Bettermusic

Where listeners find the music they want to hear.

What's different about bettermusic is sideways navigation. You're not looking for a track — you're following a sonic thread. Hear a track. Click "Sounds Like." Land somewhere you weren't expecting. Find an artist you love who you've never heard of. That's the bettermusic moment.

Sideways search starts with indie bands you already like and leads you to other bands by their sound. Do you like Connecticut's Thundersun metal/progressive sound? You might like the Hudson Valley's Akane emo/metal sound, too.

Discovery is one of the things broken in music today.

"Until very recently, learning about new music carried a human element. Whether you heard something on college radio, or someone cornered you at a wedding, insisting that you had to hear a great new band — you received recommendations originating with people."

— Jeremy Morris, Professor of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin–Madison

If you want the mechanics — what a vibe is, how the math works, whether this is AI, why the catalog is what it is, how we're exploring work with labels — that's on the FAQ.

Where did bettermusic come from?

Would you believe it started with books and my experience writing with AI?

The title of the Substack is My AI-Induced Psychosis: How I managed to write a 50,000 word novel with no dialogue.

https://carmendelessio.substack.com/p/my-ai-induced-psychosis

I am not against AI. But I learned that deterministic things have real value in the world. By deterministic I mean: same input, same output, every time. No randomness, no recommendation feed.

Asking whether a book is good or bad is subjective. But there are ways to compare the style and prose of one book to another to determine matches. See findbookslike.com if you're interested.

The same principle applies to music.

Bruce Springsteen covered this brilliantly in his keynote at SXSW a few years ago:

"But you can pick any band, say KISS, and you can go, 'Early Theatre Rock proponents, expressing the true raging hormones of youth,' or 'They suck!' You can go, Phish, 'Inheritors of the Grateful Dead's mantle, brilliant center of the true Alternative community,' or 'They suck.' You go, 'Bruce Springsteen, natural-born poetic genius off the streets of Monmouth County, hardest – hardest working – hardest working New Jerseyian in show business, voice of the common man, future of Rock and Roll!', or 'He sucks.'"

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You like what you like. At bettermusic, we want you to discover more of what you like.