¶ The problem with new releases · 14 December 2023 listen/tech
There were a lot of things on Every Noise at Once that updated daily or weekly, and some of them will lose value only slowly now that they can't be updated. The one that loses almost all of its value at once is the weekly New Releases by Genre.
There were no new-release features in Every Noise at Once at its literal outset, pre-Spotify when it was powered by second-hand Echo Nest data and the Rdio API. I found a 2014-07-30 message from me on I Love Music sharing the URL of the first single-page version of a Spotify new-release list, but the earliest capture in the Internet Archive is from 2014-09-24, when Maroon 5's "Maps" was the top single of the week, and the righthand column listed "all 3304 releases this week". I called this version the Spotify Sorting Hat, because certain things hadn't happened yet.
By 2019 that version became untenable, and I rewrote it from scratch to separate the genre collation from the raw list, and introduce more control so you had a prayer of finding the subset of music you actually cared about. That version is dead now without the internal Spotify feeds that provided its data.
You might imagine that there would be alternatives by now, but there aren't any on the same scale. Spotify has by far the best API for this kind of idea, but it isn't quite set up to provide any of the three things that a serious new-release tool should offer:
- "all" new releases: in truth I started imposing thresholds on what the Sorting Hat would include before switching to NRbG, and NRbG never showed literally everything, either. But it showed a lot. The Spotify API for searching allows you to specify "tag:new" and get only things released in the last two weeks, but you can only get 50 of them at a time, and only 1000 total, sorted by popularity. Most weeks there are more than 100,000.
- new releases by genre: you can filter by genre in the Spotify API, but only in artist searches. And you can only use "tag:new" in album searches. So currently they can't be combined. Unlike the all-release issue, this one would be a reasonable feature request for the API, as it fits the existing usage-models and wouldn't be particularly onerous to support. Assigning artist-level genres to albums can get existential if you think too hard about it, but if you stick to the idea that genres are communities, then calling an album "atmospheric black metal" is shorthand for saying that it's an album made by a band that is part of the atmospheric black metal community, which makes sense even if the particular album is acoustic folk pastiches, and in the new-release case gets it to the audience that wants to know about that album, so it's fine.
- discovery: the more complicated thing NRbG did was to try to distribute new releases by bands who aren't really the canonical representatives of any genre to the genres whose fans would be their most likely audiences. This absolutely can't be done using the existing API, for the same reasons that you can't extract a "full" list. You can get the 20 most similar artists for any artist, but for matching unknown artists to genres you need to go in the other direction, finding the 100s of artists whose Fans Also Like lists includes the known artists in a genre. But adding this feature to the API wouldn't be much harder than adding the genre filter itself.
Absent those features, the Spotify API can't be used to build this, and so far all the other services are even farther from being able to provide the tools for it. NRbG worked because the end results weren't confidential, just inaccessible, and I could solve the inaccessibility by running a set of carefully interlocking internal queries. Now I can't.
I don't really know how we can do new-release discovery now, without this. We can go back to the human, community-based modes of knowledge we used to use, of course: mailing lists, discussion forums, blogs, playlists maintained by individual experts. One genre at a time, these ways are usually better than queries, detailed and contextual and exultory. But they can't be aggregated the way data can. You can keep track of a genre or two or five this way, but not 20. Not 100. I've been monitoring hundreds of genres every week, for years. Now I am as lost as you.
There were no new-release features in Every Noise at Once at its literal outset, pre-Spotify when it was powered by second-hand Echo Nest data and the Rdio API. I found a 2014-07-30 message from me on I Love Music sharing the URL of the first single-page version of a Spotify new-release list, but the earliest capture in the Internet Archive is from 2014-09-24, when Maroon 5's "Maps" was the top single of the week, and the righthand column listed "all 3304 releases this week". I called this version the Spotify Sorting Hat, because certain things hadn't happened yet.
By 2019 that version became untenable, and I rewrote it from scratch to separate the genre collation from the raw list, and introduce more control so you had a prayer of finding the subset of music you actually cared about. That version is dead now without the internal Spotify feeds that provided its data.
You might imagine that there would be alternatives by now, but there aren't any on the same scale. Spotify has by far the best API for this kind of idea, but it isn't quite set up to provide any of the three things that a serious new-release tool should offer:
- "all" new releases: in truth I started imposing thresholds on what the Sorting Hat would include before switching to NRbG, and NRbG never showed literally everything, either. But it showed a lot. The Spotify API for searching allows you to specify "tag:new" and get only things released in the last two weeks, but you can only get 50 of them at a time, and only 1000 total, sorted by popularity. Most weeks there are more than 100,000.
- new releases by genre: you can filter by genre in the Spotify API, but only in artist searches. And you can only use "tag:new" in album searches. So currently they can't be combined. Unlike the all-release issue, this one would be a reasonable feature request for the API, as it fits the existing usage-models and wouldn't be particularly onerous to support. Assigning artist-level genres to albums can get existential if you think too hard about it, but if you stick to the idea that genres are communities, then calling an album "atmospheric black metal" is shorthand for saying that it's an album made by a band that is part of the atmospheric black metal community, which makes sense even if the particular album is acoustic folk pastiches, and in the new-release case gets it to the audience that wants to know about that album, so it's fine.
- discovery: the more complicated thing NRbG did was to try to distribute new releases by bands who aren't really the canonical representatives of any genre to the genres whose fans would be their most likely audiences. This absolutely can't be done using the existing API, for the same reasons that you can't extract a "full" list. You can get the 20 most similar artists for any artist, but for matching unknown artists to genres you need to go in the other direction, finding the 100s of artists whose Fans Also Like lists includes the known artists in a genre. But adding this feature to the API wouldn't be much harder than adding the genre filter itself.
Absent those features, the Spotify API can't be used to build this, and so far all the other services are even farther from being able to provide the tools for it. NRbG worked because the end results weren't confidential, just inaccessible, and I could solve the inaccessibility by running a set of carefully interlocking internal queries. Now I can't.
I don't really know how we can do new-release discovery now, without this. We can go back to the human, community-based modes of knowledge we used to use, of course: mailing lists, discussion forums, blogs, playlists maintained by individual experts. One genre at a time, these ways are usually better than queries, detailed and contextual and exultory. But they can't be aggregated the way data can. You can keep track of a genre or two or five this way, but not 20. Not 100. I've been monitoring hundreds of genres every week, for years. Now I am as lost as you.