What goes on here

As this site was originally set up, in the wee hours of every Friday morning we'd automatically scan Spotify-curated playlists for the latest new album releases. In November 2024 Spotify cut off access to that info, so now we check the MusicBrainz database nightly for new releases. We then check for album availability on Spotify. Albums are ranked by their Spotify popularity score and for the next two weeks, we conduct focused searches for articles about the 133 most popular albums. Why 133? Because that's the number of daily searches we're able to execute for free between Google and Bing custom search engines. After a month, albums are removed from the system. (I used to search on all albums for a full month, but discovered that if an album doesn't generate an article or review within about eight days of release it's probably not going to. Reducing the number of albums searched means finding current items sooner for albums that are still generating online interest.)

About the project

This site is a spare-time project that fuses my longtime passion for music and journalism with a more recent interest in programming and web development. I basically wanted to figure out how to automate the weekly process of finding out which items on my Spotify Release Radar playlist were full albums and discovering what folks were writing about them.

I've worked on a few other sites and various data projects, but this has been the most complicated so far. It includes some algorithms and a bit of machine learning to make it almost maintenance-free, which was the goal. I'm pretty satisfied with it, but welcome any feedback. And I do have a few features and improvements planned...

Coming soon (hopefully)

Some things I'm thinking about adding:

• Email newsletters to allow fans to follow specific albums or genres and get timely updates when new articles are posted
• Personalized emails linked to a person's Review Radar playlist
• I'm looking at how to make the genre pages less of an archive and more of a useful destination for people who follow a particular type of music
• Adding artist twitter feed to artist pages

Known issues and limitations

There are a few bugs and flaws that I'm aware of; I am working on them, where I can.

• I had an embedded Spotify album player on album pages, but it wasn't working very well on many devices
• Speaking of devices, I've made some updates to optimize the layout of most pages on smaller screens, but there are still some things I'm looking into to make them even better.