VIRGOMOON'S BLACK MUSIC COLLECTION: a series of playlists where i collect black artists from various genres to showcase the talent of my community; particularly that outside of typical genres you see us in.
black people created rock btw: my magnum opus. as the title suggests, here is rock music made by black people or bands that feature at least one black musician, particularly the lead singer and/or songwriter. classic rock, pop punk, hardcore, punk rock, goth, and more. this includes rap rock remixes and rock inspired rap tracks. songs range anywhere from the 60s to now.
a southern gothic tale: this playlist is just like the above, except featuring black artists who make primarily country music. there's bluegrass, folk, blues, and the like here. including covers and crossover songs. again, older music as well as newer tracks are featured here.
black alternative: black music that isn't just generic "pop", "rap", or "rnb". nothing wrong with those genres, of course, but obviously, we make all kinds of music and deserve to be recognized there too. here you'll find hyper-pop, bedroom pop, indie pop, dark pop; all those trendy sub - genres.
juicy fruit, certified bubble yum: bonus points if you know the song the title is from. anyway, here's bubblegum pop by black artists because for some reason black pop girls get labeled as "urban" and "rnb" when they're not? not necessarily? music from the 80s and on.
black girl punk!: punk and punk adjacent music from alternative black women in music. including fem presenting artists.
we've always been here: a new addition to the collection! this is every song from the various playlists collected into one major playlist. the only missing one is juicy fruit, as i wanted to showcase more unknown / underground artists and/or the songs from known artists that are a little more obscure because they're showcasing alternative genres than what we're used to from them. for example, don't hurt yourself from beyonce. a blues rock song from a known pop artist. still adding music to it as of april 2025.
I only just found the band, but this new instrumental/baroque/thall/avant-garde metal EP from MIRAR? It might be one of the most brutal things I’ve ever heard
The first track is an interpolation of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with a breakdown that made me yell "let's fucking go" out loud (3:25-4:01). The fourth song begins with a sound that can only be described as renaissance fair metal (12:08-13:00). By the penultimate song they are purely messing with you, they're jumping into hardstyle for no apparent reason (19:30-20:10). And then their last track is an 8-minute long piece about insomnia which made me feel real, physical fear (20:58-25:00) before turning into a somber piano solo. I don’t even know how to describe some of this properly, there are moments where it doesn’t even sound like music anymore, it sounds like someone is doing surgery on your brain
there’s a website where you put in two musicians/artists and it makes a playlist that slowly transitions from one musician’s style of music to the other’s
I feel like this could be useful for trying to slowly pull yourself away from your depression music to something more uplifting without it being jarring…
.mp3 is very small, but uses lossy compression which means it's lower quality
.flac is smaller than .wav, but uses lossless compression so it's high quality
.m4a is an audio file format that apple uses. that's all i really know
downloading the music
doubledouble.top is a life saver. you can download from a variety of services including but not limited to apple music, spotify, soundcloud, tidal, deezer, etc.
i'd recommend ripping your music from tidal or apple music since they're the best quality (i think apple music gives you lossless audio anyway. .m4a can be both lossy and lossless, but from the text on doubledouble i assume they're ripping HQ files off apple music)
i also love love love cobalt.tools for ripping audio/video from youtube (they support a lot of other platforms too!)
of course, many artists have their music on bandcamp — purchase or download directly from them if you can. bandcamp offers a variety of file formats for download
file conversion
if you're downloading from apple music with doubledouble, it spits out an .m4a file.
.m4a is ok for some people but if you prefer .flac, you may wanna convert it. ffmpeg is a CLI (terminal) tool to help with media conversion
if you're on linux or macOS, you can use parameter expansion to batch convert all files in a folder. put the files in one place first, then with your terminal, cd into the directory and run:
for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.flac"; done
this converts from .m4a to .flac — change the file extensions if needed.
soulseek
another way to get music is through soulseek. soulseek is a peer-to-peer file sharing network which is mainly used for music. nicotine+ is a pretty intuitive (and open-source) client if you don't like the official one.
you can probably find a better tutorial on soulseek somewhere else. just wanted to make this option known
it's bad etiquette to download from people without sharing files of your own, so make sure you've got something shared. also try to avoid queuing up more than 1-2 albums from one person in a row
tagging & organizing your music
tagging: adding metadata to a music file (eg. song name, artist name, album) that music players can recognize and display
if you've ripped music from a streaming platform, chances are it's already tagged. i've gotten files with slightly incorrect tags from doubledouble though, so if you care about that then you might wanna look into it
i use musicbrainz picard for my tagging. they've got pretty extensive documentation, which will probably be more useful than me
basically, you can look up album data from an online database into the program, and then match each track with its file. the program will tag each file correctly for you (there's also options for renaming the file according to a certain structure if you're into that!)
