[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

I recently contributed to a (ultimately successful) Kickstarter campaign for a new music service, Mirlo. I’ve also been reading off and on articles on the furialog blog, written by Glenn McDonald, who used to work at Spotify before he was laid off, and who (among other things) created the Every Noise at Once site mapping musical genres. McDonald’s latest post, “10 aspirational rules for the moral operation of a music service,” is particularly relevant to Mirlo and other would-be alternatives to Bandcamp, Spotify, etc.

You can read the full list yourself, but I was particularly struck by #3, “The feature goal is to connect individuals to communities. Music is a social energy.” This echoes things the folks in 65daysofstatic have been saying to the effect that music is always and everywhere a community phenomenon, in contrast to the view of music as “content” that LLMs can generate as well or better than people. It also reminds me of McDonald’s own comments that “[musical] genres are communities” that cannot be adequately captured by machine learning algorithms looking at sonic similarities.

McDonald has a book coming out later this month, You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music. It looks interesting; I’ve preordered it.