FOR THE RECORD

For the Record is a conversation series with all manner of music heads about their stories and the music that makes them. It’s a new Crate Coalition experiment in building connective listening graphs.

For the “why” behind For the Record, this stretch from our manifesto is useful:

Streaming platforms promise listeners personalization but the tradeoff is isolation. By obscuring other people’s behavior in their platforms, they remove opportunities for shared meaning. They remove the human element that’s so inherent to music, and they force us to gather on exploitative social platforms detached from the music itself.

In a nutshell, where and how we discover music are important parts of its impact. Music can take us back in time. It can trigger vivid recollections, transporting us back to that show, that road trip, that house party, that person. Music “acts as a contextual trace and memory cue.” It lies there latent in our minds, right next to the people that made the discovery possible – until in a great aural burst it all comes roaring to the fore.

The music and the people, then, are inseparable, but that’s not clear in a streaming landscape that is increasingly abstracted from music’s context. Music is a thunderous, non-partisan, connective thread that brings us together. That’s why we built the Crate Coalition, and that’s why we started For the Record.

To date we’ve had 20 For the Record conversations. We’ve spoken with celebrated music journalists, record store owners, promoters, radio broadcasters, DJs, musicians, blog founders, music researchers, festival owners, A&R folk, label heads, and web3 builders. Each has a unique story whose various vignettes are woven together by music. Across myriad scenes and locales – Brazil, Australia, Portugal, the UK, and various corners of the US – music has been the recurring motif.

MUSIC MAPPING

In each conversation, we stamp every music mention, and in the background, we’re mapping these names to form those yet unseen connective threads between people.

For example, our first conversation was with Lauren Murada, the Marketing Manager and a resident DJ at the Brooklyn club, Good Room. She mentioned 25 music people and communities.

Our second guest, Kaitlyn Davies – membership lead at FWB and head of curatorial partnerships at Refraction – mentioned another 27 people and communities.

Zoom out & this listening graph gets big quickly. Through 20 episodes, there have been 441 total music mentions, each one representing an artist, label, venue, album, festival, record shop, blog, or radio station that’s important enough to a person’s story to be mentioned in a 30-minute conversation.

The most mentioned entity is the Joy Division/New Order continuum (New Order is the regathering of Joy Division’s parts after Ian Curtis’s tragic suicide), where the original iteration was mentioned thrice and their succession, twice. Burial and The Beatles have also been mentioned three times.

Now none of these are surprising – they’re all household names. The context is where the magic lies, the manner in which they’re mentioned – as music heard around the house as a child, as fodder for stoned college discussion, or as essential inspiration for someone’s own music-making.

These names round out our stories, and offer points of connection between all those involved: the artist, the listeners, and everyone in between. For the Record exists because there's so much value to be cultivated around this love, if only the connections are shared and made visible.

Tweeting (or posting on Instagram, TikTok, or similar) to form that connection, as seen above, isn’t ideal. Twitter et al are centralized, algorithmically curated third parties that exist separately from the music and don’t have clear ways to build and cultivate a music community (nor is it designed or financially incentivized to do so), but at least it’s visible. (At Grey Matter, we’re working on unifying this experience in more decentralized ways.)

And while making these connections may not be as valuable for the artists mentioned above – they’ve already found their communities and earned their keeps – for an emerging artist, that connective tissue is huge. What an honor to be part of someone’s musical story! And what an opportunity to lean in and cultivate that connection toward a truly meaningful relationship.

Alabaster DePlume was the only artist mentioned multiple times in our “three artists of note that you heard for the first time in the past year” question, mentioned by Kaitlyn Davies and Lani Trock.

There have been hundreds of artists named during the series that would likely find immense value in knowing these connections to their music exists. To make those visible and illustrate their importance, we’re building an interactive map/graph of the For the Record mentions. We hope to make it public in the next few months, and it will be:

• a public good

• a potent source of music discovery

• authentic, non-algorithmic exposure for everyone mentioned

• a foundation to build more value and closer connection

ARCHIVAL: PROOF OF CONNECTION

The blockchain is an excellent archival device, and it’s great at verification. You may have heard of ‘proof of stake’ or ‘proof of work’ protocols, or ‘proof of impact’ tokens. We’re archiving each episode and minting them as ‘proof of connection’ – enduring evidence that these connections exist.

If you fancy stamping your name to any of them – because you appreciate the guest, the people mentioned, the ethos, or all of the above – there are 10 free editions available on both Nina Protocol and Lens.

DESERT ISLAND DISCS

While we continue to build the map in the background, we can already lean into the music discovery value of these conversations. One of the key moments of For the Record is the infamous desert island question: you’re going to a desert island, which three records do you bring?

It’s impossible to answer and that’s the point. But in a given moment – and in the context of the rough, lonely living conditions of a castaway – something is revealed. These are highly personal choices – music that someone would listen to by themselves. And with each trio, there tends to be a lot of diversity, accounting for the variety one might seek during a long desert island stay. Always, the music is excellent.

So far, Burial’s Untrue is the only record to get mentioned more than once (twice, by Mark Redito and Montrey Whittaker) – though it’s also worth noting that Smashing Pumpkins have had two entries, one for Siamese Dream and one for Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (by Ben Steidel and Mark McGlinchey, respectively).

By decade, the mentions are broken down as such:

The living playlist of every desert island album lives is here:

REFLECTIONS THUS FAR

20 episodes in, this is also an opportunity for reflection. We’ve learned that building a well-structured database and finding tools that best visualize it – while we grow the database in real-time, week by week – is no small task, especially with a small team with minimal resources. Another challenge arises around verifying context as we record it from conversation to database. Firsthand experience is integral – specifics can be difficult to validate without it.

As we document the mentions and build the database, we find ourselves asking questions like: was that reference a club night, a roving party, or a label – or maybe all three? How do you spell that small defunct 70s label that never had a digital presence?

Getting these right is important, not just because we should strive to contextualize the truth, but because finding overlap in niche spaces is particularly special. What might a connection be like for two people who found out they were at the same club night back in 1996? What other music might they connect over today, reflecting on the decades that have followed?

For all these reasons, we envisage the caretaking process to resemble that of a community garden, where people can pop by to tend to the weeds. Did we spell something wrong? Present it incorrectly, or at least insufficiently? If we did, and if you’ve been there, please feel free to prune the hedges.

There’s also opportunity to interact with more diverse voices, and to speak with people from scenes we’ve yet to represent in our series. That will be a focus as we head into 2024. As always, our mission remains the same: connect people through music and build enduring value for those who make it.

For the Record conversations happen live in the Crate Coalition Discord, usually on Thursdays around noon ET. They’re open to anyone who'd like to join. Hope to see you there 💽