Hello comrades, and welcome to sputnikmusic, the music vertical for the Russian propaganda news site sputniknews.com. Today we will cover a long lost feature of sputnik, musical neighbors. First, anybody that visits this site loves music. Sometimes users come onto this site and celebrate their favorite artists and the albums of theirs that they love. Sometimes they come to trash someone else’s favorite artists and albums but also because they love music. It takes a special love to spend one’s time and mental effort listening to music they know they won’t like, and a special love to come up with a long string of sick one-liner put-downs. We share this love with each other, as fellow chum, in all its forms; but it is true that our love of music can align more strongly with an exclusive subset of individual users: our musical neighbors.

From the list on this topic that I did a while ago, I gather that musical neighbors was a fun, well-regarded feature of the site, even though no one knew what the hell it was or how the hell it worked. (I recall being told that almost everybody was connected to one particular user.) It’s obvious why it was so popular; it’s because it made us feel connected to others and feel bigger than ourselves. It made us feel connected to the whole of sputnikmusic, the music vertical for the Russian propaganda news site sputniknews.com. With this post, I will return that shared love back…

Hello world, and welcome to a first-of-its-kind staff blog, one written by someone with no reviews and pedestrian/almost non-existent music taste. I joined the site when I was trying to find something to fall deeply into, and I thought being the only person I knew that liked Led Zeppelin meant that I could become a SERIOUS music listener. Of course, I failed and, besides a real weak stream of bands I like, I don’t listen to much music. As a result, I stopped regularly visiting the site after maybe 6 months of being a regular commenting member. Nevertheless, I returned to the site because I found a different interest.

Now, I’m not an expert in this kind of stuff. I didn’t actually get a degree in the kind of thing that would make one a said expert. More than anything I’m a diligent and creative googler, the level at which you can fake expertise. I like data. Since I decide I liked data, I have done SERIOUS data guy stuff. I started to keep track of my stats in video games like COD: BO and Rocket League, and I analyzed this here website. (That’s it. There’s not really a third thing, I tried making a tool to help me with a fantasy football draft once, but people were drafting so fast it actually was probably more costly than useful.)

So, as best I could tell, these blogs will go something like this: I’ll write some kind of description of…