A Guide to Escaping the Algorithms and Your Own Musical Ruts

A guide to escaping the algorithms and your own musical ruts.

- Spencer Kornhaber

Last June , the record mogul Jimmy Iovine, legendary for helping launch the careers of artists ranging from Tom Petty to Eminem, appeared on a San Francisco stage to announce that his latest employer, Apple, had a bold new product that would change the future of music. He called that product an “ecosystem.” Drake, then the biggest rapper on the planet, was on hand to testify about Apple’s foresight. The industry press mostly yawned. Beneath the hype was one basic proposition— hear almost anything, anytime, anywhere!—that the likes of Spotify already offered to millions of users. Around the turn of the millennium, people referred to the still-theoretical notion of on-demand digital listening with the appropriately awestruck coinage the celestial jukebox. A decade and a half later, it has simply, drably become streaming, the heir to MP3s, CDs, and records.

But one part of Iovine’s presentation did feel new. Apple was poised to launch an online radio station meant to embody the ideals of an era when $9.99 a month buys you unlimited access to a huge amount of history’s recorded music. The DJs for the station, called Beats 1, would play music “not based on [market] research, not based on genre, not based on drumbeats,” Iovine said. They would play “only music that is great.”