Curated Music Newsletters: Jukebox In Your Inbox

Streaming services aren’t the only place to discover new music

- Kamakshi Ayyar

Every week, I receive tons of junk mail that promise easy home loans, cheap holidays or are hackneyed press releases. I’ve subscribed to a few newsletters because I find them to be a helpful way to navigate all the noise of the Internet. I get updates on daily news events, weekly longform suggestions and, beginning a couple of months ago, new music. I don’t mean music fresh off the oven, just tracks that I may not have come across before.

I’ve never been one to venture too much outside my standard music cubbyholes of pop, blues and jazz, and that’s a shame given how much the Internet has to offer. Algorithms on Apple Music and YouTube would suggest recommendations based on my listening patterns but it would never stray too far from my comfort zone. I’d come across one-off tracks that I’d fall in love with thanks to friends’ recommendations or YouTube links that someone might tweet out, but it didn’t happen often enough.

And then I came across a tweet from Yooti Bhansali last year. She was going to start sending out a weekly newsletter with music recommendations and shared a link to her newsletter for her Twitter followers to subscribe. Curious to see what I’d get, I signed up. Over the next few months I received newsletters that had an eclectic mix of tunes, many of which I hadn’t heard before. It was nice to have a little jukebox in my inbox ever week or so. On digging around a bit, I found that Bhansali wasn’t the only one who was sending out new music regularly.

The mixtape makers

Bhansali, a 33-year-old media professional in Mumbai, started her