Shit Patrol, an automated playlist

03 Nov 2023

Years ago, I was involved in college radio. Every week, we would get hundreds of new albums from bands & promoters that wanted us to put their music on air.

We listened to every single CD we received. At least a few tracks, at least 30 seconds per. We called this Shit Patrol, and it was as mind expanding as it was brain melting. Often 100 genres in as many minutes.

Today, the struggle to discover new music is real. As with all media, trying to stay on top of what’s new feels like drinking from a firehose. Instead, you might throw on your favorite album for the 100th time this year, or lean into some form of curation - Spotify Discover, Bandcamp Daily, your favorite creator.

Or, you can attempt the sisyphean task of listening to every band that plays a live show in New York City every week!

If you brave this, you will be overwhelmed. You will hear things you hate. Things that confuse you. You will be blown away by a song that has only been listened to 312 times. Then, you can have the immediate gratification of getting to hear that band live! (or the disappointment of not being able to!)

• Concert listings come from ohmyrockness.com (via an internal API and a clever webscrape)
• Built with js, postgres, AWS lambda
• Github repo