The answers reveal more about taste than any algorithm.
What's In My Bag has been running on Amoeba's YouTube channel since 2007. Almost 1,000 episodes of musicians, actors, filmmakers and athletes pulling records out of their shopping bags, on camera, in a record store in Hollywood. We logged every pick.
What is this?
This is a searchable archive of Amoeba Music's What's In My Bag series — a long-running video series where musicians, filmmakers, and other artists walk through a stack of records they picked out in-store, explaining why each one matters to them.
The series runs to nearly 1,000 episodes. Amoeba publishes the picks as structured text alongside each video, but there's no way to search across episodes, find which albums get recommended most often, or follow a picker's full taste across the collection. This archive is that missing layer.
What's in it?
994 episodes, 10,114 picks, and 5,127 enriched albums with cover art, release year, genre, and 30-second audio previews — all sourced from Apple Music's catalog. Each album links back to its original episode. Picks are in the original bag order, which is how the picker arranged them.
How it was built
Episodes were fetched from Amoeba's website and parsed into structured data. Each pick was matched against Apple Music to get canonical metadata. Duplicate editions (remasters, deluxe versions) were collapsed to a single canonical entry. Episode dates come from YouTube's API. Wikipedia summaries are fetched on demand and cached.
The pipeline is Python + SQLite. The UI is Flask + Jinja2, server-side rendered, minimal JavaScript.
Who built this?
Seba. Designer, Zurich. Worked at Last.fm in London around 2005. Before and after that, clients included Ninja Tune, Warp Records and BMG. Ran a DIY concert series for a couple of years — Elmo Delmo — Protomartyr, Gold Class, Die Die Die, that kind of thing.
Currently building sooon.live — a music agenda for Switzerland.
Always trusted a person's recommendation over an algorithm. This is a side project that got a bit out of hand.
Disclaimer
This is an unofficial fan project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Amoeba Music in any way.
All episode content — picks, videos, and the What's In My Bag name — belongs to Amoeba Music. This archive exists purely to make their publicly available data more browseable and discoverable. If you enjoy what you find here, go buy something at Amoeba.
Album metadata and cover art are sourced from Apple Music. Audio previews are 30-second clips provided by Apple Music.