Horsegirl – World of Pots and Pans

A friend invited me to take part in her Music League back in the spring. It’s an app/website where you and some number of other people are given a theme and have a few days to anonymously submit a song that fits the theme, then a playlist is generated (this all syncs up through Spotify) and you have a few days to listen to it before voting on the songs. You can leave a comment on all of the songs but at least in this league, you are required to up vote six songs and down vote one. Then the votes are tallied and there are weekly first, second, and third place finishers, as well as a cumulative total for the overall winner.

I can’t remember if I ever wrote about Turntable.fm but most of the people in this league are people I know from that app/website. Turntable was forced to shut down when it ran into problems with streaming and copyright issues, but it reemerged two years ago or so using YouTube as its streaming source. I loved the first iteration of Turntable. I have met up with several of those people in real life at concerts; they’re good people who listen to great music. But I don’t really have the time? energy? something, to keep up with it now. So when this friend (one of the original Turntable crew) texted and asked if I wanted to be in the Music League, she said up front that it wasn’t a huge time commitment, you have several days to submit and vote, I figured I could give it a try.

The themes have been things like post a song by a band with siblings, or a song with strings, a song released in 1989, a song in French, a song released since June 2022, etc. Someone in the league is the admin and sets up the weekly themes so you can see what’s coming up and plan ahead. If two people try to submit songs by the same band it will warn you that there has already been a song by that band submitted so try something else. There have been a bunch of times when my first, second, and even third choice bands were already used. But you can’t see what other people have submitted until the cutoff time (or all submissions have been made).

Anyway, it is a lot of fun, easy to keep up with, and I have heard a lot of new music that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have discovered. Like Horsegirl. They appeared a couple of times in the line up and were talked about in the accompanying chat in the app. Plus, it has been good to “see” these friends again, even in this very minimal way. I highly recommend it!