Welcome to 2020 Music Group (2020MG), a music recommendations initiative by Alexander Iadarola, Nick James Scavo & Alec Sturgis. In 2025, we began meeting up around the city to discuss the state of music writing. For better or worse, music has become a way for us to theorize, structure, and orient the world—and that hasn’t come without psychological consequences. Like many conversations that traversed the 2010s into the 2020s, it was easy for us to discuss high highs and low lows, music’s power and potential, but also its reliable disappointments and diminishing returns. Much of music writing has chronicled the loss of halcyon moments and emergence of new formats, trends, and “discoveries,” driving forward a kind of obsessive state of death and renewal around listening, recounting, prophesying, critiquing, and sharing music. With 2020MG, our conversations began to zero in on the number 2020 as a kind of conceptual boundary for writing about music, providing us with an implicit frame for our inquiries to follow. For us, it became a clear line to draw into our continued passion and preoccupation with music: what was then and what is now? In the words of composer Tony Conrad: “What was music?”
Together, we’ve navigated and contributed to a musical sphere of online music blogs and print magazines, internet labels and composition fronts, podcasts, choirs, bands, and ensembles, self-produced music festivals and DIY spaces, ethnomusicology conferences, and experimental music platforms, institutions, and museums. From writing press releases for obscure saxophonists and big-budget electronic music alike, to features spanning philosophy and conversational roasts—from massive institutional events to basement stagings of classical works. We can’t get enough music.
2020MG issues will drop every week on Fridays with an introductory text followed by three music recommendations, a recommendation from each of us. The frame of the recommendation is one we’re intentionally choosing instead of criticism. It can be enjoyable to recommend music—and to pursue that simple gesture seemed right for this project. Our recommendations will include recent music releases, historic works or recordings, experiences at shows and performances, other ephemeral musical perspectives and content, and more—even just good (or bad) ideas that are worth contending with when listening or thinking about music. They will also include things we do not like. Every other issue will be for subscribers only. Join now for all-access to all 2020MG issues.
We hope you enjoy this new initiative.
—2020MG
Alexander Iadarola, Nick James Scavo & Alec Sturgis
