Music Rabbit Hole

The problem

Music Convergence is a reference tool — a map of musical lineage you can pan, zoom, and read. That’s useful when you want to understand the shape of a scene. But there’s a different mood: when you want to let go of the steering wheel and be taken somewhere you wouldn’t have thought to ask for. Maps don’t help with that. Maps give you options; what you want is momentum.

The approach

Music Rabbit Hole is the opposite of Convergence. Instead of many artists at once, you see one track. Instead of pan-and-zoom survey, you see three or four typed doors — a sample it borrows, a session player it shares, a cover of an earlier recording, a label sibling. Click a door and the current track disappears; the next one takes its place. No sidebar, no siblings, no way back except through history. It’s depth-first exploration as a UX, not just a metaphor.

The typed doors matter. “Similar artist” is black box; “shares the drummer from In Rainbows” is a reason. Each door carries the why in a single sentence, so a sequence of choices reads like a small, coherent story even if you didn’t mean to end up at the last stop.

How it’s different from Music Convergence

• Shape — Convergence is a map; Rabbit Hole is a trail.
• Unit — Convergence is artist-centric; Rabbit Hole is track-centric.
• Movement — Convergence lets you drift laterally and return; Rabbit Hole only goes forward.
• Data — Convergence is hand-curated editorial connections; Rabbit Hole is algorithmic, pulled from public sample databases, session credits, and label history.
• Mood — Convergence is for “show me the shape of this scene”; Rabbit Hole is for “surprise me, one step at a time”.

Status

In development — currently at the shape-of-the-thing stage. The interaction model is straightforward; the hard problem is the data layer. Public sample databases (WhoSampled, Discogs) have partial coverage and inconsistent schemas, and stitching them into a reliable “three doors from here to there” graph is where most of the work lives.