The Revolution Will Not Be Spotified
For a 45-minute Cliffs Notes on how democracies fail, try liberating the music piped through your office speakers.
When you arrive in October, revolution is already simmering.
Your new coworkers have heard that one Metric song — you know the one — so many times that they talk openly about a violent overthrow of the sound system. That Adele joint, too, gets way more play than it should, no matter what Pandora station you put on.
Skrillex. Sleigh Bells. Savages. Groban. Doesn’t matter.
The simmer boils over, and one of these coworkers begins stalking around, railing to whomever will listen about the tyranny of this technology. If he has to hear “Pumped Up Kicks” one more time, he says — well, he doesn’t know what he’ll do.
It isn’t just a problem with Pandora. By the time you’re hired, the office has already tried Spotify and Last.fm, too. By December, the only people who are satisfied are those with a decent set of headphones.
Fast forward to late February. Status quo.
A friend of yours emails to say she’s working at a startup company that built an app to let Spotify users gather in virtual rooms, add songs and vote for the songs they want to hear first.
The app is called Soundrop, and even though it’s relatively new in geologic terms, the service has streamed a half-billion songs and become a disruptor in what startup nerds and tech bloggers call the “music discovery space.” It’s only about a year old but is spreading to Facebook and to the web at large and is, along with Turntable.fm, the benchmark people compare newer services by.
You think Soundrop sounds kinda awesome. Your coworkers think so too. One of them creates a room and slaps your company logo on it.
People engage, posting a bunch of music that ranges from Bon Iver to Chvrches to Kendrick Lamar. Those who don’t add songs at least vote, endorsing things that sound gauzy and ‘80s-ish and things that sound garagey and ‘70s-ish, but all of which were recorded in a basement, probably in Bushwick, within the last 6 months.
Overall, the music is diverse within a certain range, with a glitchy spatter of dubstep for the company’s programmers and enough early Built to Spill to mollify its bookish copywriters.
There’s a healthy dose of Robyn because one dude has a fetish for female vocalists — which means that, come March, there’ll also be some Rhye on rotation, until the dude figures out that Rhye’s lead singer, is a man who just happens to sound like Sadé.
And okay — sure — it’s kind of a weird mix, but it all sounds good to you, because it is the sound of freedom. For a while — almost 45 minutes — peace prevails.
And then the barbarians arrive at the gates.
You see them coming before you hear them. Like a man on horseback warning of Red Coats, someone sends out an email. It contains no words, only a screen grab:
The threat is imminent, but the office does not panic. People put their heads together. They ask questions:
Can we downvote?
Can we veto?
Can we ban people?
The answer to all of those questions is no. The creators of Soundrop have kept their system maniacally simple. You can add music and you can upvote. If the office is to defeat the Bieber/Baauer menace, you must find other, better candidates, and then convince some hodge-podge coalition to vote on the side of good.
And that’s exactly what happens. People organize. They lobby for their own songs. They upvote things they like but don’t love. They make concessions for the greater good. Disaster is averted, but everyone seems to realize something about pure democracy that hadn’t occurred to them before.
The main problem with freedom is that people get to do whatever they want.
And then, as if on cue, someone drops in “Pumped Up Kicks,” about a dozen people upvote it just for LULz, and the system completely breaks down.
Days pass.
The office returns to Pandora and you feel like a failure. You console yourself by hanging out with a bookish friend. On one of your discursive meanderings, this friend reminds you of the French Revolution.
His facts aren’t all perfect, but the abridged version is sound:
In the last decade of the 18th century, the French people — either answering the clarion call of liberty or riled to mutiny by a class of manipulative bourgeoisie — rose up, threw open the gates of the Bastille, beheaded a few key people and declared themselves free. Almost immediately, a bunch of military entanglements stretched the nation’s military and economy thin as vellum. Sensing a vacuum of power, one asshole (we’ll call this asshole “Napoleon”) seized power and had himself crowned Emperor, which sent the country ping-ponging around between republic, monarchy and empire for 80 years until basically the end of the 19th century.
This ping-ponging wasn’t invented in France, though. Machiavelli wrote about it in Italy in the early 1500s, having been influenced by the Ancient Greek historian Polybius, who saw governments cycle so often from monarchy to tyranny to democracy to mob rule and back to monarchy in the second century BC that he named the process “anacyclosis”
Listening to your bookish friend (we’ll call him “Wikipedia”), you realize that, if you replace “monarchy” with “Pandora” and “mob rule” with “Foster the People” — which makes sense if you think about it — your office had essentially recreated the most ambitious failures of Western history in two hours on a Thursday between meetings.
The bad news in all this is that democracies often fail. The good news, according to Polybius and Machiavelli and the American Revolution and The French Revolution and the Velvet Revolution — even the Arab Spring is batting, what? .500? — is that democracies tend to rise again.
And when the Soundrop democracy rises again in your office — about two weeks later, give or take — people are a little more ready for it. They form coalitions to advocate for the music they like and work collectively to keep Ke$ha at bay. And, of course, some days are better than others.
Some days no one pays attention to the list until it’s too late and a Luke Bryan song trickles through the way sometimes someone like Sarah Palin becomes a Vice Presidential candidate. It makes you stop, and scold yourself, and promise to try harder next time.
The music democracy in your office, then, is a lot like democracy in the real world. It’s good, but imperfect, and works best when people are paying attention and not being dicks to each other just because they can be.
But the reality is that some people are dicks, and other people just think it’s funny to upvote pop country songs and other people actually, honestly like Ke$ha. People are vastly different, so differences of opinion are unavoidable.
And so, in an attempt to do the greatest good for the greatest number, well-meaning people will create coalitions to tip power in their favor, believing that they know best what the rest of the group needs. When these coalitions break down — either through infighting or neglect — the people that created them will panic and resort to coercion and threats (of a sort).
Things may get worse before they get better, and eventually the newness of all that freedom will wear off and many people will stop voting and the system will start to repeat itself, day-after-day, with only slightly more variation than before.
Which sounds a lot like what people my age have been complaining about in America during every election cycle that doesn’t include Barack Obama.
Still, even that guy from the beginning who was at his wits end over “Pumped Up Kicks,” in the end, admits that this volatile system is better than what came before. It might even be the best one we ambitious, fallible, well-intentioned, power-mad apes can come up with.
That guy will say those things and you will agree with him, even though you both recognize that the democracy in your office, like democracies in the real world, still has no idea what to do about Justin Bieber.
This originally appeared, in slightly modified form, on www.redbullmusicacademy.com/
