

That’s UCLA.

Sorry, Trojans, I can’t help it. I’m rooting for y’all to get to the Natty. I’m rooting for the banner to get raised in Pauley.

U-C-L-A, fight, fight, fight!

a comic book panel from "March" by John Lewis. While young activists sit on the floor listening to Hosea Williams, a woman stands up to sing, "They say that freedom is a constant struggle"

February 26, 2025 / 0 Comments

Fortunate

“They say that freedom is a constant struggle. They say that freedom is a constant struggle. They say that freedom is a constant struggle, O Lord, we’ve struggled so long we must be free.”—a freedom song

Almost exactly ten years before I was born, a young John Lewis and thousands of others who grew weary of waiting for their freedom crossed the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. With unparalleled discipline, unwavering resolve, and profound love, they refused to be denied. Months later, the Voting Rights Act was passed in direct response to their courageous actions. It chokes me up to think about those sacrifices that allowed me to live half a century without enduring those harrowing battles. No one has ever attempted to suppress my right to vote. Bigotry holds so little power over my ability to succeed that I have largely forgotten its sting.

I can count on one hand how many times I felt someone else’s racism had negatively impacted my life. I have achieved everything I have set out to do with my skin color rarely being used against me.

I’m fortunate.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve immersed myself in the three-volume graphic novel collection “March” by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell. This autobiographical narrative reminds us of our nation’s history and the relentless pursuit required to bend it toward the ideals we profess to hold dear. Illustrated in stark black and white, the story unflinchingly recounts how a boy from Troy, Alabama, became one of the architects of the civil rights movement and what it took to even glimpse equality.

“By and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic, and social exploitation.”—John Lewis

I’m fortunate.

This leaves me with an important question: What do I do with this good fortune? How can I repay the sacrifices made by those who had so little and gave so much?

How can I help foster a society where love reigns as the highest virtue?

The answer is simple: ultimately, you stand up.

In her acceptance speech at the NAACP Image Awards, Kamala Harris declared:

“This organization came into being when our country struggled with greed, bitterness, and hatred. Those who forged the NAACP knew the forces they faced and how stony the road would be. Many see the flames on our horizons, the rising waters in our cities, and the shadows over our democracy, asking, ‘What do we do now?’ We know exactly what to do because we have done it before and will do it again.”

Despite the suffering, chaos, and anxiety that permeate our world, I still choose joy. I commit to the resolute ideals championed by those who paved the way before me. You can take many things from us, but you cannot take away our dignity.

Those who seek to deny us genuine justice and equality cannot steal my sunshine.

“However difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long… because ‘truth crushed to earth will rise again.’” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

The fortunate may lament going through this administration’s nonsense, but making good trouble in service of those in its crosshairs is how I pay forward what was done for me long before my birth. I would consider myself fortunate to lead a life that echoes just a fraction of the good accomplished by John Lewis and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement.

Fortune favors the brave.

March.

A young man on a busy city street with headphones on and a backpack. Only the back of his head is visible but he appears to be enjoying what he is listening to.

February 8, 2025 / 1 Comment

Escaping Spotify: My Month of Intentional Listening with TIDAL

On the day Spotify announced its first fiscal year of profitability, I canceled my paid subscription. My action was not in response to that news but in recognition that after a month of using TIDAL as my primary music streaming service, I didn’t miss the world’s most popular audio app enough to continue paying for it.

I switched to TIDAL at the beginning of 2025. I’m trying to live a more intentional digital life, and the question of the most ethical way to listen to music online led me to the service. It has been a fantastic replacement for the things on Spotify I had become too dependent on and less enamored with over time.

The music on TIDAL sounds great! I can hear the difference in audio quality, especially when using my high-quality speakers and headphones. TIDAL has fewer algorithmic bells and whistles than Spotify. However, the service still values human curation by music aficionados. It is obsessed with the people who make music rather than celebrities or hyper-personalization. Those subtle shifts mean I am not overwhelmed by their homepage when I select my next listen. TIDAL forces me to be a more active music selector, which has led to an increase in complete album spins and artist-centric radio stations. It has also led to me listening to more music overall.

