100,000 songs are uploaded to streaming services every day. That’s a conservative estimate, and it doesn’t even count the flood of AI slop.
And I keep wondering: Do we even need more music? Isn’t there enough already, more than we can discover and listen to in a lifetime?
This is a listener’s selfish question, I know. Artists should tell their stories and spread their messages through songs, regardless of what came before. But hypothetically, we wouldn’t ever run out of new music to discover if no more music were released.
But with the overwhelming amount of music out there, the challenge becomes discoverability. How do we find new music? How do we develop and expand our taste? I don’t think we should delegate this solely to an algorithm.
Five years of Weekly5 add up to a catalogue of 1,000+ songs. But frankly, they’re hard to discover.
So I’ve started tinkering: collecting and cleaning up the raw data points, correcting information, adding and researching. The result is a tiny application, only a first version for now.
It lists all artists featured in 2021 and 2022, including the songs and our editorial descriptions. Each track includes the words I wrote when I originally featured it. It’s a thing no algorithm can offer.
And for the indecisive: the “Surprise me” button hands you a random track from the archive. I’ve already enjoyed the randomised rediscovery, stumbling over tracks I played constantly only a couple of years ago.
Give it a try here:
Janosch Tröhler-Nordström
Artists from 2023–2025 follow over the coming days, along with a bit more polish. If you find any errors or have suggestions for how to improve it, email me at hello@negativewhite.com!
A thousand songs, five years of listening, one small rebellion against the feed. Maybe we don’t need more music. We just need better ways back to it.
