Where’s that sound coming from?: How music discovery is changing

Time passes. The father dies. The woman now has this piece of music stuck in her head, but she doesn’t know its name. She tells her husband about this memory. They decide to search YouTube for lists of the best guitar songs. They find the song in 15 minutes.

Eric Johnson’s Cliffs of Dover begins with an ad-libbed intro, a plaintive wailing into the night. At about the 20-second mark comes the first crash of drums. Ten seconds later, the song begins to cook. It’s routinely named among the top guitar songs of all time.

The woman posts the story about her father and Cliffs of Dover on Reddit, in response to a thread titled “What’s your childhood mystery that you finally solved years later?”

There is still room for serendipity in the era of Spotify. But a lot has changed.

New songs come at the listener not from the radio or music videos but from the soundtracks of viral Reels and Instagram Stories, and via TV shows where new and retro songs are knowingly mixed in. On YouTube, the comment sections are rife with statements such as “Umbrella Academy brought me here” or “Love how this played on Sons of Anarchy”.

This is changing how we consume music. We remember hoods and samples, not even choruses. A few words of lyrics can lead to a new favourite artist.

The personal playlist has become a marvel of technology. Recommendation engines use filters, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to decide what music to suggest. Software programs analyse aspects such as genre, tempo and instrumentation to fine-tune suggestions over time. Collaborative filtering techniques scan the music preferences of other users with similar tastes, for additional clues.

Audio fingerprinting software creates a unique token based on sonic characteristics such as rhythm, melody and harmony to identify similar-sounding music. So you like BTS? Have some Stray Kids. And Blackpink. EXO. And Monsta X for good measure.

Secondary levels of recommendation use geographical information to promote music. Are you a listener from north or western India? You might like Kesariya or The Punjaabban Song. South Indians get recommendations from KGF 2 and Kantara. In Kolkata, it’s songs from Belashuru or Baba Baby O.

Even without lyrics or legendary guitar work, you can find a song you seek. Shazam is famous for identifying songs from a few snatches hummed or recorded by the user. It does this by using audio fingerprinting to, converting the recorded segment into a digital representation called a spectrogram. Using the unique features of this spectrogram, it runs a search for the fingerprint against its database of millions of fingerprints, and throws up a match in seconds. It’s been doing this, with ever greater degrees of success, since 2002.

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Accessing music via the internet is almost as old as the Web itself. In 1993, just two years after the Web was opened to the public, California musicians used it to make their music available to fans, bypassing record labels.

By 1995, MP3 players for the PC were making mixed-tapes obsolete. The release of the iPod took that approach mobile. Bluetooth changed speaker technology. The rise and fall of Napster, the rise and rise of Spotify, they’ve all played a part in the way we listen to music today.

Not all traditional routes of discovery have faded away. Movie soundtracks still play a significant role. Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok (2017) introduced Led Zeppelin to a whole new generation with Immigrant Song, in much the same way that Michelle Pfeiffer’s breathily seductive rendition of Makin’ Whoopee breathed fresh life into Eddie Cantor’s 1928 hit song in the 1989 film The Fabulous Baker Boys.

TV shows showcase great music, as with Ramin Djawadi’s iconic theme music for Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. In fact, after an interval in which nervous network TV executives shrunk the introductory segment down to almost nothing, afraid that the viewer would switch channels (Veep, by Season 6, had an intro of five seconds), elaborate intros on streaming platforms are once again making room for artistic talent to shine. Not since the 1980s and ’90s — the days of Dragnet, Moonlighting and The X-Files — have theme tunes been as memorable as they are in today’s culture of appointment viewing.

The result is iconic new music such as the theme tune for The Crown (Netflix; 2016-), composed by Hans Zimmer, and Nicholas Britell’s foreboding, foreshadowing, addictive theme for Succession (2019-), a masterclass in how music can set the mood.

But more than movies or TV shows, videogames are today’s biggest platform for music discovery. Gaming franchises such as Grand Theft Auto and Fallout have in-game radio stations that play a variety of popular music. Saints Row goes a step further, allowing players to create their own mixed-tapes of in-game music. Last month, Electronic Arts (EA) released the “ultimate soundtrack” of songs from its bestselling FIFA videogame franchise, featuring artists such as Billie Eilish, Imagine Dragons and Glass Animals. (See the story alongside for more on music discovery in gaming worlds.)

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Music has always been tribal. People found artists they liked. They attended concerts, discussed songs, talked about epic performances — whether it was Deadheads talking about the legendary Barton Hall show on May 8, 1977, or TM Krishna fans talking about his performance at the Madras Music Academy on December 27, 2007. Fandom was a brotherhood, an identity.

But most of the tribalism associated with music has been diluted by sheer ease of access in the digital age. There are still devoted fans – Beyonce’s Beyhive, Taylor Swift’s Swifties, the BTS Army – but they are more the anomaly than the norm.

Where music collections were once physical and definitive (LPs, cassettes or CDs dominated by a favourite master artist, a particular genre or stream), today’s playlists are, by default, eclectic. A pop cover of a Punjabi folk song sits alongside a ’90s rock classic, a love ballad by a once-popular band, some tracks by AR Rahman and the keening laments of Sam Smith. Technology has made discovery easy, but loyalties more fickle.

Each individual now has at their fingertips what amounts to the largest record store in the world. Which still leaves room for serendipity, of a different kind.