Music Tectonics
Can Gamification Fix Music Discovery?
Published: 3 June 2026 at 16:17 Europe/London
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Episode notes
Remember when the best music recommendation you ever got didn't come from Spotify's algorithm, but from your coworker, your cousin, or a stranger in another country who loves the same obscure band you thought only you knew about?
Eric West is the founder of Music League, a competitive music discovery platform with nearly 200,000 monthly active users across 160 countries. Players compete in themed rounds, submitting songs and voting on each other's picks, which means people actually listen rather than just passing along a link and forgetting about it. The result is something the streaming era largely eroded: real music discovery driven by real people whose opinions you have a reason to care about.
This week on the podcast, Eric talks with our head of new business Jade Prieboy about how a music taste game accidentally became a community-building tool for workplaces and families, what the daily-to-monthly active user ratio reveals about how people actually engage with the platform, and what phase two looks like when artists get direct access to fans who have already been repping them inside the game for months.
If you work in music tech, artist development, or fan engagement, this one reframes how discovery and community can work in the streaming era.
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The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Visit musictectonics.com to find shownotes and a transcript for this episode, and find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Let us know what you think!
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