Contour Music

Discover music, compare taste, and see what's actually big

Android

Music

Spotify

Analytics

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Hi, I'm Peyton and I'm the solo dev working on Contour! I started Contour because I wanted more visibility into the algorithms that pick my music. Something decides what I hear next off signals I can't see, and when it gets me wrong I have to guess on how to steer it in the right direction or it overcorrects and removes some of what I enjoy. Here's how Contour attempts to solve that. You can listen (for 30 seconds) then rate music, your taste profile fills in as you go, and the feed comes out of ratings you actually made, with direct feedback on what's changing. If you hate what you're getting, you can throw it out and ask for something else, or something completely random. You're never stuck in a loop the app decided you belong in. The social side comes from the same desire. Your profile page is where your taste lives and it's built to show off what you actually like, and what kind of listener that makes you. You can hold your profile up against a friend's to see how much you really overlap, and read what people who share your taste said about a record before you give it 45 minutes. Then the charts, which are those same ratings zoomed all the way out. What I'm building toward is a place where you can line up two albums, or an artist's whole discography, and compare them on both axes at once: how people actually felt about the music, and how much it actually got played. To me, streaming only means something if you properly adjust it. A 2014 album and a 2024 album were competing on platforms of very different size, so raw play counts just flatter whatever came out most recently. Contour scales streams against how big the platform was when the record came out, which is what makes cross era comparison possible in the first place. That unlocks the questions I actually wanted to help answer. What is the biggest album of all time, once you take era out of it? What did people love that almost nobody played? What got played into the ground that nobody rates highly? Perception and performance come apart constantly, and the gap between them can be answered with music data. About 4,000 ratings so far from a small group of about 100 who use it a lot. Two things I would appreciate feedback on: 1. Does the feed feel like yours to steer? 2. What would bring you back next week? That's my hardest problem right now and would really appreciate your input.