Spotify Wrapped and Last FM’s Yearly Listening Reports tell me I am a high-volume digital music listener annually. I’m generally amongst the top 5% of all users on those services in spins. I listen to about 80 songs a day every day. My consistency is a crazy outlier.

In January, I pressed play 3900 times from over 960 different artists across nearly 1400 different albums and over 2400 unique songs. From what I saw in other people’s music listening wrap-ups for 2024, that might eclipse their digital streaming totals for the year. I’m a terrible customer of an audio streaming service. All that streaming means they likely are paying out all my monthly subscription payments in royalty distribution. I’m the kind of power user that subscription services have to mitigate in some way if their costs are variable by consumption, and I’m sure they do. Based on what I know about the digital subscription business, there’s a significant portion of dormant or extremely low-consumption users whose subscription fees have little to no royalty implications most months.

One of the reasons I switched to TIDAL was to get music artists and publishing rights owners the highest royalty payment I could. My spins in January could account for about $50 in royalty payouts or five times the value of a monthly TIDAL subscription. By comparison, those same listens on Spotify would equal $12, or about the total cost of their monthly premium tier. That’s what I intended to do!

My top five artists of the month should all earn at least a dollar from my listening, with Kendrick Lamar nearly making $2. On Spotify, that would be about 45 cents. Over time, I will likely generate the cost-equivalent royalties for my most loved albums as a digital or physical media purchase.

This is the way.

There are other benefits to this switch. My New Arrivals playlist isn’t overrun with bedroom producers (or fake artists) gaming the algorithm like Release Radar had become on Spotify. Social sharing from TIDAL is service-agnostic. I’ve returned to Pocketcasts as my podcast-listening solution—a service for which I have a lifetime, no-cost membership. I had already given up on Spotify’s audiobook offering, having found the limitation of listening by time rather than by the number of titles nonsensical.

I do miss some of the more serendipitous discovery features that Spotify offers. And I’m spending much more time updating metadata on Last.fm. I’m not sure this is a negative, though. Maybe I’m a weirdo, but I enjoy data cleanup. It also is a better time suck than doomscrolling.

TIDAL’s lack of intelligent app switching is annoying. Not being able to have my current listening jump from device to device was a bit of magic on Spotify. So was Smart Shuffle.

But I can feel confident that the creators are getting their rightful share in exchange for these missing features. At the same time, I listen to their work at the highest quality available and support music curators who have taste. It’s a more than fair trade-off.

February 3, 2025 / 0 Comments

Los Angeles Soul

On the second day of Black History Month, Doechii said this as she accepted the GRAMMY award for Rap Album of the Year:

“Anything is possible. Don’t allow anybody to project any stereotypes on you that tell you that you can’t be here, that you’re too dark, or that you’re not smart enough, or that you’re too dramatic, or you’re too loud. You are exactly who you need to be right where you are, and I am a testimony.”

I imagine the black women who make up more than half of the 2024-25 UCLA Bruins Women’s Basketball Team understand this already. Earlier in the day at Pauley Pavillion, the theme was Black Excellence, and it was on display on the court and in the stands. Lauren Betts, the tallest player on the floor, had the most assists, while the smallest, Londynn Jones, had the biggest impact. They both happen to be young black women in incredibly different packages. UCLA fought through a sluggish first half and Minnesota’s pack-the-paint defense to continue their undefeated streak and reign as the number-one team in the country. Meanwhile, Black students were the focus of the in-arena entertainment. Ari Waller hosted as Melanin & Medicine, the National Society of Black Engineers, the Nigerian Students Association, Afro-Latinx Connection, the Bruinettes, and the members of the Divine Nine made their presence known.

UCLA women’s basketball home games don’t usually feel particularly black-coded. They don’t have the South LA patina that USC Trojans’ games bring. What UCLA brings to the table is public school charm, enthusiasm, and earnestness. A Bruins athletic event is a student-run affair with current students most in mind. With that comes the centering of their beliefs, hopes, dreams, and the values the school is trying to deliver to them during their time on campus. That includes making room, space, and time for all those who attend and their incredibly varied backgrounds.

