[HN Gopher] Pigeons and Planes Has a Website Again
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Pigeons and Planes Has a Website Again
Author : herbertl
Score : 49 points
Date : 2026-02-26 10:51 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pigeonsandplanes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pigeonsandplanes.com)
| jasongrishkoff wrote:
| Great to see this! P&P is one of the OG music blogs.
|
| For context, I started music blogging in 2007 (my site is still
| around - Indie Shuffle - indieshuffle.com). I also started
| SubmitHub (submithub.com).
|
| About this: "we're not sure what a music website's role is in
| 2026 and beyond".
|
| I waffle between cynicism and optimism. Music blogs used to be
| major influencers. The rise of social media and streaming
| platforms squashed a lot of that, and our audiences have
| dwindled.
|
| Meanwhile Spotify is increasingly pushing toward AI
| recommendations rather than human curation. I've heard rumor that
| their editorial team has been halved.
|
| So, where do music blogs fit in? Will there be a resurgence in
| their audience? The cynic in me says "no". In general, blogs have
| gone out fashion, and users don't seem to have the patience to
| listen through a mountain of unknown music.
|
| But there are still those diehard music lovers who _do_ sift
| through the hundreds of thousands of daily new songs. And there
| needs to be a human touch to curation somewhere along the line -
| a space that blogs still fill.
|
| I suppose at the end of the day I'm mostly just blogging for me.
| For the artists I share, there's some minor exposure - as well as
| SEO and AI ingestion. I don't think I can make or break an artist
| anymore - not like we used to back in 2010. But my blog is an
| extension of me, and I hope that for Jacob there's some similar
| upside.
| armenarmen wrote:
| I'm not a musician, but I have referred several friends to SH!
| You've helped them a ton, thanks!
|
| Re the roll of blogs, I'm guessing that to an extent at least
| Spotify and other recommendation algorithms/bots are taking
| into account the buzz online and what bloggers are saying?
| polairscience wrote:
| I think about this all the time through the lens of "authority"
| on a topic. When we yielded our gathering spaces online to
| major social sites (read, Zuck et al) we then gave the content
| all the authority of what it means to dialogue in those places.
| Which is to say... not much.
|
| This has impacted journalism, music, science, and so much more.
| It would take an eternity to hash out my perspective but I
| think that there's value in realizing that. And I think there's
| value of creating content from the authority of a personal
| website with cache. I think music is a great place for this to
| take off, since you don't need institutional backing. You just
| need good words and a deep connection to the community. In that
| way, I hope people do write and create good content through
| their own mediums/sites. And I hope we all join in reading and
| sharing those sites.
|
| It might be wishful thinking though.
| callroomlamp wrote:
| Thank you for creating/maintaining indieshuffle! I visited
| 12-15 years ago with very fond memories. Your site was one of
| the few I checked on rotation due to good curation. Thank you
| for the human hand you played in music discovery! Visiting the
| site again today and "it feels very similar to how it was back
| then". Thank you for sharing such extension of yourself!
| oflannabhra wrote:
| Music / mp3 blogs were one of the heights of the free and open
| internet. RSS, Hype Machine [0] (an aggregator), blog rolls, back
| links, etc, all allowed for both discovery and taste-making in an
| organic way that still let individuality shine through. New
| artists could gain visibility just by emailing a couple MP3's.
| One could find a subset of blogs that matched one's general taste
| and discover new artists every week.
|
| Today's world of algorithms and an endless sea of new music
| really pales in comparison. It's completely soulless.
|
| [0] - https://hypem.com/popular
| callroomlamp wrote:
| HypeMachine was a core memory of my adolescence. I reminisce on
| the way the site encouraged music discovery through the
| aggregation of all the little niche blogs, among those pigeons
| and planes. Memories of Sitting in my room with old headphones
| while sorting by most recent. Unfortunately nothing has ever
| replaced it for me and unfortunately it has faded slowly as
| Spotify and SoundCloud gained more prominence. I agree, music
| discovery has become soulless...
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