Australian indie band Middle Kids released their debut album, Lost Friends, at the start of May after a series of set-up singles and EPs over the previous year. As part of the post-album promotion, they have created a playlist-matching microsite for users – craftily titled Found Friends.
Drawing on Spotify’s API, anyone going to the dedicated microsite gives it authorisation to connect to their Spotify account, with the option to sign up to their newsletter.

From there, you can nominate one (or a number) of your own playlists and then it scans the tracks and finds playlists created by other users that match yours. It also lets you peek into and follow any of their playlists that they have set as public.

“To us, the phrase Lost Friends mourns lost connections but also reveres the very human desire for relationship,” runs the description on the microsite. “We are thankful for the bonds that music creates for us and want you to feel a little more connected by music, too.”

It calls to mind the early days of P2P (while obviously respecting copyright) where users found total strangers via shared taste in music – all antecedents of the sharing and collaborative culture of the web today. The retro look of it all – a chunky tape player and a menu of cassettes – is also a throwback to the tape-swapping culture of the 1980s and 1990s.

It is clearly intended to spread online and get in front of people who might not otherwise know about Middle Kids, but the sales push throughout is light. At the bottom of the page are links to the band’s social sites, a link to buy merchandise and a button to direct you to Apple Music, iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Music (as well as Spotify) to hear or buy the album. But the overall feeling is one of the boundless joy of sharing and the serendipity of peer discovery.

It is a collaboration between Domino Recording Company in the US, EMI in Australia and Lucky Number in both the UK and Europe.