"The Future Looks Viral" is a weekly series where we profile the people behind an innovative, new online project, be it a parody Twitter account, web series or artsy Instagram profile. They all have one thing in common: the potential to go viral.
It's no secret that the digital revolution has been unkind to the music industry. But we sometimes don't realize how much the Internet has sucked the fun out of listening to music.
Sure, there's more ways to access music these days than ever before through music streaming sites, digital downloads and social media. However, as much as technology has made it easier to create, share and play music, it has also made finding music more complicated. With features like search tools and algorithms that make suggestions based on your preferences, many of the platforms we use to listen to and discover new music today, like Spotify or iTunes, really don't make our encounters with music as random as they used to be when a provocative album cover could just catch your eye as you walked down the aisle of a record store.
Predominant.ly hopes to replicate that experience for the 21st century. The new music discovery website gets rid of the usual filters you can apply to your so-called music discovery, such as searching by artist, genre or music that sounds like what you already enjoy, and instead narrows it down to give you only one choice: color.
Head over to Predominant.ly, and you'll be met with just a gradient of nearly every color you could think of. Pick a spot to click, and the database will return several albums whose dominant color on their covers is the one you selected. This database of about 150,000 albums so far comes from iTunes, so Predominant.ly works similarly to that, allowing you to click on an album to see its tracks, play snippets of songs and go to iTunes to purchase the music if you so choose. Technically, Predominant.ly could make money off of that referrer link, but that isn't up and running yet, one of Predominant.ly's creators Dan Powers told T-Lounge in an interview over Skype.
For instance, if you click on a bright yellow area, you'll be met with such sunny-looking albums as Jack Johnson's In Between Dreams, Ella Fitzgerald's The Best of the Song Books and David Guetta's Who's That Chick? EP featuring Rihanna.
"You kind of always want to search, or you're used to searching, and we deliberately didn't include that in the interface," said Lizzie Malcolm, another one of the creators of Predominant.ly, in a Skype interview with T-Lounge. "All you can do is sort of blindly click around and explore."
Malcolm and Powers, along with their fellow designers Susana Carvalho and Kai Bernau, are part of a design collective called Open Work located in the Hague in the Netherlands, though the team members are originally from all over the world. Predominant.ly just started out as a fun project for Open Work to fiddle around with on the weekends, but the creators quickly discovered it could be something more.
"As we started developing it further, we realized its potential as kind of a reaction to what listening to music or finding music online has become like, where everything is just sort of like a sortable and filterable list," Powers said. "We saw that this had some potential to sort of bring some of the serendipitous aspects of music discovery back."
With more than 900 colors included in the database so far, it would be pretty difficult to come across the same set of albums twice in one sitting. You'll also notice that in addition to unique RGB values, each shade also has a pretty unusual name, like "University of Tennessee Orange," "Booger Green" and "Space Cadet," taken from the blog XKCD's Color Survey.
"For me, that's a really nice aspect of it. It's real human beings that named these colors," Malcolm said.
Since music is obviously an aural medium, you may think it's kind of weird to find music based on something as visual as color. You know, don't judge a book by its cover and all that jazz. However, since the dawn of the modern music industry, an artist's image is inevitably tied to the music.
"It always has been, up until the past decade or so, that album artwork has been a really important part of a band and their image," Malcolm said. "We are all graphic designers, and it's the sort of dream job to be asked to design an album cover. So for us, and I think for a lot of people, album artwork is a really important part of the music."
So will we all abandon our search and algorithmic ways that have helped us navigate the wild frontier that is online music in favor of music discovery sites like Predominant.ly? Probably not right now, but the site still has its uses.
"Well I just hope that it's fun. We've had quite a lot of nice tweets about it. Like, just people saying, 'Wow, I've wasted a half an hour on here just clicking around,'" Malcolm said. "I think the main goal is really supposed to open up this experience of finding music and let people have fun with it again."
