08/17/2026
Great article written by one of our regulars!
Dennis does a magnificent job capturing his music journey with the VGR. I am so grateful and tickled by his honest proclamation and detailed observations! Thank you Dennis!
“What I’m really finding, though—and perhaps should have realized a long time ago—is that even if I could connect with an algorithm that was sophisticated enough to understand all of the above, the music that truly resonates with me is the stuff I’ve discovered with, or as a result of, another actual human being in my life. And these days, my most reliable anti-algorithm is my local record-store owner, Travis Harvey.
I’ve often joked that Spotify had a decade to figure me out and still couldn’t make hide nor hair of my musical proclivities, but Travis had my tastes pegged to a tee within two months of the first time I walked through the door of Village Green Records. He’s turned me on to some truly amazing music that I almost felt ashamed for not having heard before, and his success rate is darned near perfect. In the two years I’ve been haunting his shop, I’ve only bought one record on Travis’s recommendation that didn’t work for me: a merengue record by Nando Galan y Su Orquesta that doesn’t quite get the balance of chocolate and peanut butter right in its blend of Latin brass and ’80s synth vibes. Close, but no tacucho. Oh well. I think I paid like six bucks for it.
On the other hand, most of the time Travis nudges me off the beaten path, it’s for new favorites like Jono El Grande’s brilliant-but-challenging Neo Dada, which spins on my turntable at least once a week, but which I can’t get anyone else in my life to give half a chance.
Consistently getting it right the way Travis does is a good skill for any record-store owner to have. But it’s one that’s particularly important for many of Travis’s customers who’ve never even set foot in the store—indeed, who’ve never met him—but rely on his skill for cooking up hyper-personalized music recommendations when subscribing to VGR’s distinctive subscription bundles.
“The subscription program came about during COVID, when I knew I was not going to be interacting with people anymore, one-on-one,” Travis told me one hot afternoon as I was digging through recent additions to his collection. “My former partner Bear and I were brainstorming, and she had this idea to create something that transcended an in-store visit in a way that was safe. So it was equal parts social distancing and also reaching a wider audience. After like three or four months of having it going, though, I think I had 150 members.
“But here’s the crazy thing: 80 percent of those people had never set foot in the record store. I don’t know how they learned about it. I really don’t. But somehow or another, the word got out. And so I had people in New Jersey and California, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico. I had people in Alaska. I had people all over the place, many of whom had never come to the store. Of course, I also had a good fair share of people who were my regulars who joined out of necessity.
“But that’s why I created my listener-preference survey that . . . I think maybe you took at some point?”
I hadn’t before, but I have since.
It’s not quite your typical listener-preference survey, either. It’s far from cookie-cutter. It starts by asking for mood preferences, and in a sense it’s kind of like a better version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, in that you have to select an answer even if the answers don’t necessarily cover the nuance of all possibilities that apply to your unique you-ness.
From there, it goes on to ask questions about how open you are to new music in the most descriptive way, challenges you to name one concert you would attend if you were a time traveler (or just a traveler), asks if each season of the year has a musical vibe for you and which you dig the most if so, and how musically adventurous you are, with specific examples to help guide you.
Honestly, I don’t know if anyone except Travis could make sense of the answers to these questions, but they give him the insight he needs to start personalizing his musical recommendations.
“I absolutely don’t want to be an algorithm,” Travis tells me. “I don’t want to have a relationship, even through the subscription program, that’s like, ‘If you like XYZ, then you’re going to like ABC.’ The survey is kind of abstract, sure, and it’s just kind of fun questions and it doesn’t really seem like I’m gleaning all that much information. Plus, if someone gives me a five or lower on their willingness to explore new music, that makes it harder for me. I can’t expect this person to come along with me on some wild-eyed journey.
“And when I say ‘with me,’ I really, truly feel like my relationship with each and every person that joins a subscription program is a dialogue between us, one-on-one. And so that’s why I can confidently say that no two subscription bundles are alike. And that means for that individual, no two are alike, and also that means that no two bundles are going to be alike between that individual and some other individual. Like, every single collection that the person receives monthly is absolutely one of a kind, individually tailored to them and their taste.”
“I also think about the long game too, though. Like, ‘OK, I’m going to send them these albums this month, this bundle of albums next month, and that’ll lead me to a point where they can graduate to these albums in six months, or whatever seems appropriate for their level of musical openness.’
“That’s another thing I don’t think any algorithm could do. At least not yet. No algorithm I know of can build the groundwork for mind-blowing albums that you’re just not quite ready for yet because they’re just so weird and esoteric that nobody will take a chance on them at first. But I know they’re good. And I want you to love them, too.
“So when I think six months ahead in terms of what I’m going to send a subscriber—when I’m prepping a subscriber for something coming down the road a ways—I’ll write a little note saying, ‘Look out for these things when you listen to this,’ or ‘Start out with track five. It’s gonna blow your mind.’ And maybe that’s the track that I know is going to be this specific person’s touchstone for this record.”
Of course, buying records like this, sight unseen, must come with its risks. I asked Travis how often his subscribers return records they got in a bundle but already owned.
“That’s yet another element of all this that I have to juggle. Sometimes I’ll come across the record and I’ll be like, ‘I bet this person already owns this album. I’m not gonna send it to him.’ As far as I know, though, I think I’ve only had three occasions where someone wrote back and said, ‘Hey, I already have this record that you sent me.’ That’s out of more than 7000 albums I’ve shipped out in these subscription bundles.
“Mind you, that’s only the people who told me. I don’t know how many people got a dupe and just didn’t do anything. But there have even been a few occasions when someone said, ‘Hey, I already have a copy of this, but I do like this album a lot, so I’m going to pass it on to someone else who’s going to also enjoy it.’ So, you know, they technically paid for this record. But now they don’t feel bad because they’re going to pay it forward to someone else. Which is also part of the fun of building community around music.”
To really get what makes Travis such a great algorithm alternative, though, you have to understand that he steers me away from music just as frequently as he turns me on to it. And it’s not a matter of it being good or bad—he handpicks every record he sells in his shop, so if he’s slinging it, he digs it—it’s a matter of whether or not it’s right for me. Or maybe just whether or not it’s right for me right now.
A few months back, I was in the shower, listening to an electronica playlist or radio station on Apple Music—I honestly can’t remember which—and had my mind absolutely blown by a song I’d never heard before. It had the textures and tones of, say, an Alon Mor composition, just a lot more fun ...
