[mustacheemperor]

I haven't experienced the top-40 veer, but it seems like any jazz song from absolutely any subgenre will eventually lead to Freddie Freeloader off Kind of Blue, and then the algorithm just continues to generate from that direction. It's become a running joke between my partner and I. "Just threw on a Cal Tjader album - how many radio tracks do you think we'll get before it's a Miles Davis station instead?" I recall back when I used Spotify, that service's radio similarly insisted that any playlist incorporating even a single indie rap song MUST become a radio featuring JPEGMafia.

It really highlights the limitations of these automated discovery services. I would love a service that makes it easier to explore the vast amounts of recorded music in jazz's various subgenres, and current streaming services are not it. The human curated playlists on Apple Music are pretty good for exploring a genre, at least, but relatively surface level. You are unlikely to discover the deep cuts I'd expect to surface two hours into a generative radio off an album that was itself kind of obscure.

Gosh, I miss what.cd. The industry destroyed it and never replaced it with anything close to it. I have to imagine so many of those cassette rips, like lost Dilla tapes handed out at shows in the 90s, are just gone forever now.