Manifesto

These days Spotify receives between 60,000 and 100,000 new tracks per day, compared with about 100 per day in the US in, say, the 1950s. Music making has been democratised, and a decent slug of these songs are actually not bad, even in the absence of gatekeeper record companies, avaricious publishing houses and obscene personal managers.

We all know the music industry is, and always has been, horrific for 99.9% of artists, even the big names at times. Power-law economics dictate that most artists today will get a pittance unless they are streamed, and a pittance even when they are abundantly streamed. We music lovers somehow know all of this, yet still we must choose our music in the face of abundance. Both an abundance of new music and an abundance of playlists: Spotify claims over 9 billion playlists exist.

We at Rebel Groove Collective have decided that what we want is playlists focused on the listener experience, drawing from the widest eras of music, and we want the playlists you like to change frequently, to keep them interesting while holding their shape and purpose. You find the set of playlists you like for how you lead your life, and you demand that they change actively, while respecting the things you love about them.

As the world is about to be swamped by AI-in-everything, we also want to respect and prioritise real human beings: not only you, the listener, but also the musicians, the poor sods who love music so much they dedicate a decent fraction of their waking hours to get it to us for essentially no reward. The least we can do is put them ahead of the AI queue. We are not editorially against some uses of AI in music, such as mastering, arrangement, marketing or demo creation. But we will remain vigilant for 100% AI creations. This might be a losing battle, but we say, let us fight it.

Music for Humans.

Most playlists do not have a point of view. They drift. They start well enough, then soften, then fill up with whatever the algorithm thinks will keep you from skipping. You do not notice it happening, but you feel it: the edge goes, the thing you came for dissolves, and you are left with something passable. Others are well-meaning Frankenstein monsters made up of hundreds and hundreds of tracks.

We are not interested in passable.

Rebel Groove Collective exists outside that system, free of the because-you-listened-to logic and the smoothing of rough edges to keep engagement metrics tidy. Just a set of playlists built with intent, each one trying to do something specific and doing it properly.

That means we interfere. If a playlist needs tightening, it gets tightened. If it needs rotating, it rotates. Some will settle into a slower cadence. Others get rebuilt daily because they demand it. The point is simple: if you come back to something here, it should still work.

We chase effect rather than completeness. A playlist should hold together, carry you through, and leave you somewhere slightly different from where you started. Sometimes that is maintaining a focus. Sometimes it is momentum. Sometimes it is something harder to name. But if you come back, it should be because you trust that whatever you press play on next has been put there for a reason.