What happens when you stop letting streaming apps pick your music?


This is the truth. Every streaming platform decides what you hear based on what's popular. The same 20 tracks float to the top for every artist. The same recommendations cycle through. The algorithm isn't broken. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do: keep you listening to the safe, familiar, high-play-count stuff.

I stopped accepting it about a year ago so I built Sonic Oracle because I wanted to hear the other 80 tracks. The ones buried in an artist's catalog. The ones no algorithm would ever surface because they don't have 40 million streams. And now Sonic Oracle does it for you.

If you haven't followed my posts here: Sonic Oracle is a music discovery engine for Tidal and Qobuz. You type in an artist, pick a depth level, and it builds a permanent playlist saved directly to your streaming library. 10 million+ artists. No AI. No promoted content. Every artist is a real person with a real discography. Roon, Audirvana, Lumin, Naim, Aurender, dCS, everything picks it up automatically.

There are three depth levels. Essential is genre-pure. Put in a jazz trumpet player, get only trumpet players back. Put in a punk band, get only punk. Balanced widens the circle into territory you wouldn't have explored on your own. Adventurous is where it gets interesting. It crosses genre lines entirely and finds connections no streaming platform would ever make. I've seen jazz searches return soul artists, rock searches pull in ambient composers. The kind of discoveries you used to make by accident at a record store.

And now there's The Vault. This is the one I'm most excited about. Sonic Oracle's proprietary database. Built from the ground up over the past year. A separate track catalog with its own logic, its own connections, its own selection. No streaming platform has it. No other tool uses it.

Here's what makes it different. I ran Aretha Franklin through The Vault twice. 63 tracks each time. Over 90% were different between the two playlists. Completely different songs from across her entire career. Your playlist is yours and nobody else will ever get the same one. Toggle over to Popular and you get well-known tracks weighted by streaming numbers. Still better than what Tidal or Qobuz will give you because the artists behind it come from Sonic Oracle's engine, not theirs. But flip back to The Vault and you'll hear why I spent a year building it.

I built this because I was tired to listen to the same tracks on repeat. Turned out a lot of other people felt the same.

https://sonicoracle.music/

Happy discovering,

Alessandro

panyc77

@oberoniaomnia you state:

And it circumvents all streaming and the intrinsic exploitation of artists.
 

Is my interpretation correct that you don’t do any streaming through the various platforms like Tidal, Spotify, and Qobuz due to their intrinsic exploitation of artists? Beyond physical formats, do you do something like HD Tracks then?

On the flip-side, the argument can be made that OP’s website is supporting starving artists from independent record labels that don’t have the mainstream associations or appeal (even within the pipelines of the streaming services AI and algorithms). Exposing listeners and potential fans to these otherwise ignored artists seems like it would be beneficial, no?

 

@toro3 You are correct that I don't do any streaming anymore. In the early 2000 I used pandora for a while, but once learning how badly artists get exploited, I dropped that as well.

I do listen to digital music using Roon/Audirvana server. I buy a lot of physical media on Bandcamp, particularly on BC Friday, and those purchases include digital files. I have also purchased digital-only releases. I have nothing against digital format, I am opposed for streaming company C-levels getting rich at the expense of artists, and I vote with my $$$.

Re HD tracks, most of what I listen to is not available at more than 16bit/44.1. Occasionally 24bit. 

Souldisco on YouTube recently did an analysis of revenue artists receive from various sources. Streaming is WAAAAAY below any physical media. It is not even funny. It's in German, though.

If you really want to support minor artists, BUY their music. Latest arrival here is for instance Hackedepicciotto's "Lichtung", my favorite of theirs so far. Also preordered the third Yakima Jera, the new Diavol Strain, Rope Sect, L'Avenir, Rue Oberkampf, Oppenheimer MkII. Recent digital-only purchases include Velvet Velour, Contre Soirée, tAngerinecAt, Vioflesh.

My main point is, if one pretends to like music, then please invest some time in finding it, don't leave it to ANY algorithm. Then support those artists you like by BUYING their music.

I run both Tidal and Qobuz.  Mainly Qobuz.    The Sonic Auricle app only recognized Tidal?   How do I get it to recognize both?    Or just Qobuz if it can only app,y favorites to one 

Thanks

Steve  

@oddiofyl
 

Hi Steve,

Currently Sonic Oracle only allows you to connect to one platform at a time. Multi-platform login is on the roadmap.

Alessandro

Hi , thanks for the quick reply.    Is there a way to undo the connection and have it bind to quobuz?