Human Curation vs. The Black Box

I remember a site I used to use. The site’s function was to find new music. You would have bubbles representing different moods and it would play songs for you. You could move to another bubble, which would give you more artists and songs. It was made before AI and long before algorithms got either really good or really bad. Yet, I couldn’t remember what it was called. All I knew was that it could be long gone or dead.

I put that prompt into Gemini and it gave me the name: Musicovery. Search is not strong suit but these prediction models can be good at finding pattersns therefore useful tool for the job. Unlike a search engine that requires accurate keywords. Understanding the tool for the job was key here. Happy, I went to the site, but disappointment appeared. It is now a rather different site and, well, closed to the public. It seems to have closed down some time ago, instead, they are selling their tech to businesses. The public, facing part of the site is, well, dead. 

It is now a rather different beast. The web radio is gone. Like so much of the net is disappearing. I suspect this is due to copyright reasons. Now, they seem to be licensing stuff to streamers instead of doing whatever they were doing before. It is a French website. It had a limited set of songs, but it did give you a good starting point to explore.

So, why this post? Well, I wanted to visit that site and share some music. I have been having trouble finding new music recently, so I wanted to visit this site to find some stuff. It was made in the age before algorithms and AI, the “Old Web” like this blog. Various stages of websites this one is rather modern compared to some of oldest ones. Anyway. I wanted to find some music and enjoy it. These days there are various tools you can use, but nothing like that site as far as I can tell. Hence a hunt to find something similar in hands of user.

As it turns out, without Gemini, I would not have guessed the website. This is causing me a bit of a problem when it comes to figuring out how I want to direct this blog post now. The state of music discovery often comes down to things like the Spotify machine-learning DJ feature. You just have no control over what comes up. A black box serves you something. 

Music-Map is similar to what it used to do. It creates a map after you input something. Human curation can help you find some rather good gems and lead you to some interesting places. Yet the machine misses the point. It lacks that “what if” and “here is a gamble” moment. It lacks creativity. It isn’t designed for it. That is a feature, not a flaw, it is meant to keep engagement high to maximise profit. That may be by accident, but that is what it does. Gnoosic seems to be pretty good, but it is not what Musicovery was or what Music-Map is. That said, it is better than nothing. Speaking of which. I used that to find a new artist I’m listening to now. 

To think I just wanted to use Musicovery to find some music to post, and now we’re here. The good news is that I did, by luck, find what I was looking for, and I’ll likely be posting that soon. But I want more, and it took me a while to get the machine to give it to me. Had do some digging myself. It isn’t how I used to do it. One of my favorite bands I found by… I can’t even remember. I don’t know many people who enjoy that group, to be honest. But if it weren’t for my family and other personal inputs, I would have never sought that music out. 

In many ways black box is nothing new. Just another form of curation. Radio stations and music channels used to do that job. Video killed the radio star, streaming killed the video star. Now just radio remains with streaming being it in different form. When you think about it. Yet human curation was part of it now it less so. Age of plenty with nobody being gate keepers. No one sound linking us together. Shared experience like with visual media is gone.