So on this Sunday, a little bit of that Black Los Angeles Soul was in Westwood, and when Lift Every Voice and Sing played before a performance of The Star Spangled Banner, it hit different. American history is filled with violent and despicable acts of regression, and we are in one of those periods now. This time, however, is particularly callous and brazen. Federal agencies are prevented from celebrating or acknowledging identity-based holidays or events, like Black History Month. At the same time, the Trump Administration attempts to roll back years of progress for all Americans.

They not like us.

And, as Alicia Keys would state even later in the awards ceremony at Crypto.com Arena, “DEI isn’t a threat; it’s a gift.”

January 13, 2025 / 2 Comments

Crimson Skies and Hot Hands

The Wildfires have disrupted sports in the city all week. The Lakers and Clippers have postponed games (though they resume home play tonight). The Rams shuttled fans to Glendale, Arizona, for their relocated wildcard game. College basketball is no different. Northwestern didn’t make the trip west. The Bruins will play Penn State in Long Beach instead of at Pauley Pavillion on Wednesday, as Westwood is just outside of one of the evacuation warning zones.

But on Sunday, on what felt like our first day of respite from the flames, Juju Watkins was on fire. The Galen Center was only about half full and not nearly as raucous as it has been for most home games this season but the women of Troy didn’t seem to notice or care. They continued their winning streak, leaning on their two elite stars, who combined for 68 of their 95 points. Those who attended appreciated the efforts and there were smiles, high-fives, and hugs as a little bit of LA came together to cheer and celebrate.

Trojans games continue to feel like Sparks games. DJ Mal-Ski’s playlist and shtick don’t deviate much from what he does at Crypto, aside from fun interactions with the USC band. Familiar faces of Sparks 24/7 members are dotted around the arena. The Trojan fan base is very familial; The proximity to South LA and the deep ties between the current roster and their alums to the blacker parts of this city make it similar to the long-time fan base of our WNBA team.

Much like our first in-person Sparks games in 2021, it was so lovely to see the women’s sports friends we’ve come to cherish so much over the last decade. We might be from all over the county, but these are our neighbors. This is our community.

Once again, the church of basketball didn’t disappoint.

January 12, 2025 / 1 Comment

City of Stars, City of Angels

My mom sent a picture of her view in the northeast corner of the Valley early Friday evening before sunset.

I didn’t understand what direction she was facing. I thought it might have been the Lidia Fire burning on its last legs east of her or the Kenneth Fire to her southwest. She texted that she was looking due south to the mountains behind Encino, just a neighborhood or two over from us. She sent a second pic as dusk turned to night, which shocked me, and I looked out our window to deep red plumes, dark smoke, and flames exploding from the back of the hillside. The mountains often feel close enough to touch from our vantage point, five miles away. It was the first time I thought we might have to evacuate, not just in this wildfire disaster but in any Southern California disaster of the last twenty years.

We checked our go-bags, filled a few extra pieces of luggage, and confirmed we had everything necessary, like my passport and booze. Tiffany packed the car so we could be even more ready. As our ongoing crisis in LA moved closer than ever towards us, I turned on the TV and found local news. It was surreal to watch and hear broadcasters talk about firefighting efforts that we could see occurring in real time every time we looked out our dining room window.

Although the evacuation warning zones were within walking distance of us, The fact that an evacuation center was set up less than a mile from our home comforted me as we slept in our beds.

The following morning, the sun shone, and the winds were calm. White smoke over those mountaintops seemed like welcome progress. I sought out trusted local and national sources for additional context. I used the non-profit app Watch Duty for updates. Tiffany turned the local news back on. The battle raged throughout the day with meaningful progress as we hit dusk. This morning, after I had slept hard for ten hours, we awoke to clear skies where the inferno had raged 36 hours prior.

What I had little desire to do over that time when the crisis was so close to home was jump to social media.

I’ve seen tremendous value in social networks as a utility this past week: it’s great for finding out if loved ones, friends, and acquaintances are safe; mutual aid networks scale awareness for those in need quickly in these spaces; if you’ve tuned your feeds right, you might see things that deepen your understanding, build your resolve, make you laugh, or remind you that the folks you know and follow are primarily lovely people who want to take care of each other.

