Music Discovery

[delayed]

Music recommendation is such a hard problem. There are all these seemingly obvious relationships you can map between bands to create a big graph that looks good but that almost never captures what goes on when a human with deep music knowledge recommends music. Often the best recommendations have no obvious relationships to the band you like.

I played around with this tool a bit and didn't find it any better then other more traditional music discovery tools, that is to say not very effective.

For example, I entered John Zorn and was recommended a bunch of John Zorn's bands. I entered The Residents and got The Pixies :/

I think its more effective to click around on Music Brainz and Wikipedia.

Cool app. One small complaint is the chatty tone of the recommender engine. In particular, I find it a bit disingenous to have an LLM tell me "Ah, I love <X>!".

EDIT: I also notice the recommendations are totally different when making the same query in a different session. I'm not sure if that's intentional? I expected at least some overlap with the previous time I asked.

Thank you for this - I've just discovered something I'll be listening to all week. Is there any chance I could prompt it again with the bands I liked and didn't like from the list, possibly asking for something more refined?

Great job. This works really well.

> "lofi home recordings with no electronic elements and harmonically complex"

Yielded a bunch of things I would have expected but after 5-6 'dig deeper' clicks there were lots of interesting artists I hadn't heard of before.

> "contemporary classical with no electronic elements and small chamber arrangements"

Lots of interesting results I hadn't heard of before.

> "obscure indie bands associated with Olympia, WA formed in the 1980s"

Very good list. Does the time/location-bound results very well.

I think it's a good companion to sites like RYM as a middle ground between 'best of' ratings lists and personally curated lists.

Weird. It hallucinated one for me, and recommended an album that doesn't exist. Flashbacks of 2023. If this is your app, you might want to consider adding a validation layer that performs a review before publishing an output.

Heads up that the site doesn’t resolve without www on the domain name. Just going to secondtrack.co won’t work.

I entered "if tipper and lsdream had a child".

4 of the 5 links didn't even work. The other sounded nothing like what I described.

"Like Veruca Salt" give me a few bands which sound rather like Veruca Salt, not bad at all ...

does anyone actually want to discover music like this, by typing in what mood you're in or what kind of music you like?

if so, what about something more visual like movies and tv shows?

FM Radio is the best method to discover music, especially for getting out of your bubble.