I know people find new music now, but I honestly don't know how, and I think I'm too old to care to figure it out.

Goth/Industrial music is grossly under-represented in today’s streaming landscape. ID3v1 held 80 genres, five of which overlap with On The Edge’s typical playlists (Industrial, Euro-Techno, Gothic, Darkwave, and Techno-Industrial). Spotify, on the other hand, has over fifteen hundred. From a curational standpoint, Amazon and Tidal have none. Discovery of Goth/Industrial has become nearly impossible, partially though commerce and partially through design as the music has become exclusive enough to be invisible. It has become necessary for someone to push music at the pullers. That someone should be us.

excerpt from the manifesto that saved my show

It's really funny. Tidal hooked up an AI to their recommendation engine. You can type requests like "give me an hour's worth of music that goes well with Prodigy's 'Firestarter'" and it will give you bizarre r&b tracks you've never heard of. "genre" was this thing that fans did by hand and there's no real collation. Soundprinting? GraceNote does that automagically, that's why your Android phone tells you what song is playing in the background on your lockscreen. But GraceNote has never bothered to pull in ID3 tags, standardized or otherwise. You wanna see the search string I use to find new music?

industrial, industrial.techno, synthpop, witch.house, IDM, shoegaze, !experimental, !pop, !psychedelic, !minimal.house, !freely.available, !hard.techno, !art.rock, !retrowave, !metal, !black.metal

That's for Gazelle, which drives most torrent sites. The ! means "fuck off don't give me any of that shit." I'd totally "!alternative" if I could, but anything to the left of Journey gets labeled as alternative.

I probably listen to ten hours of new music a week. It's work. Streaming services won't do it for you. Your friends will.

My kid went through the pandemic remotely. She figured out how to sneak into her teacher's assistant's Google Meet room when the assistant wasn't there because she was (and is) an idiot. She'd go hang out with her friends in the "secret meet" and there'd be five of them, locked down in a pandemic, figuring out how to watch netflix together or play video games or who knows. We did bring it to the attention of the teacher just to keep her out of trouble? And she promptly deliberately forgot. They kept using that "secret meet" for as long as they had school laptops.

Would she rather play in person? Every time. There are better games to play and it's much more interactive. But we've got a whole generation of kids who had to figure out how to pass time in the digital, which makes passing time in the real easier.

I think some people don't make friends well, and that the situation can make things more challenging? But nature finds a way.