On the flip side, though, seeing the in-the-moment thoughts of seemingly everyone near and far, especially during a crisis, is terrible for the psyche. As LA burns, we’ve been reminded that the owner of the largest and most used networks has no discernible moral compass beyond attempting to protect himself and his business. Misinformation, disinformation, and hatred run rampant, pushing people to debunk and counter those narratives.

None of that is helpful. Much of it is harmful.

TikTok will likely disappear in the US by the end of the month, and I’m not sure I will miss it. The time I spend consuming content is overwhelmingly empty calories. I could be spending that time reading or idling, granting my brain a more hearty diet than the dopamine rush.

The communities I enjoy interacting with on Threads may not survive Mark Zuckerberg’s MAGA machinations, and I will miss that if it happens. However, I’m not sure I have the energy to invest in another Social Media space beyond distributing my blog. The other upstart networks just haven’t been my thing.

I don’t want to chase your attention. I don’t want to be your audience. I want to be a part of something real.

When real shit goes down, these digital networks only simulate community and often through a funhouse mirror.

Real human networks come together directly. Like this week, the city of stars has proven itself as a city of angels every day, especially in times like these.

At times, we might use these platforms to help facilitate coordinated action but they aren’t are our only resource and likely aren’t even the best.

The best might be just going where you’re needed and asking, “How can I help?”

January 6, 2025 / 1 Comment

Switch

What’s the most ethical way to listen to digital music?

By ethical, which major services pay the fairest royalty to artists and music rights owners on a per-play basis? Spotify has been the most prominent digital music provider for years, and they have used that position to pay less than their competitors. They also are increasingly doing what tech companies tend to do when they begin to dominate the industry they are disrupting: find ever more creative ways not to pay people.

The collective disappointment with this year’s Wrapped—including me—has sparked a drumbeat of social media users reminding us that there are services that treat artists better than Spotify and provide more value for their customers if higher audio quality is your thing. TIDAL, Apple Music, and Amazon Music can all make this claim.

An infographic explaining streaming royalty rates, including a bar chart that shows that Tidal pays out the best while Deezer pays the worst, and several factoids about the state of music industry revenue

credit: ProducerHive

I have requirements beyond the baseline of a good digital music service—catalog size, playlist diversity, personalization, and audio quality. The most important of which is relatively niche: integration with Last FM. If you’ve been paying attention, you know I’m a bit obsessive about capturing my listening data, and this year’s Spotify Wrapped hammered home the need to continue to have a solution independent of the digital streamers.

That requirement severely limits my options as few services natively integrate with last.fm anymore. I could make it work if I only listened to music via iTunes or a web browser. Still, I regularly switch between my laptop, my phone, and my tablet, and so, despite having access to all of the major services in some form via bundles I pay for, they won’t work for me in this case. [ed. Note—we’ll need to examine the value of these bundles in the future.]

It’s frustrating that this is the case, but I don’t mind shifting to TIDAL. I’ve used the service before. They pay the best per stream of all the major digital music providers. They have the highest quality audio. It should be a no-brainer, but I have used Spotify so much over the decade since the death of rdio that I have gotten used to the things they provide.

A Pay table with three columns—Streaming Platform, Royalty Rates (per stream), and Streams Required to make $1. It only requires 78 streams to make $1 from Tidal Music while it takes 314 to achieve the same on Spotify.

credit: ProducerHive

But I’m listening right now, and the music sounds excellent. The transition felt daunting initially, but playlist transfer was easy thanks to TuneMyMusic (though why they require a subscription is bewildering. This is a once-in-a-blue-moon use case. Charge me once or on a per-usage basis). Within a couple of hours, I started to find my way. TIDAL has human-curated playlists like New West Coast, Women of Hip-Hop, New Arrivals: Hip-Hop and R&B, Grown Rap, Real Love: Best New R&B, R&B Hits, and Pop&B that are fair proxies for the mostly ML-based recommendation playlists that I used on Spotify. As I listen to more music, the home page is refining and showing relevant playlists, artists, songs, and albums I will likely explore.

My Tidal home feed has sections for Suggested new albums, recently updated curated playlists, user playlists I might like, and albums it thinks I might want to revisit.

After using TIDAL exclusively this weekend, personalized music mixes appeared on my home page feed this morning.

