On the occasion of its 10th anniversary, and a long overdue release on vinyl , how one soundtrack kicked off the indie revolution and predicted the way we listen now.
Chris Ritter/BuzzFeed.
I remember life before the Garden State soundtrack. In 2004, before the release of Zach Braff's quirky cri de coeur, I spent the first few months of my freshman year hunched in a stodgy dorm-room desk nook, beneath the pouty eyes of an Eva Longoria poster, peering obsessively into the overpriced laptop I'd bought with my high school graduation money. I was cruising Amazon's music section mostly — Windows Media Player if I was desperate — searching for the seven words for which I had developed a borderline unhealthy obsession: "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…"
I loved those words, written in pumpkin orange text in the middle of every Amazon product page, and the never-ending chain of new music served up by the web store's celebrated recommendation engine. I'd spend hours discovering albums this way, 30-second song preview after 30-second song preview, indebted to the well-documented shopping patterns of what I assumed were better-informed consumers than I.
It was a magical time for music lovers like me who lacked an offline community to guide them. Back then I was only a couple of years into excited experimentation with genres other than the R&B and hip-hop on which I had been raised, and the internet provided an indispensable lifeline. In the middle of the last decade music blogs were ascendant, online forums flourished, and the algorithms of an emerging class of web services made connecting the dots between anything and everything increasingly effortless.
When I first found myself listening to indie and alternative music that my friend group didn't care for, when I didn't know where the cool record stores were in town, and before digital streaming services had become ubiquitous, it was early recommendation engines like Amazon's that fed my curiosity.
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