Artist Stories: A Faster Way to Keep Up With Who You Love

Keeping up with the artists you actually care about is a job nobody wants.

The information exists — it's in a social feed you've muted, an email newsletter you never opened, a Wikipedia page you'd have to think to visit — but it arrives scattered, late, and mixed in with everything else.

So most people don't keep up. They find out about albums three months later and tours after the tickets have gone, and they assume that's just how it is now.

What's in one

When you follow an artist in Zene, their activity can surface on Home:

The important word is gathered.

None of this is information you couldn't find elsewhere. The problem was never availability. The problem was that properly following twelve artists meant checking twelve different places, and almost nobody does that consistently.

Why it's a strip and not a feed

There's a deliberate design decision here worth noticing, because it's the difference between something useful and something you'll mute in a fortnight.

A feed is effectively infinite. It keeps finding more things to show you, which means it can easily demand far more attention than you intended to give it.

A story line is finite.

You look at it for ten seconds and you're done — either something happened or nothing did.

That's the right shape for this particular job. You're not trying to be entertained by Artist Stories. You're trying to not miss things, which is a much smaller task.

How the plan affects it

You can follow up to 20 artists on every Zene plan, including free. Following itself isn't behind a paywall.

What changes is how many followed artists can surface through Artist Stories on Home.

Worth understanding rather than glossing over: on free, this feature is essentially a close watch on two artists.

That's genuinely useful if there are two people or bands you care about intensely — maybe a favourite artist and another you're waiting on an album from.

If your interest is spread across fifteen or twenty artists, Premium makes the feature broader.

Getting the twenty right

The value of the whole thing depends almost entirely on who's in the list.

A carefully chosen twenty makes Home quietly useful. A badly chosen twenty turns it into noise.

The tour thing

Of everything that can appear in a story line, live activity is the part with a deadline.

An album you discover late is still an album. A show you discover late may already be gone.

This is also where following smaller artists can pay off disproportionately.

Huge tours are discussed everywhere for months. A smaller artist can announce a local date, sell the room quickly, and disappear again before somebody outside their active audience notices.

Zene also has concert discovery as its own section, so the two features serve slightly different jobs: Artist Stories keeps you close to artists you already follow, while concert discovery helps you see what's happening more broadly.

The annual clear-out

Follow lists rot.

That's not a criticism. It's just how taste works. The artist you were obsessed with in February may be someone you'd describe as “a phase” by November.

Once a year, run through the list and ask one question about each:

If the answer is no, unfollow.

It frees a slot for someone who matters more now, and a list of twenty people you genuinely care about is much more useful than a much larger list of people you vaguely do.

Pick a date you'll remember. New Year works well, and the list doubles as a surprisingly good record of what your year sounded like.

What it doesn't do

Five minutes, then years

That's really the pitch.

Following twenty artists takes a few minutes with your listening history open, and after that the system can quietly do its job for as long as you use the app.

The alternative is the status quo: finding out about things late and assuming that's simply unavoidable.