Crate Digging: Music Discovery
Location
We’ll meet at WFMU, 43 Montgomery Street, Jersey City, at 4pm. For those of you who drive, I’ve been told there are many nearby parking garages. I’m also happy to meet folks in Manhattan for a group trek across the Hudson. There’s a 3:30pm PATH train 🚂 from the World Trade Center — we can meet up at at the Entrance to the PATH (on the western end of the lower level of the Oculus), near Epicurie Bouloud (see photo below!), at 3:20 — which will get us to Exchange Place by 3:33; from there, it’s a six-minute walk to WFMU. If you miss the 3:30 train, there’s another at 3:45. N.B. PATH allows for tap (phone/credit card) payment 🙂
Agenda
We’ll visit one of the nation’s preeminent, awesomest free-form radio stations, WFMU. In conversation with Station Manager and Program Director Ken Freedman plus our special guest, music journalist Liz Pelly — author of Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist(Atria, 2025) and much else — we’ll consider how transformations across the entire music ecology (record labels, radio, venues, streaming services, criticism, and beyond) have devalued creative labor and cheated listeners. More importantly, we’ll explore old-school, alternative, non-algorithmic means of resistance and reclamation — as well as agents, like free-form radio and public libraries, that can support these efforts.
To Prepare for Today
- I recommend that you read or listen to Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine — or watch (or listen to) Liz Pelly in conversation with WNYC’s John Schaefer at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (March 11, 2025) [video: 34:35 > 1:33:36] and read Pelly, “Library Music,” Pioneer Works Broadcast (September 10, 2021).
- See Ann Powers’s September 14, 2025, “NPR Music Newsletter” on music discovery; unfortunately the newsletter doesn’t seem to have been archived, but I saved a large excerpt to my Pinboard bookmarks; I hope it makes sense even out of context 🙂 [Update! Elena Razlogova shared the full newsletter with me on March 31! 🤗]
- Read John Erik Hmiel, “Tuning Out the Algorithm at WFMU,” Jacobin (April 13, 2025). For more, see the work of Elena Razlogova in the Supplemental Resources below.
- Peruse the website of WFMU, review the programming schedule, and try to sample a few hours of shows over the preceding week(s) 🎧
- Tell us a bit about your own music discovery — the methods, tools, communities, etc., to which you turn for your own preferred musical genres and scenes. How do you find out about new music, and how have those strategies evolved across different phases of your life? Please share your Music Discovery Memoir on our shared slide deck (and, if possible, please try to post by noon on April 1 so I can review — and perhaps even summarize or create some hand-outs — before class 🙂
Fieldwork Documentation
Supplemental Resources
- Bandcamp Clubs.
- Claire Biddles, “Steve Albini Believed in a Democratic Music Industry,” Jacobin (May 10, 2024).
- Josh Crowe, “Part Pub, Part Club: The Rise and Rise of Listening Bars,” Dazed (July 4, 2025); “Why Listening Parties Are Everywhere Right Now,” Dazed (January 13, 2026).
- Christopher Cwynar, “Brick, Mortar, and Screen: Networked Digital Media, Popular Music, and the Reinvention of the Public Radio Station,” Journal of Radio & Audio Media 27:1 (2020): 74-92.
- Tim Davis, “Listening to Music Is Better When It’s a Conversation Among Friends,” The New York Times Magazine (February 13, 2024).
- Santiago Delucchi, “Music Powerhouse: KEXP’s Argentinian Host, Albini Cabrera,” TIGRE Sounds (November 8, 2024).
- Ryan Dombal, “Liz Pelly on the Impact of Her Anti-Spotify Book ‘Mood Machine’ and Where We Go From Here,” Hearing Things (January 14, 2026).
- Eric Drott, Streaming Music, Streaming Capital (Duke University Press, 2024).
- Omar Garcia, “Melting Pot Music,” Dirt (November 2, 2023)
- Robin James, The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
- Katherine Rye Jewell, Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
- Shannon Mattern, “Collecting Sound,” “Collecting Media” Class (University of Pennsylvania, Spring 2024).
- Lily Moayeri, “Libraries (Yes, Libraries!) Are Leading the Crusade in for New Music Discovery,” SPIN (February 28, 2024).
- Marcus J. Moore, “A Music Obsession That’s Adventurous and Soothing,” The New York Times (September 24, 2021).
- Amanda Petrusich, “” The New Yorker (March 8, 2021).
- David C. Porter, “The Discovered Country,” Garden Scenery (March 27, 2026) [on genre and “new” music].
- Elena Razlogova, “WFMU-FM,” Radical Radio: Freeform Radio Archive (August 2024);“Freeform Radio and the History of Music Streaming” in Michelle Hilmes and Andrew Bottomley, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Radio and Podcasting (Oxford University Press, 2024): 22-40; with Mack Hagood, “Hacking Music and Media; Freeform Radio, Audience Agency, and Digital History,” Phantom Power (November 16, 2024); more of Razlogova’s work here.
- Nick Seaver, Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
- Dave the Spazz, ed., The Best of the Art and Writing of WFMU-FM 91.1fm (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).
- Justin Turford and Joff Casciani, “The Four Factors of Crate Digging in the 21st Century,” Truth & Lies (November 24, 2014).