My Tidal home feed has sections for custom mixes, my favorite artists, recommended new music, and curated Essentials playlists from artists I might want to get to know better.

There were some mishaps. I lost some song scrobbles because I didn’t check if I had to sign in to Last.fm on every device where I am using TIDAL (I do). Track-level data cleanup will be an ongoing concern, but I learned that I can correct metadata mistakes from TIDAL’s scrobbles to Last.fm by editing a track at the scrobble level. The cool thing is that when I correct that data, Last.fm allows me to correct previous scrobbles and set it so future appearances of that track will be automatically updated to the proper naming conventions. What a revelation! For example, I was able to go back and update scrobbles from when Kendrick Lamar’s GNX first dropped—before the featured artists were included in the track name—and fix those so I have an accurate count of how many times I have listened to dodger blue (feat. wallie the sensei, siete7x, roddy ricch) and peekaboo (feat. AzChike).

Fewer algorithmic playlists mean more active and intentional listening, and intention is IN for 2025. I’m tired of being tricked by convenience into being passive in so many things in my life. I want my brain to make more choices about things that matter to me, like what I’m listening to and why. I want my values to be the driving factor in where and how I spend money and time.

If you’re on TIDAL, you can find me here.

Where do you listen?

Banner Photo by Kojo Kwarteng on Unsplash

January 2, 2025 / 0 Comments

No More Hiding

As the clock ticked to midnight, we were in Disney Concert Hall with the rest of “grown & sexy” Los Angeles losing our minds to Mike Phillips doing saxophone solos over Bone Crusher’s “Never Scared.” Nothing says you’re of a certain age like stomping the yard in one of the world’s premiere orchestral venues as a jazz saxophonist gets you hyped to a song that started fights in clubs 20 years ago.

We old, y’all. But much like Big Daddy Kane—who closed the D-Nice & Friends New Year’s Eve Club Quarantine Show and is well into his fifties—these knees still work, and we’re still out here getting the job done.

We are dancing in the aisles. We sing along loudly and off-key with Johnny Gill and Jon B. We canoodle to NEXT and Case’s hip-hop ballads. We get hyped to Greg Nice, En-Eye-Cee-Eee. We praise 90s icons in the building like Arsenio Hall, Yo-Yo, and the dearly departed DJ Clark Kent, whose turntables, kicks, and signature fitted cap were in a place of honor on stage.

I did not want to enter 2025 on my couch watching other people’s lives on our TV. Leaving 2024 behind required something tactile. I needed catharsis.

I am not so dramatic as to need to burn off the sadness, loss, and illness that were frequent in the previous year, but I longed to feel of and in the world. I wanted to feel the electricity of being alive.

I wanted to feel all the days of my big Gen X age and, instead of standing on the sidelines shaking my head, be in the thick of it shaking my ass.

We took public transportation to experience the holiday with our fellow Angelenos. We ran into Cadence of the LA Sparks Crew on the train there. I took that as a good omen. Was our favorite tumbler from our favorite team going in the same direction as we were? Yes.

As we returned home, downtown LA was filled with shiny, happy people. We got to pet dogs and laugh at kids up way past their bedtime while dodging our intoxicated neighbors as they navigated to their next destination.

Like us, I hope they all made it safely to their beds and opened their eyes this morning to a day of perfect winter weather in our fair city.

As I opened my eyes for the first time in 2025, I was immediately reminded that getting home safe and waking up is not guaranteed.

If we are so lucky as to wake up in this life, let’s face it directly.

I ain’t never scared.

December 31, 2024 / 0 Comments

2024 in Review – Symptom of Life

It is rare for words to fail me, but I’m struggling to sum up this year.

Here’s what I’ve felt:

Self-doubt
Anxiety
Frustration
Sick
Grief

Grief is always lurking on the outer edges of everything.

We keep it pushin’, though.

I have considered this conversation between Andrew Garfield and Elmo since it was published in October.

Even though sadness is always present, remembering that grief is a privilege for those who have experienced love brings me back to the path of joy.

It was a privilege to be loved by my father.

It was a privilege to experience the love and kindness of so many in the prelude and epilogue of his death.

Instead of analyzing all the ups and downs of 2024, I will honor and celebrate all the compassion, empathy, and warmth I was given.

