New Music Friday
A weekly email of every release from your followed artists — enriched, ranked, and review-scraped.
The problem
Streaming services have a “release radar” but it surfaces roughly half of what I care about and none of the critical context. I wanted a weekly digest that showed me every release from the artists I follow, with streaming links that work across platforms, and pull quotes from whichever critics had already written about it.
The approach
New Music Friday reads my Music Harbor library directly from its SQLite store, identifies releases from the past seven days, and enriches each one with Apple Music metadata, Odesli links, and any critic coverage that exists. The whole thing lands in my inbox as a formatted HTML email every Friday at noon via a LaunchAgent — no web app, no subscription, no push notifications.
How it works
A Python 3.11 script reads Music Harbor’s local SQLite DB for the followed-artists list, then queries Apple Music for current-week releases. Each release gets an Odesli lookup for cross-platform streaming links, then the scraper checks Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, and Album of the Year for review hits. A Jinja2 template assembles the final HTML, and smtplib delivers it through Gmail. A LaunchAgent fires the whole pipeline every Friday at noon.
Results
- Full coverage of every release from followed artists — not an algorithmic subset
- Cross-platform links via Odesli so you can open in Apple Music, Spotify, Bandcamp, or wherever
- Critic review scraping pulls pull-quotes from Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, and AOTY
- LaunchAgent scheduled — runs Fridays at noon with no manual kickoff