One Simple Trick for Broadening Your Horizons

This amazing life hack will make you smarter and better in every way!

Ugh, Clickbait, amirite? We all know there is no “simple trick” for anything, and that doing normal human things is not an “amazing life hack,” right?

There was a time when I saw the direction technology was heading and felt encouraged. We hadn’t yet flooded our feeds with garbage competing for clicks or surrendered to the all-powerful algorithms. It was exciting.

Wikipedia launched in January 2001, and by the time I joined in 2006, it was growing into something that, while not perfect, gave me hope that humans could “have nice things”… like a truly democratized repository for human learning. I still feel like it is that, which is why I’ve continued donating to them all these years.

At the time, I was also excited by the technologies growing up around music: file sharing was always going to be problematic, but for a while, there were apps like Gracenote and Shazam that made it easier to catalog and identify songs, and the recommendation algorithms that ended up powering Pandora and Spotify promised to help us find new music based on our individual tastes.

But instead of helping us expand our palettes and discover truly new or (to us) obscure artists, corporations have prioritized the sale of “tent pole” artists and serving us more of the same.

Go ahead and experiment—start with the most obscure artist you can think of, let your favorite app recommend an “if you like/then you’ll like” playlist, and tell me how many tracks it takes before they’re recommending the Foo Fighters or Pink Floyd to you for the 1,000th time.

And the trend now, if you’ve been following the Spotify debacle, is to not even recommend real artists, but to generate AI nonsense based on your existing favorites.

But there is a way out of this…

Start With the Familiar

Recommendation algorithms can be useful, even if they aren’t giving you “new” stuff. The value may not lie in their recommendations, but in studying what they’re offering you and asking yourself questions about them.

• Why did they suggest whatever they suggested? Can you make the connection between what you started with and what they gave you? (You can practice making connections by following the regular Tune Tag installments on

  Front Row & Backstage
  . I got to play in Tune Tag #71!)

• If you don’t like what they are suggesting, ask yourself why - even if the answer is “I’m too familiar with that” figuring out what it is that you’re bored with can point you to new stuff.

• Also ask yourself why you love what you love - this is the beginning of listening critically to your music.

Once you have some self-knowledge and know how to make connections yourself, you can apply what you have learned to the next step.

Whether Sounds or Subject Matter

There are several approaches you can take to start branching out and finding new musicks. Most people are happy to find a genre they like and look for artists working in that genre. If that’s your approach, you should study as many genres as you can and learn what is the same or what is different about them. He is on a hiatus now, but

Reid HT

left an excellent resource for exploring genres here on Substack:

My personality tends to be contrary, so I like to identify “things I hate” and lean into them. For years, I made fun of the accordion. It was easy to mock, and jokes do abound… but once I recognized how much of the music I was loving had accordion in it (They Might Be Giants, The Pogues, Buckwheat Zydeco) and started seeking out accordion players, my musical choices got much more interesting. I never liked metal when I was younger, but I kept giving metal bands a chance, and while I still have limits, I have a lot more exciting stuff to listen to.

You might have a particular theme or topic that you enjoy. Maybe you are into ballads or stories; that can open your world up to a variety of country, blues, folk, and Americana artists. But maybe that love of story and language can lead you to exploring wilder poetry, like Jason Thompson recently did on

Ear Candy Update

Break On Through to What, Exactly?

The Point Is…

… There is a lot of great, undiscovered¹ music out there waiting for you. Some of it may require repeat listening before you “get it”; some of it will pull you in instantly.

Whatever your journey will be, you’re not going to make it if you don’t take charge and learn how to think critically about what you are looking for. I recommend that you put your curiosity in charge, don’t shy away from the unfamiliar, and remember that even finding something new to hate is a new experience.

You never know what your next discovery will be.

1. “Undiscovered” by you, that is.