Shuffle
Music has become more of a backdrop to other activities, and this kind of setup fits that very well. But there’s another part to this: What about the musicians?
Won’t You Please Think of the Musicians?
This makes me wish for a whole-catalog shuffle on Apple Music or Spotify, a way to hear new music, instead of Apple Music’s poor algorithmically chosen New Music mix. And why stop here? There must be plenty of ways to present music when your streaming catalog includes pretty much every song around. We already have shared playlists that people can follow, but how about DJs who do what old-school DJs did, digging out gems and presenting them in a show? Imagine that Apple, for instance, made it possible for anyone to create a live DJ show, where the host would effectively be remote-playing songs on listeners’ computers. It could be live or available on demand, but the result could be something like the amazing John Peel, a BBC Radio 1 DJ who discovered and shared every kind of music. We’ll never see another John Peel, but music streaming could at least try to come up with some different ways for us to find new music and perhaps connect with the musicians that make it all possible.
