Each new day brings hundreds of emails from labels, solo artists, bands, and publicists. Time constraints regulate how many receive a listen. And even then, if some quality about the music – the beat, the melody, the vocals—doesn’t immediately catch our attention in the first fifteen seconds, we click delete and move on to the next. Much of the music is either derivative, meaning it sounds like everything else, or mediocre, implying it leaves us feeling stuck in neutral, or, thankfully, in very few cases, really bad, indicating that the Peter Principle is in effect. We listen to pop, rock, hip-hop, R&B, country, jazz, EDM, World music, blues, metal, alt-rock, soul, indie-rock, reggae, folk, Latin, punk, easy listening, K-pop, funk, ska, electro, industrial, prog-rock, grunge, dream-pop...