It's probably not the one I wrote. It would be weird if my book were your favorite book. It's a geeky book about music-streaming and music and algorithms and technology and curiosity and morality and where we are right now, and your favorite book should probably be an immortal novel about how we always are, or something you have re-read every year since you were 12 because it reminds you what you love and believe.  

But my book about how streaming changes music is also kind of a book about loving and believing things, and the fears and joys that love and belief produce, because everything is if you really think about it, and I wrote a book about this stuff because I really think about it and didn't know how to stop.  

As a method of not thinking about something any more, writing the book seems to have been fairly ineffective. I have kept thinking and writing about music and algorithms and technology and humanity. My new job, which doesn't have music anywhere in the wording of the mission, is just as fundamentally about figuring out how to use math and machines to amplify humanity instead of phase-cancelling it.  

As an organized explanation of why I think streaming is good for music and music-streaming is good for humanity, though, I made it as coherent as I could. (And then a really good editor goaded me methodically into making it more coherent than that.) If you love music, you might like reading this book while you listen to whatever you are currently discovering or wondering or doubting. It's a book about discovery and wonder and productive doubt.  

And it was officially published today.  

You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song; Canbury Press, 2024.
US: bookshop.org or amazon.com or kindle
UK: uk.bookshop.org or amazon.co.uk or kindle UK  

In London: Waterstones or Blackwells or Foyles
In Montreal: featured at Librairie Résonance  

 
 

Some related links as I notice them:  

- A review in the Telegraph, also available via Yahoo News
- A conversation with Walt Hickey on the Numlock Sunday podcast
- An appearance on The Ray D'Arcy Show on RTE Radio 1 Ireland (June 25 from about 26:10-50:37; clip)
- An appearance on Your Morning Coffee Podcast (June 24 from about 7:00-18:00)
- A conversation on the podcast The Gist
- A short interview on Newstalk in Ireland (with a Cactus World News shout!)
- A radio piece in German on Deutschlandfunk Kultur (with blasts of gothic metal and wisps of theremin!)
- A print rendition of the same interview from that German radio piece in Die Tageszeitung
- A "new book" mention on Tinnitist
- A conversation with Chris Dalla Riva in his newsletter Can't Get Much Higher
- An earlier appearance on Ari Herstand's The New Music Business podcast with some book-anticipation towards the end
- The book's page on Goodreads