There are as many valid and fruitful ways to discover new music as there are chords on a piano, and if you've been around long enough, you've tried a bunch of them. The two that were the most meaningful/influential for me were the bountiful shelves of vinyl at my old college radio station, WMFO, a freeform wonderland of funk, jazz, soul, punk, prog, folk, classical and the first FELA, SONNY OKOSUN and CHIEF EBENEZER OBEY records I'd ever laid eyes on; and the more tightly controlled, snobbily curated bins at PLAY IT AGAIN RECORDS in Bethlehem, Pa., where I got a daily lesson from owner/curator/snob JOE HANNA in the most basic music metric: "This is essential, buy it. That sucks, I don't even know why I stock it." I was probably exposed to less music during a couple formative years at each of those places than SPOTIFY ingests in an average day. But I heard—really truly heard—more. Partly because it was the right moment in my life. But also, I'm sure, because both were organized in a way that made sense to me. I understood the road maps. And because there was community, with a shared aesthetic and a shared hunger. And lots and lots of hand-scrawled notes. There was also, I think, something like what BEN RATLIFF calls "a language" in this essay for NPR MUSIC on his hip-hop cassette-trading days—"not so much a language of verbal syntax but one of finding, catching, sifting, passing on through your own expression." NPR Music has been killing it this week with a series of essays on the social, cultural and economic meaning of streaming music, and I was particularly struck by a trio of pieces published Wednesday on discovery cults that came before: In addition to Ratliff's piece, SAM HOCKLEY-SMITH remembers the "digital wild west" of AUDIOGALAXY, a geeky peer-to-peer download site that followed in the footsteps of the original NAPSTER, and MARK RICHARDSON gets nostalgic about Music TUMBLR, a hidden corner of the site where young critics were working out and sharing ideas about music a decade ago, free from the judgmentalism of so much other social media. They're all variations on a theme, the same theme that once sent me down a Fela rabbit hole one day and a CARLA BLEY rabbit hole the next. A yearning to make sense out of a room or a server or a world full of sound. A yearning for a piano chord you've never heard before. Ten years from now, another slate of essays, written by people younger than I, will rhapsodize about the currently hidden-in-plain-view wonders of SOUNDCLOUD and BANDCAMP and SPOTIFY and other sites and avenues I hardly know about, in ways I couldn't begin to articulate. I sleep a little easier knowing they're there. And that new languages are being written in their own dark corners... Referring to those Fela, Sonny Okosun and Ebenezer Obey records as "world music" is, and has always been, patronizing and provincial, so cheers to the GUARDIAN for this well reported piece that doubles as an announcement that it's ditching the phrase while remaining "more committed than ever to telling the stories of music around the world." There are some arguments within for why that umbrella term, no matter how ill-fitting, served a practical purpose for a time. But it basically was a way of excluding the music from the main floor of big record stores while giving owners the cover of it at least being included somewhere in the store... Huge double victory, a long time coming, for MEEK MILL: His 2008 gun and drugs conviction, which led to two stints in prison, has been vacated by an appeals court in Pennsylvania, and the controversial judge who refused to step down from the case has been ordered to do so. He celebrated by launching a record label in partnership with JAY-Z's ROC NATION... An anti-gentrification group is suing the city of Los Angeles in an attempt to prevent AMOEBA MUSIC from being forced out of its iconic Hollywood home... Half-verified rumor of the week: When he was trying to launch SPOTIFY in the US, DANIEL EK was convinced STEVE JOBS was prank-calling him "just to breathe deeply on the other end of the line"... RIP AARON ROSAND and DAVID PATRICK MCCABE.