The Thursday Dispatch - 6 August 2026
How does one discover music these days? I just asked a friend this and I’m still waiting on an answer. But I wonder how people do it. I was sent a playlist the other day on Apple Music and I was really intrigued by the fact that when I clicked through the songs to get to their source albums or singles, basically none of them were attached to a preexisting playlist from one of Apple Music’s curators. A playlist full of pure gold with apparently no crumb trail leading to it.
Record stores still exist; there’s just not quite as many of them. When I was growing up on the south end of Lincoln, NE, I had three I could reasonably walk to without visiting a mall. When walking into a record store, each genre section had these kiosks with around 10 albums pre-loaded into them so you could hear what you were curious about before you went home. Most record stores don’t have that anymore. Now it’s whatever the person behind the counter happens to be playing that day, a discovery by whoever’s shift it is, which is really just roulette.
Streaming has replaced a lot of that, and sampling everything at once is genuinely convenient. But it can also feel directionless, acting like a firehose instead of a filter. What actually works for me is more specific than “streaming” as a category. I still wake up to Seattle’s KEXP every morning, set to play automatically on my living room speaker the second I turn off my alarm, and it hands me something new almost daily. This week alone it’s how I was steered back to the self-titled album by Racing Mount Pleasant, as they did a live session there recently. Apple Music’s algorithmic radio stations scratch the same itch. And then some mornings I just scroll new releases and try something cold, no recommendation attached at all, which is how I stumbled onto The Strokes’ newest album and found American Football put an album out out of nowhere.
So does streaming do enough on its own? Honestly, no, not for me. Every real find I just described came from something adjacent to pure streaming: a curator’s taste (KEXP), a friend’s playlist, or a deliberate act of browsing rather than passive listening. The playlist that kicked off this whole line of thinking is the clearest example, with all the infrastructure of Apple Music, and the actual discovery still came down to one person’s judgment with no algorithm in sight.
I’m curious how you find new artists and songs. Is streaming carrying the load for you, or are other channels still doing the real work? Feel free to email me and maybe send a recommendation as well.
Weekly Photo
While I was in Lincoln today, I stopped by my friend’s restaurant Muchachos and got a rice bowl. He has these cool planters around the joint.
This Past Week
The Listening
- Racing Mount Pleasant - Racing Mount Pleasant ★★★★★
Songs in the Chaos
This is my weekly list of songs that either caught my attention or came to mind this past week. I post these throughout the week on a site called Crucial Tracks, where they’re also added to a playlist on Apple Music. Feel free to follow me on either space.
