https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-a-long-lost-indian-disco-record-won-over-crate-diggers-and-cracked-the-youtube-algorithm/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
How exactly did this overlooked album surface, nearly 40 years after its original Indian pressing? It helps that the songs could turn up in Balearic disco sets, Indian weddings, or even vibey “studying” playlists. But tracing Disco Jazz’s path to re-emergence shows how roundabout and happenstance the modern rediscovery process for old music can be.
The journey started the old-fashioned way, with a bit of crate-digging. In 2005, Florian Pittner, a Hamburg-based record-seller who runs the Discogs page Hindustani Vinyl, was traveling in Kolkata when he came across Disco Jazz. Pittner recognized the name of the album’s producer and co-arranger, Aashish Khan, and decided to buy several copies. He sold a few on eBay and, in 2010, listed another copy on Discogs. In May 2012, Swedish DJ Albion Venables was searching for disco music when he came across Pittner’s Discogs listing. He took a chance on it, largely based on the album artwork and Hindustani Vinyl’s reputation. “When I heard how Rupa sang, in a really heartfelt way and with this divine voice, I knew the universe would relate to it,” he says.
Venables started playing “Aaj Shanibar” in his sets, one of which was posted in a Facebook group for listeners trying to identify obscure songs based on snippets of audio. That was where Fran Korzatkowski, a music fan based in Albany, New York, first heard “Aaj Shanibar” and became obsessed. After much digging, Korzatkowski identified the track based on its use in Miss Lovely, a 2012 Indian art-house movie. Disco Jazz was selling for about $400 on eBay at the time, so he took the recording from Venables’ mix, adjusted the bass levels a little, and became the first person to upload “Aaj Shanibar” to YouTube, in April 2016.
Months later, Dan Snaith—best known for his roving house project Caribou—was stuck in a YouTube wormhole, skipping through hundreds of songs, when “Aaj Shanibar” stopped him in his tracks. He immediately integrated the song into his live DJ sets and radio broadcasts on NTS and Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide FM. “Juxtaposed against contemporary club music, it’s like a breath of fresh air at the right point in a club night,” Snaith says. “‘Aaj Shanibar’ has the propulsiveness of a great disco track but also an otherworldly, spacey feeling—it floats along allowing people to get lost in the arrangement, the melody and Rupa’s voice. It’s one of those records that gets asked about every time you play it.”
In mid-2017 and then again in early 2018, Korzatkowski started to see a spike in the song’s YouTube views and comments. By the end of 2017, German label Ovular had released a bootleg pressing of Disco Jazz, and people were posting about “Aaj Shanibar” on multiple Reddit forums. The word-of-mouth chatter and DJ sets (not just by Snaith and Venables) almost certainly helped the song spread on YouTube, but there are other factors that likely boosted its chances from there. Longer videos can be favored by YouTube because they offer extra space for ads; at the same time, “Aaj Shanibar” is immediately punchy, encouraging audience retention. But Massimo Airoldi, a professor and digital researcher at Emlyon Business School, suspects something else is at play as well: YouTube has been found to suggest music based on situational qualities, like whether a song would fit on playlists of “study music” or “shower music” (whatever that means). “The atmosphere of the song resonates well with these sort of relaxed forms of listening to music,” he says.
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