Ever find yourself in the mood to listen to something new, then pulling up Spotify and listening to a playlist with the same artist you’ve been listening to over and over again?
It’s a uniquely modern problem: We’ve never lived in a moment of time when access to vast catalogs of recorded music has ever been easier. Yet music discovery – the deeply subjective process of sifting through everything out there to find new audio candy – has never been harder. Quite frankly, as mediums like radio and music blogs have been deemphasized from the zeitgeist, the process of music discovery really sucks.
We can thank the platforms and the algorithms for that, indexing art by genre like a periodic table of elements instead of signal boosting the natural curiosity a bona fide tastemaker.
Since 2015, New York State Music has crafted a March Madness bracket to showcase some of the hardworking, up-and-coming musical talent in the Empire State. Browsing through the brackets is a lot of fun because (A. you get to discover new music the old fashion way, using your brain and (B. there are all sorts of gems, like this badass music video from Rochester’s own The Dirty Pennies – a little bit of surf rock, a little bit of gritty Americana.
Go check it out. And happy digging!