How does the way you discover music shape your relationship to the community around you?

The Proximity Index measures the gap between what communities produce and what discovery platforms surface to those communities. The Community Discovery lab developed it to study why BIPOC-led nonprofits and the communities they serve could not find each other despite producing exactly what those communities needed. The finding: the gap was not caused by a lack of output. It was caused by discovery infrastructure that was never built to close it.

The same gap exists in music. A city's artists are not invisible because they are doing poor work. They are invisible because streaming platforms were not built to surface music by proximity. They were built to surface music by engagement. Those are different things with different community outcomes.

Before streaming, you found music through people and places. A friend played something in the car. A local DJ dropped something unfamiliar in a set. Someone behind a record store counter put it on because they had sized you up and thought you needed to hear it. Those moments were not just about the music. They were about the network of people and places through which the music moved. That network was community infrastructure. Algorithmic platforms stripped it out.

WAXFEED is a therapeutic environment for the music domain. It surfaces music through proximity: what artists are building scenes in your city, what your social graph is listening to, what is being made by and for the community you belong to. This research program applies the Proximity Index to music and tests WAXFEED as the corresponding intervention.

The Proximity Index takes two inputs and produces a score. Input one: the music produced by or for a community, measured through local artist registries, venue booking records, local press, and community-maintained directories. Input two: what discovery platforms actually surface when queried with community-identity prompts. The gap between those two numbers is the Proximity Score. A high score means music made for your community is algorithmically invisible to you.

The methodology was validated through the MUSEOFRI pilot in the civic resource domain. This research program adapts it to music, validates it in the new domain, and uses it to compute Scene Proximity Scores for local music communities across five mid-size U.S. cities. The question is whether cities with stronger community-embedded discovery infrastructure show lower Proximity Scores than cities where algorithmic platforms dominate.

The second stage tests WAXFEED as a Proximity-reducing intervention: a 90-day controlled comparison against Spotify, with Proximity Scores computed at baseline, 45 days, and 90 days. The question is whether a platform designed from proximity produces measurably stronger community outcomes than one designed from engagement.

The existing literature establishes the structural claim: algorithmic music discovery conceals the social and geographic signal that once made music discovery an act of community formation. What it does not yet establish is the causal magnitude. How much does discovery mode actually predict community connection? And by how much can a platform built around proximity shift that outcome?

Those are the empirical questions this lab is building toward. The Providence baseline study, in development, will produce the first Proximity Scores for a defined local music scene. The controlled WAXFEED intervention will be the first test of whether proximity-based discovery produces measurably stronger community outcomes than algorithmic alternatives.

This research is early. The instruments are in development. If you are in a position to accelerate that development, whether through methodological expertise, community access, or institutional partnership, the most useful thing you can do is reach out.

WAXFEED is what music discovery looks like when it is designed from proximity rather than engagement. Where algorithmic platforms surface music by listening patterns, WAXFEED surfaces music by who you know and where you are. That is not a design preference. It is a direct response to what the Proximity Index finds in the music domain: the gap between what local artists produce and what streaming platforms surface to the communities those artists belong to.

Local artists, particularly artists from BIPOC and working-class communities, are not invisible because they are doing poor work. Their work exists. It does not reach the people it was made for. WAXFEED is built to test whether proximity-based discovery can actually close that gap. This lab tests whether it moves the score.

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