We got to love.

We get to love.

Life goes on.

December 10, 2024 / 2 Comments

My 2024 Musical Journey

I started 2024 by getting infected by COVID-19. By the end of the year, I would have lost my appendix, my job, and my father. Moments of hope were often dashed by the harsh realities of this moment in time. Kamala Harris would not win the US presidency. The entertainment industry wouldn’t find its footing. I wouldn’t win the lottery.

The ache of loss wouldn’t ease, only transform.

In February, though, Hiatus Kaiyote started sending signals to my aching heart with new music. “Everything’s Beautiful” quickly became a guide for my soul. I might be sad, weary, anxious, and gloomy, but when Nai Palm reminds me that the sun is kissing my face, that I’m singing this song that’s blaring in my headphones, and that I know love, well, everything is beautiful.

I am free from harm’s way. Everything is fine.

Every time my song of the year played, I was back on the path to joy no matter how far I had veered off the road.

My Hyper-Specific Listening Behavior

I wrote about my disappointment with this year’s Spotify Wrapped. Their lack of meaningful genre exploration led me to utilize my own last.FM data to understand my digital music consumption.

While not fully comprehensive, I used the top five tags for each artist that got 100 or more plays from December 2023 through November 2024. These genres and thematic clusters represented my listening for the year.

Hip-Hop/Rap
- Instrumental
- Underground
- Trap
Soul/R&B
- Neo-Soul
- Alternative R&B
Jazz
- Fusion
Pop
- Singer-Songwriter
Female Voices
Los Angeles

In Spotify hyper-specific genre parlance, my 2024 music listening might be categorized as Love Heart Cheat Codes for West Coast Heads Having a Shitty Year.

Beyoncé, KAYTRANADA, and NxWorries (or Anderson. Paak in general) were glue artists this year, often providing the music that allowed for a seamless transition between these clusters.

Charli xcx and Sabrina Carpenter had their moment in the sun during August, my BRAT summer month, and while I think those are great albums, they ultimately didn’t feel like they belonged with the core list.

Albums of the Year

GNX – Kendrick Lamar
Chromakopia – Tyler, the Creator
GLORIOUS – GloRilla
Love Heart Cheat Code – Hiatus Kaiyote
Ceremonial Contrafact (empathogen deluxe) – Willow – Pop
Alligator Bites Never Heal – Doechii
Cowboy Carter – Beyonce
Timeless – KAYTRANADA
Please Don’t Cry – Rapsody
BRAT – Charli xcx

There’s some recency bias at play here, but IDGAF. GNX is a master at work. All these albums were made by people with impeccable taste, vision, and a commitment to their craft. They also all demand to be listened to in their entirety when any of their songs shuffle through the speakers.

Discoveries

While I have listened to Willow since she first whipped her hair back and forth, Empathogen is the album where, for my ears, she became more than one of Jada and Will’s talented children. She is one of the few artists I saw live this year, and I was a bit overwhelmed by her musicianship, stage command, and vocal quality.

Pale Jay’s Shameful Game likely came to me as a discovery from a Spotify playlist. Before their data-driven “Pulse of…” playlists started to falter in May of this year, it was my routine to add the most recently added tracks to my “New Music” listening on Saturdays. Shameful Game showed up on a Saturday in early January, and Pale Jay’s music has been consumed every month since. Over the summer, his 2021 release, The Celestial Suite, entered regular rotation by blending well with Hiatus Kaiyote and Cleo Sol.

KOTA The Friend’s Lyrics to Go vol. 5 was also likely discovered via a Spotify playlist. His track TULUM surprised me enough to seek out the full-length that it came from, and that album was popular on my playlists for the first half of 2024, especially in February.

I’ve been thinking more about how we discover music now. I find myself seeking out more human music curators and tastemakers lately to counterbalance both the increasing dependence on recommendation engines to drive playlists on digital platforms.

2025 will likely have me returning to hunting out the playlists of DJs and music critics whose ears I respect just as much if not more so than algos and AI even as I have been a fan of that kind of data magic in the past.

My musical consumption is hungry for more balance between tech and taste.

How did you discover new music in 2024?

Jason Toney