This month’s First Friday playlist comes from Wes Jones – Senior Software Developer.

We talk about DSPs and artist storefronts a lot at Muserk. It’s no secret that probably the most influential medium for art, fashion, culture, and music right now is TikTok. For me, it’s completely changed how I find new music.

Years ago, before I left for college, I played in a metal band so I spent a lot time playing with other artists, traveling, meeting new people, and that was most often how I heard about new music. Maybe it was a recommendation from someone I met, an opener, a member of this band played in that band. A few years ago you could kind of curate avenues for new music to be force-fed to you based on what you were interested in. Pandora was a huge help and then we finally got Spotify in the US, but this was still a pretty active approach to finding new music. Remember “NOW That’s What I Call Music”? I kind of ripped off that idea and I would spend a ton of time every year finding new music and adding it a playlist called like NOW 30XX which would be all the music I found for that year. I still do this today, and I’m on NOW 3021 (I make it the current year, but 1000 years into the future).

Now with TikTok I’m able to take a more passive approach to finding new music as it’s kind of fed to me as I’m consuming other content. Here is a playlist of various songs and artists I that I was first introduced to through TikTok.