there's also beets, which is a CLI tool for... a lot of music collection management stuff. i haven't really used it myself, but if you feel up to it then they've got extensive documentation too. for most people, though, it's not really a necessity
how you wanna organize your music is completely up to you. my preferred filestructure is:
artist > album > track # track
using a music player
the options for this are pretty expansive. commonly used players i see include VLC, foobar2000, clementine (or a fork of it called strawberry), and cmus (for the terminal)
you can also totally use iTunes or something. i don't know what audio players other systems come with
i personally use dopamine. it's a little bit slow, but it's got a nice UI and is themeable plus has last.fm support (!!!)
don't let the github page fool you, you don't have to build from source. you can find the releases here
click the "assets" dropdown on the most recent release, and download whichever one is compatible with your OS
syncing
if you're fine with your files just being on one device (perhaps your computer, but perhaps also an USB drive or an mp3 player), you don't have to do this
you can sync with something like google drive, but i hate google more than i hate spotify
you can get a free nextcloud account from one of their providers with 2GB of free storage. you can use webDAV to access your files from an app on your phone or other device (documents by readdle has webDAV support, which is what i use)
disroot and blahaj.land are a couple providers i know that offer other services as well as nextcloud (so you get more with your account), but accounts are manually approved. do give them a look though!!
if you're tech-savvy and have an unused machine lying around, look into self-hosting your own nextcloud, or better yet, your own media server. i've heard that navidrome is a pretty good audio server. i unfortunately don't have experience with self-hosting at the moment so i have like zero advice to give here. yunohost seems to be a really easy way to manage a server
afterword
i don't know if any of this is helpful, but i just wanted to consolidate my personal advice in one place. fuck big tech. own your media, they could take it away from you at any moment
fundamental problem is this idea of bandcamp as a platform you use, instead of switching from spotify to Owning Music. you can just download music. you can have all ur mp3s and use whatever music app you want. you could be getting your music from bandcamp or itch or soulseek or redacted.ch it doesn't matter. music isn't just some app you use. centering bandcamp as Freeing Music or thinking about things in those terms is a fundamental misunderstanding of the good that bandcamp was doing, and will lead to the exact same problems spotify is causing. by far the biggest problem musicians face is that bandcamp is one of the only remaining fair ways to sell music; we need more places, not one solitary "better" place.
a collection of my playlists highlighting black artists in multiple genres of music. a little late for BHM but better late than never <3 enjoy! suggestions and additions are always welcome.
black people created rock: a forever growing playlist of various sub - genres of rock made by black artists and musicians; from classic rock, pop punk, rock rap, metal, post hardcore, etc. from underground bands, popular artists experimenting with their sound, artists from other genres collaborating with rock stars, and more!
a southern gothic tale: country / folk / blues / bluegrass; there are some rap / pop songs that include country elements in them but for the most part it's what you think.
black alternative: black artists that make music outside of the expectation. alt [rnb/pop], hyperpop, indie [pop/rock], dream - pop, bedroom pop; you name it, it's probably in here.
black g!rl pvnk !: similar to my black people created rock playlist, except it's just black women. this playlist also includes rap that takes heavy inspiration from alternative subculture.
juicy fruit, certified bubble yum: [bubblegum] pop by black artists. oftentimes our music gets categorized as rnb / urban / hip hop even when it's clearly not! there's been a historical record of black music being put in the wrong categories by reviewers and the academy trying to box black music into a box. while some songs may have rnb elements, it's clear that they're classic, well-made, and respected pop songs!
I will not rest until the unintentionally campy and extremely dramatic, vampiric Gothic Rock in the way it was done in the 90s when everyone was draped in red velvet and had candelabra in their shows/shoots/videos makes a full comeback.
Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 6,291 genre-shaped distinctions by Spotify as of 2023-11-19. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.
apparently this is a tool built by a former Spotify engineer. so for instance, here's a search for Minuit Machine my beloved:
(sorry mobile users)
and then you can see linked genre map:
and if i am like "what the actual fuck is anime cv" i can go listen to it
Audience member: "Hey John, can you play “Going to Maine”?"
John: "No."
*Audience laughing*
John: "We’re gonna play a new song again, if that's cool with you. Alright. Thank you. This song is a true story. *laughing* That’s the saddest thing about it. I hope that if you should happen, and if you do, don’t let anybody tell you not to but uh… If you should happen to be having the sort of year I was having when I was seventeen, you may feel free to sing along with the chorus, nobody’s gonna hold it against you. Uh, I know that twice that uh, I *to Peter Hughes* can I out you? This is Peter’s favorite of the new songs I think precisely because of the chorus. *laughs* It’s called “This Year”."
blakekathryn
prguitarman
germansingergirl
2087
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
theartofmadeline
