Introducing Univershuffle: chaotic neutral music discovery
Plus an Albums tip and a rant about Spotify
Okay, I’m sitting in my big comfy chair, time to write a Music App Stuff. This one’s got the announcement of my new app, a look at how I use an Albums feature, and a rant about some of the bullshit Spotify has been up to. Where should we begin?
Introducing Univershuffle
Wowowow, my first new app in five years! Yes, as I alluded to at the top of the year, I’ve been working on a music discovery app. It’s called Univershuffle, it comes out on January 7th, 2025, and you can preorder it on the App Store now! Preorder is kind of a weird word. You can hit “Get” and it’ll download on the release date.
Univershuffle was borne of a very stupid idea that had been nagging at me for a while. What if you could shuffle every song ever? What’s out there? That’s the premise. Raw, random, uncut, unmediated music discovery. No payola-powered playlists or AI-determined vibes. The more I’ve used Univershuffle, the more I’ve come to appreciate the incomprehensibly vast canon of human creativity.
I’ll have much more to say during release week, but for now I’ll leave you with a magical little three-song run of songs I had with the app the other day. I enjoyed some Caribbean hip hop from the late 90s, then a Polish-language country song called “Stetson Hat”, sung in an unbelievably endearing twang, and finally the song “Drums That No One Played” by The Microphones.
The Microphones! That’s a band some of you will be familiar with (okay, fair, maybe you already know Szwed & Makiewicz, Polish country duo extraordinaire). That happens too on Univershuffle sometimes, which I think is another fun layer. To my discredit, I haven’t really done my due diligence on The Microphones (like some people), and it occurred to me as I heard this song that I had no idea if it was one of their biggest, one of their least known, a single, an album track, or what. Chaotic neutral music discovery! I liked the song, anyhow.
And What About Albums?
I am still and will always be primarily an album listener, and I thought it might be a nice palate cleanser to wash away the aftertaste from those yucky songs and talk about how I use Quick Collections in Albums. I haven’t spent very much time at all in this publication talking about how I use Albums, and it’s something I’m going to try to work in more.
A brief note on jargon: Albums is full of it. Everything has to have a name, unfortunately, and those names are words like “Quick Collections”. Quick Collections are ways to create custom collections in Albums. You start with a source collection, like “All Albums,” then you add filters and apply a preferred sorting. Now you’ve got yourself a Quick Collection! From there, you can choose pin the collection. Uh oh, now you have a “Pinned Collection.” Pinned Collections are those colorful squares on the Collections Tab of the iOS app, and available under the Collections heading in the sidebar on the iPad app. So here are mine.
All Albums: Gotta keep it classic. I’d say about 50% of the time I use Albums, I just come here and pick something to listen to.
Today in History: Regular readers of Music App Stuff will be well aware of my obsession with album anniversaries. It’s important to pay your respects.
Check Out Later: This collection has an important job: keep track of all the music I’ve come across that I want to remember to eventually listen to. I tag those albums with the “Check Out Later” tag, then I go here when I’m looking for something new.
Released Last 3 Months: As my 2024 Albums listening report will no doubt show in a few weeks, a good chunk of the music I listen to in a given year came out that year. This collection helps me keep track of the fresh stuff.
2024 Notables: I use two tags to keep track of albums I enjoy in a given year: “Best of [year]” and “Pretty Good of [year].” Try as I might, year after year, I never come up with a better phrase than the accidentally-kinda-pejorative seeming “Pretty Good,” but really it’s kind of my personal B and C-tier. This collection combines everything I’ve enjoyed from the year.
Pretty Good Played Once: The idea behind this one is to collect every album with a “Pretty Good of [any year]” tag that I’ve only played once so I can revisit them. It’s a tough sell, though, and I can’t say I actually choose to listen to this collection very often.
Potential Play Along: To paraphrase the great Mitch Hedberg, I used to play music. I still do, but I used to, too. On any given night, I’m playing guitar and singing along with some album or another. When it’s time to pick an album, I use this collection, which has albums with a play count over 5 that aren’t hip hop or rap.
A Quick Rant About Spotify
Everyone already knows the sins of Spotify are myriad. Fractal sins unto sins unto sins, at each new magnification level. Too many to enumerate; many, I grant you, more severe than the one that’s got me all riled up, but this one’s got all the pieces to really get my goat.
Recently, Spotify updated their developer API to remove access to seven types of previously available information, citing ensuring a more “secure platform”(!). Squint even a little bit at what they chose to remove and you can make out the real reason—they don’t want other people training AI on their vast treasure trove of music data. A trove of music data the likes of which Spotify is one of maybe two or three companies powerful enough to have. Not just the songs, but the information about the songs, and moreover, their analysis of the songs.
Setting aside the perhaps-indelicate means by which Spotify comes by this trove of data, up until recently they offered it for free to anyone with a developer account. This isn’t just basic music app algorithm stuff—related artists and the like—this is their in-house quantification of the musical characteristics of the song. Its “dancibility” and “acousticness”, as well as its key, mode, tempo, and more. Forgive me for still harboring some vestige of the dream of the open internet, but that’s the kind of information that should just be available on the internet. It’s what the fucking internet was for!
Ah, but there—“in-house”—okay, I admit it, the data is proprietary. True. Who but Spotify can perform this analysis across such a corpus? Whoa! Behold the big powerful corporation who did such an excellent capitalism! They’re well within their “rights” to decide to stop offering the data. But now it’s gone. And as a feeble lone app developer operating by the grace of a tech giant, I was moved by the diversity of ways people shared in the sure-to-be-considered-by-CEO-Daniel-Ek Spotify forum thread of how they’re using this data (hearing testing and yoga class vibes curation, to name two). And rattled into remembering that this ain’t the open internet anymore. An app that’s possible today might not be tomorrow.
Conclusion
Shoot, sorry to end on a bummer. New app Univershuffle coming at the top of the new year. No reason to believe it won’t have a very long life indeed! Perhaps you might like another opportunity to “preorder” it. Please do tell people about it if you think it’s something they might like! Have a nice end of your year.