We love and hate the YouTube algorithm.
It’s quietly doing the lord’s work at figuring out what the hell you want to watch next. It works so incredibly, that it disappears into the experience of being on YouTube.
It’s also icky, right? I don’t love the idea that it’s algorithms telling me how I should feel next, based on a weaponized corpus of data around human behaviour.
HOWEVER, if you look at it like a tool rather than handcuffs, it can be extremely powerful!
As a music producer it’s on us to curate what we consume in such a way that inspires creativity, new ideas, and re-contextualizing existing ones. It seems obvious, but sometimes it needs spelling out : you are what you eat.
My default feed is a MESS of 70,000 ADHD-inspired topics. It’s insanity and only fuels the ADHD cycle, with its unfocused scattering of tempting deep-dives that could sink an entire morning.
This idea clicked for me accidentally. I logged into an old YouTube account I hadn’t touched since around 2012, and the feed was perfectly frozen in time : Skrillex synth growl tutorials, early vaporwave music, obscure cassette tapes, no politics, no influencers, no algorithmic sludge. Just a beautiful, eerily intact quilt of exactly what my brain cared about back then. It felt like opening a sealed time capsule that somehow still understood me. That’s when it hit me: this wasn’t nostalgia, it was curation. The algorithm hadn’t “gone bad”; it had simply been retrained by years of scattered ADHD chaos. The question became obvious: how do I recreate that level of focus on purpose?
So, I started creating YouTube accounts, each meant for consuming ONE general topic. So for example, I want Vaporwave music to be influencing me because I want it floating in my brain for tonight’s session with an artist. Creating a fresh YouTube account, dedicated just to this, has proven to be extremely useful!
On this fresh account - watch a bunch of Vaporwave videos - the algorithm will tune itself to the nuances of your own preferences, specifically on the topic of Vaporwave. Want to include another flavour? Search UK Jungle music …it’ll keep churning out fresh videos, learning and noticing patterns about your interests and niches, and it’s really so helpful at generating a constant source of inspiration when focused this way!
You can do this with any subject you want to sink into rather than skate overtop. It’s my way of taking back control over consumption, while flipping the tool to be super useful!