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I Got Bored of Spotify. So I Built My Own Music Discovery Platform.

There's a specific feeling that used to come with finding a record you'd never heard of.

Something from 1973 that nobody talks about anymore. A Japanese funk album that never made it outside of Tokyo. You hear it and wonder how it existed without you knowing. That feeling is what got me into music in the first place.

I spent a decade as a DJ collecting vinyl seriously. UK Garage, Techno, Drum and Bass, UK Dubstep. I played Zouk, Rinse.FM, clubs in Cologne and Shanghai. I co-founded #vinyloftheday and turned it into a global community of collectors who shared the same obsession: find the thing nobody else has found yet, then share it.

That feeling never leaves you. But the tools for producing it have gotten worse.

Spotify killed it. Not intentionally. But somewhere between the Discover Weekly algorithm, the "fans also like" rows, and editorial playlists built for scale, the experience of real discovery quietly disappeared. The algorithm is good at giving you more of what you already like. It's terrible at showing you what you didn't know you were missing.

So I started digging elsewhere. YouTube rabbit holes. Reddit threads. Discogs browsing. Each one had the same problem.

YouTube is great for stumbling across something unexpected, but it tells you nothing. A 1977 Nigerian afrobeat record shows up in your feed. You love it. Then what? Who made it? What was happening in Lagos that year? Why does this record matter? YouTube has no answers. Discovery without context.

Reddit has the context but you have to fight for it. For every genuinely knowledgeable crate digger sharing something rare, there are ten threads derailed by arguments, unverified claims, and the noise of a forum never designed for this. Good information exists there. Finding it is exhausting.

Discogs is in a different category entirely. It's the best database of recorded music that exists. But it's a marketplace first. You go there when you already know what you want. It's not built for the moment before that. When you don't yet know what you're looking for.

None of these solve the same problem. None of them give you a curated record, tell you its story, explain why it matters, and point you to where you can actually buy it.

That gap is what I built into.

What I built

Souldigs (souldigs.club) is an editorially-driven vinyl discovery platform. The focus is soul, funk, jazz, rare groove, and City Pop. Genres with deep catalogs, devoted followings, and a lot of music that never made it onto streaming services and never will.

The model is simple. Every record on the platform is hand-picked and written about by a human. No algorithm decides what shows up. No popularity ranking. Just editorial judgment about what's worth your time.

There are 111 records in the catalog right now, each with a written story. The context behind the music. Why it was made. Why it matters. What to listen for. Paired with a featured track, a Spotify link where available, and buy links so you can actually act on the discovery.

A few features I'm particularly proud of.

Listening Paths. 14 curated sequences that take you through a genre or theme in a specific order, with editorial framing at each step. The difference between handing someone a playlist and walking them through a genre. The Funk Continuum, Tokyo After Dark, Women of City Pop. Each one is designed to build on itself. By the end you understand not just the records but the lineage.

Price Alerts. A lot of the records I care about are only available on the secondary market. Save a record to your crate, set a price threshold, and get an email when it drops below that on Discogs. Set it once. Forget about it. Get notified when the right moment comes.

The World Map. Browse records by where they came from. West Africa, Brazil, Japan, the UK underground. The geography of music matters. Knowing that an album came out of Lagos in 1975 or Tokyo in 1980 changes how you hear it.

Editorial pieces. Long-form writing about specific moments in music history. The first two cover the City Pop wave that's been rediscovered online over the past few years, and 1971 as one of the most concentrated years in soul music history.

What it isn't

Not AI-generated recommendations. Not community-driven. Not a marketplace.

The no-AI part is a deliberate choice worth naming. There's a version of this platform that uses machine learning to surface records based on listening patterns. I didn't build that version. The editorial voice is the product. The point is that a human made these choices and can tell you why. Which is exactly what the algorithm can't do.

I've spent a lot of my career thinking about what AI can and can't replace. Taste is on the list of things it can't replace. Not real taste. The kind that comes from years of listening, from caring about why something works, from knowing when a record has soul and when it's just technically impressive. You can prompt an AI to recommend music. You can't prompt it to genuinely hear it.

The curator is the product. That's the bet.

Where it is now

Functional MVP. The engineering is essentially done for the core feature set. The gap is catalog depth. 111 records is a real start. The goal is 200 plus. Content is the bottleneck now, not code.

The platform is live at souldigs.club. Free to use. No account required to browse and discover. Account signup unlocks the wantlist and price alerts.

The thing I'm actually trying to recreate

The feeling I'm chasing is specific.

It's the moment you hear a record and wonder how it existed without you knowing about it. That feeling used to come from flipping through crates in a record shop. From a friend putting something on at a party. From a late-night YouTube spiral that took you somewhere unexpected.

It still happens. But the mainstream discovery tools have gotten worse at producing it, not better.

Souldigs is built around that feeling. Here's a record. Here's its story. Here's why it matters. Here's where to get it.

If that's a feeling you've been missing, come dig.

souldigs.club