> “You didn’t need specialist poets to create this kind of musicalised language, and the diction is very simple, so this was clearly a democratising form of literature. We’re getting an exciting glimpse of a form of oral pop culture that lay under the surface of classical culture.”
>In 1989, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. By the dawn of the ’90s, the internet had awakened everyone to new technological possibilities. Similarly, music and music listeners were becoming more forward-thinking than ever before. Grunge and heavy metal met in the gauntlet; hip-hop traveled from the underground to the pop charts (N.W.A. out-charted R.E.M. in 1991); pop music became more daring; electronic music began its ascent from small clubs to festival stages. 1991 marked the start of this aggressive reinvention. It was a year that shaped the music we’ve heard for the last three decades. Even today, these 13 albums that were once in rotation in six-disc Sony stereos are responsible for current digital playlists.
>https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/106359487243544156 pluralistic@mamot.fr - Thus, when the internet was demilitarized and the general public started trickling - and then rushing - to use it, there was a widespread hope that we might break free of the tyranny of concentrated, linear programming (in the sense of "what's on," and "what it does to you").
>Much of the excitement over Napster wasn't about getting music for free - it was about the mix-tapification of all music, where your custom playlists would replace the linear album.
>Songs circulate online among fans for whom an MP3 player set to Shuffle trumps conventional genre as an organizing principle. Refined tastes intertwine with semi-random surf trails to become indistinguishable from each other. Timelines fray, genealogies wander. These under-the-radar exchanges generally happen outside commercial spheres, adding to the fertile mess. You must sift through a lot of junky MP3s to uncover the great ones, but in the end, all the world's sonic secrets are out there, clumped irregularly across the Internet's flat and mighty sprawl. A catchy genre name or evocative creation myth can make the output of a few friends appear as a bustling scene to outside eyes, and the online hype can turn into a selffulfilling prophecy if global excitement trickles down into actual gigs.
- [Contextualize Your Listening: The Playlist as Recommendation Engine](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.302.1754&rep=rep1&type=pdf)
