![]() ( Taylor Swift used one of Chery’s when she fought her treadmill and lost.) In 2014, when Tim Cook explained Apple’s stunning $3 billion purchase of Beats by repeatedly invoking its “very rare and hard to find” team of music experts, he was talking about these guys. Since he left XXL magazine to join the music-streaming service Beats Music (now Apple Music) as head of hip-hop and R&B programming in 2012, Chery and around a dozen of his colleagues, working largely behind the scenes, have embarked on a never-ending quest to organize every song in history into concise playlists that you can’t live without. Did they even really know what we wanted? Do we not contain multitudes? And so now we have people like Chery. But these services were flawed, said someone about to make a lot of money, and could only recommend music based on what we were already listening to. And when it turned out that was too many songs after all (how many lifetimes are needed for a complete survey of Memphis soul? Or Brazilian funk?), a new category of music services appeared to ease our burden. Remember that? In the wake of the last century we seized the right to take our pick from all of the songs in the world ( All of the songs in the world!) and told anyone who didn’t like it exactly where they could go. You sit there and you start moving and just do it.”įor a while we thought we could choose our own music. He’s from Queens, New York, which, despite his residence in Los Angeles for the past four years, is obvious when you hear him talk. “It’s hard to describe because it’s more of a feeling or instinct,” says Chery of his process. Or at the gym going for a morning run on the treadmill, thinking about your gym and your treadmill, listening through headphones for changes in tempo and tone: Will this song push you through the pain? Is that one too long on the buildup? Or sometimes he’s at home in his one-bedroom apartment on the border of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, walking around in his living room with new Gucci Mane blasting from a Beats Pill. When he’s choosing your music for you, Carl Chery, 37, is in Culver City, California, sitting at his desk in an office with no signage, trying to decide whether Drake and Future’s “Jumpman” (jumpman, jumpman, jumpman) has jumped the shark.
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