Why does TopMusic exist?
TopMusic is an app I created that lets you discover music and create playlists for the top albums of the last decade, organized by genre and ranked by critical acclaim. I created it because I love discovering new music via year-end lists from publications, and wanted to create an experience to make that process easier. I wanted to leverage the best parts of streaming services (the ability to access nearly any piece of music instantly) with the touch of human curation that is still - in my opinion and expanded on below - superior to the algorithmic discovery methods provided by these services. A few points in detail:
People are listening to new music less than ever
In early 2022, a report came out stating that music released in the previous 18 months (“new music”) was decreasing as a percentage of total listening consumption. Specifically, between 2020 and 2021, the time people spent listening to new music as a whole went down from 35% to 30%, while the time people spent listening to the 200 most popular tracks went down from 10% to 5%. New music, as a cultural footprint, is becoming less listened to and less relevant.
Artists and labels are aware of the shift towards catalog consumption, and legacy artists from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen to Stevie Nicks have sold large stakes in their publishing rights in the past few years to take advantage. In the last five years, we’ve seen biographical films for Elvis (#302 most streamed artist on Spotify), Whitney Houston (#182 most streamed artist on Spotify), Queen (#52 most streamed artist on Spotify), and Elton John (#40 most streamed artist on Spotify).
Perhaps the most acute data point is Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” - a song that was released in 1985 but featured in the fourth season of Stranger Things in 2022 - hitting #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in June of 2022 and finishing at #23 in the year-end Billboard Hot 100 list. It’s a great song, and I suggest you watch Big Boi explain why. But how can we invent new cultural references when we keep rehashing the old ones?
It feels like culture is stuck. How many songs played at the wedding you last attended were released in the past fifteen years? What about the last bar you went to? Or at the supermarket?
Of course, this isn’t for a lack of available inventory. Every day, over 100,000 songs are released on Spotify and dozens of albums are released on Bandcamp. Why aren’t we listening to more of it?
Streaming algorithms don’t prioritize discovery
Spotify and YouTube are great at servicing personalized algorithms per user. The issue is that they are generally incentivized towards conversion and retention rather than discovery. Personalized playlists often feature music that users have already listened to and music that artists and labels have paid to be featured on. Spotify has doubled down on this approach by now offering a personalized DJ which will attempt to guess what you’re most interested in listening in, often featuring music and playlists you’ve already listened to.
Furthermore, people may not know what they like if they don’t get the opportunity to listen to it! I didn’t get into Afrobeats until I made this site and happened upon some great tracks from Asake and Omah Lay. Now, Spotify is serving me a custom Afrobeats mix. Let’s make the algorithm work for us!
Life is short, and music is a great part of life
I understand that we’re all getting older, and that “listening to music” as an interest or hobby or identity will never be the same as when we were in high school. Perhaps nothing will hit quite like Panda Bear in 2007. But my biggest takeaway from starting this project was finding that new music was much richer and more diverse than I had originally expected, especially as more releases come out from different parts of the world. Putting this site together made me feel that music was getting better year-over-year, rather than the opposite. But don’t take my word for it - find out for yourself.
It’s fun to learn new things and create new projects
Screen time is eating our life, engineered by companies leveraging us for attention and profit. It’s easier than ever to build digital gardens that give us at least a temporary reprieve from these ecosystems. We owe it to ourselves and our community to leverage our ability to grow them.
Additionally, working on side projects has been a wonderful way to dabble in new languages, frameworks, and software that I wasn’t previously exposed to to solve new problems. For OnlyNews I learned Django for authentication storage, made a custom front-end through HTML and CSS, and used Celery to hit the Twitter API. For TopMusic I learned how to implement OAuth on a webpage to have the user verify their Spotify credentials.
As of this writing, TopMusic has over 2,500 albums catalogued over thirteen years (2010 - 2022), sourced from over 30 publications and organized into over 15 genres and 75 subgenres. I’m looking forward to continuing to expand the catalogue so that for any genre there is a rich history to dive into. I’m also looking forward to putting together a personalized radio feature later this year that lets users tweak the discovery algorithm so they have full control over how they’re finding new music.