1,500 greatest song intros

A friend of mine just shared a Spotify playlist. 1,500 of the greatest song intros ever.

Not the greatest songs. The greatest intros. Those first few seconds that make you stop what you're doing. Raise your eyebrows. Smile. Sit open-mouthed.

He runs an indie book publisher. This is just something he made, because he's been paying attention for decades.

I asked him how he did it.

Community searches. Grunt work. Going through his record collection. Asking people. Listening.

Zero AI involved.

You could reasonably say a model trained on enough listening would surface plenty of these. Probably true. It would also surface the obvious ones, and the obvious ones aren't why you'd open the playlist.

An algorithm can tell you what's popular. It can't tell you what's great.

Popular is data. Great is taste, built over years of curiosity and obsession.

AI can find the pattern. It can't feel the shiver.

My friend's name is DB Burkeman. He runs the rather superb Blurring Books.

P.S. Blurring describe themselves as “a publishing house focused on art, music and counterculture... by appealing to both academics and MORONS we seek to blur the lines of what constitutes an art book altogether - no coffee table required ;)”