Eclectic Tech Carnival - Fully Booked! Please only come if you are already registered.

In this workshop, I want to share my workflow for discovering, listening to, and organizing music.

I'm deeply frustrated by how Spotify and other companies are shaping the relationship between music and its audience, and I've spent years trying to build a sustainable, ethical, affordable, and efficient system that allows me to build a deep connection with my music library, and to maintain an ongoing exploration and discovery outside of the patterns imposed by influences I don't want (such as recommendation algorithms). In this workshop I would like to share my knowledge and to motivate participants to think about the ways the tools they use to interact with music shape their tastes, interests, and patterns of listening, and how one can take control over these processes.

My approach consists of using private torrent trackers, a remote server, a tool that automatically sorts my library according to given parameters, and some simple scripts I wrote (one of them, for example, randomly selects 10 albums from my library and allows me to play one of them).

I also want to facilitate a discussion about the ethics and politics of different approaches to listening, since both using Spotify and using torrents are questionable actions from an ethical standpoint.

In the final part of the workshop, participants will be invited to share their knowledge and discuss the tools they use in their own musical journeys.