906 miracle drugs

on other people's playlists

As some of you know, I’ve been working on a new project regarding music community and curation, how we relate to and connect with each other over music. It’s mostly in a technical stage right now, but I’ve also been having lots of interesting conversations about where the project grew from, which is to say my personal relationship with music discovery and sharing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about streaming while building this project, though it’s certainly not a streaming service, because so many people use streaming as their main if not only music listening platform. Streaming has fundamentally altered our value of music, which is a larger topic for another issue, but more specifically it has altered how we find new music. I get asked a lot, when people find out the premise of this newsletter, how I discover ten new tracks for each playlist. There are a few avenues through which I seek out new music, but the most interesting by far is other people’s playlists.

I sometimes search particularly compelling lyrics of a song that I’m trying to work with in an effort to find other vibes-based playlists with or based around that song. It’s worked many times, but my favorite and most successful snipe by far has been this excellent mix by my guy Henry:

I don’t know Henry, but I am a huge fan. I was not expecting to find much from my search term “till the conga line behind me is a thousand chickens long,” but he delivered. Cameron Winter has a classic quality that’s been hard to pin down amidst the noise of his meteoric rise, but Henry captured it perfectly. I honestly didn’t know a lot of the music on this mix, but it certainly reads like a Heavy Metal (2024) inspiration playlist. I also poked around through his other playlists and based a lot of 906 miracle drugs off of music I heard on his profile. If anyone knows Henry, please connect us.

I really enjoyed the self-titled Dizzy record that came out in 2023. Often, smaller artists will have their personal Spotify playlists up on their pages (we have quite a few on the Bike Lane page). If you like the music an artist makes, chances are you’ll also like the music they listen to. They are also usually kind of eccentric people with refined and discerning taste; I find really deep cuts on artists’ playlists. With some digging, you can actually find quite a lot of interesting peoples’ playlists.

Apart from the playlists that artists explicitly post, I also really enjoy finding the pre-show mixes from their tours. They usually pick these tracks themselves, in the van while they’re driving between venues or from the list of reference tracks used for the production of the record they’re touring. I can’t find it right now, but the Lorde Solar Power tour pre-show playlist was like eight perfect songs on a loop. It was honestly one of the cooler things she did on that tour. Japanese Breakfast very consistently has really good pre-show music:

Sometimes, I’m just looking for a playlist that will recontextualize music I already know. On principle, I never put anything on shuffle, so playlists help a lot with this kind of thing. There were actually a few songs on this sadness-ranked Radiohead mix that I’d never even heard of, which was awesome. Listening to this mix also really helped me to engage fully with the music that’s become more nostalgic than anything because I have some real grievances to err with Nora here—how are “High and Dry” and “I Promise” so low? These are really, really sad songs.

Finally, I have friends with good taste. I highly recommend getting friends with good taste:

Music discovery is made to be an uphill battle because you are more profitable if you are passive. TikTok is giving us brain rot and the algorithm is putting us in a taste recession. Most people I talk to want to broaden their music taste but feel like they don’t know how to find anything new without it being served to them in a ten second snippet that a girl dances to on the Internet. Besides playlists, I discover new music through label email announcements, the openers on tours I attend, music-map, radio (NTS and also the actual radio), direct recommendations from friends, and of course music writing on Substack. In short, I discover new music through other people—if you’re feeling stuck, real curation is the antidote.