Amoeba Music asks, 'What's in your bag?' and no algorithm can compete 🎵

This is such a great idea and I can’t believe it’s been going since 2008 and I’ve never heard of it. Shame on me.

If you love music so much that the mere sonority of muso chitchat registers in your brain as its own type of song, allow me to point you toward the greatest thing on all of YouTube. It’s called “What’s In My Bag?,” a long-running video series hosted at Amoeba Music, the legendary California record store in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Berkeley. The show’s general concept is straightforward enough. Touring musicians drop by one of the store’s three cavernous locations, prowl the labyrinthine sales floor, grab up records by the armful for an hour or so, then blab about their purchases on camera.

That simplicity makes “What’s In My Bag?” a humble, handy tool for encountering new and unfamiliar music - whether you’re a fan of the artist rifling through their bag or not. But if you really dive into this thing, you’ll begin to learn how musicians hear, how they think, how they remember, how they forget, how they emulate, how they worship, how they fortify and defy their own tastes, how they communicate with one another, and, ultimately, how they experience the world.

Rian van der Merwe Elezea // The B-Sides