I’d go on artist profiles on Spotify and look through the ‘Fans Also Like’ page, clicking at random and seeing if I liked their songs.

I didn’t know where to start, so I began with Spotify playlists like ‘Sweet Soul Sunday’ and ‘Queer Folk’. I listen to endless music when I study, and while working on my undergrad dissertation in the Bill Bryson Library last Epiphany term, I began a long process of active discovery. The music artists I gave my support to were an extremely homogeneous group On some level I must have thought these artists “just weren’t making the music I liked” – clearly not the case. It never occurred to happy, ignorant me to specifically strive for a more diverse music library, so the algorithms in my streaming services could not have known I was interested, meaning that they didn’t show on my ‘Recommended on YouTube’, for example. There, of course – they were always there, I just never looked for them. Where were the ‘sad’ BAME and LGBTQ+ artists I could be listening to? I realised, to my great shame and horror, that though I counted myself as an ‘ally’, the music artists I gave my support to were an extremely homogeneous group of people, namely predominantly white, heterosexual artists. This was the first time it had ever occurred to me to consider the politics of my music taste. Then a friend of mine joked that my music taste was just “sad white people with guitars”. Genre-wise, the music I like varies quite a lot – in my early teens I listened to rock and punk pop, but I have since moved to indie pop and folk, with the occasional soul or jazz. This time last year, I set a resolution for 2019: to work on diversifying my music taste.įirst, some context: English is not my first language, but at this point in my life, I mostly listen to music in English.

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