Our Gen Z Intern on the joys of discovering new music!

A few words on new musical finds from guest columnist (and my nephew) Aidan

Design by Aidan Muffoletto

Hello there music-lovers, Aidan Muffoletto here.

I’ve been an intern at Dharma Din Creatives for a bit now and we’ve been sharing our music opinions here, whether that be through speakers or word of mouth. We all have different perspectives on music and what platforms we listen through. My taste apparently was exotic, yet familiar enough that I was asked to write a small opinion piece on it.

My goal here is just to show the artists I’ve grown to love, and maybe introduce some people to new music.

1. jschlatt: Come Fly With Me

My true music journey began when one of my favorite YouTube content creators came out with his own Christmas album, in response to past YouTuber music and AI covers. He chose a great selection of songs to do over and had a wonderful voice, so I knew I had to get the album on vinyl. Getting into vinyl was when I opened the floodgates.

Of course, my grandparents jumped all over the idea of vinyl. We got The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, The Carpenters, Tom Jones, all very good musicians. It was just the thing I needed to kick myself off of video game OSTs. After all, the only stuff I had heard was pop and rap, which I never really liked.

These foreign (to me, at least) genres opened my eyes to a whole new world of song. New bands from around the world were popping up on my feeds. One of them caught my attention through YouTube autoplay. It was a very calming duet between a man and a woman - kinda like Frank Sinatra’s Something Stupid, but it was Japanese.

2. Lamp: Heart of the Sunrise

All of these different artists come from different countries and play different genres of music from different decades. They were all good, though. I showed them around whenever we’d be talking about music, and the reactions were all pretty positive, even from some of the pickiest listeners I know.

Now, Spotify has its own algorithm and its own selection of artists. With Spotify only knowing what I already like, because I ported over a playlist of mine from YouTube, its smart shuffle feature would have to come up with something that was similar to all that I listen to. It couldn’t just find something that I checked out and never came back to - it doesn’t have that information. Their AI would need to piece together something from an artist I never knew, but was still like what I already know.

3. HOA: Come Together

The algorithm must’ve taken the region of Lamp and combined it with the music of The Beatles because HOA is a South Korean Beatles tribute band with only ~70,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. It was surprising how good and faithful some of their stuff is for being so unknown. All of the other artists I regularly listen to all have at least 1.5 million monthly listeners - except HOA.

I knew I had to show them to just about everyone. How couldn’t I? They were awesome, and nobody knew who they were.

Once Jeff heard HOA, he probably thought that my taste in music was good enough for me to write about. So that’s exactly what I did. There’s also Whitewoods, who are good, but I didn’t really think they’d fit in very well with this audience.

This piece wasn’t just meant to be me writing about myself and nothing else - sorry if it felt that way. It’s more meant to be a message reminding all of us to change things up now and then. Maybe reset your YouTube history, or play around with Spotify smart shuffle. Whatever you do, keep discovering, music-lovers.