The music recommendation game nobody can win

The music recommendation game nobody can win

Is there a record a hardened music buff hasn't already heard? The question has run through music forums ever since the internet turned the world's catalog into an infinite download library. A recent attempt to test a veteran listener ended in a draw: every recommendation —La STPO, Lunophone, Catherine Ribeiro, Annette Peacock— was met with an "I've got it downloaded" or an "I know it well." The challenge wasn't to dig up rarities. It was to find something good that was also new to the other person.

The start looked promising. La STPO, the French avant-prog and Dada collective with a 1995 album, was greeted with a "yes, I know them, I've listened a couple of times, it's downloaded." Then came Lunophone, the 2024 project blending Canterbury and RIO, and the answer was just as dry: he knows its members, Homunculus Res and Rascal Reporters, "several albums." The pattern repeated with every attempt.

When the problem isn't obscurity but quality

The turning point came with Księżyc (1996), the Polish record that, according to a circulating calculation, ranks 10th in an Onet selection and scores 77/100 on Album of the Year. The self-criticism was immediate: "I was confusing radicalism, noise and favorable critical reception with compositional excellence." The listener's diagnosis was different: he isn't looking for rarities, he's looking for excellent works. And he knows those too.

Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes and their Paix (1972) earned enthusiastic recognition, with mentions of the bass, the organ and the spoken-word finale. Annette Peacock, her voice transformed by the Moog on I'm the One, caught no one off guard either: he placed her singing with Bill Bruford. Arthur Verocai, with his 86/100 on Album of the Year, drew a comment more skeptical about the method than about the record.

Noise as a shortcut and the miscalculation

The attempt with Sprain and its 96 minutes of dissonance was the biggest failure. The description —"punk with an industrial sound"— sums up well a record that PopMatters scored 9/10 and that the listener called "hideous." That's where the logic of the recommendation broke down: favorable critical reception doesn't equal a great work. Acknowledging that mistake is the most honest moment of the whole exchange.

The last bullet was Closure in Moscow and its Pink Lemonade (2014), 60 minutes of Australian psychedelic prog presented as the answer to The Mars Volta. The match was left hanging, with no verdict. And that's where the game reveals its trap: in the era of streaming and mass downloading, the edge no longer lies in knowing the obscure, but in telling the obscure from the good. Anyone can accumulate rarities. Very few nail the excellent.