I’m looking for a song. I can’t remember any of the lyrics, but there’s a really catchy hook. The singer says “wow” a total of 120 times. So I head over to Youtube, and I type the word “wow”. Millions of hits are returned. Hmmm…ok. Maybe “wow hees”. A whole bunch of irrelevant stuff comes up. One result looks promising. It’s Fuad Omar, someone whose name I recognize. I click on it. It’s not the song I’m looking for.
I’m frustrated because I’ve been looking for this song for year. Not actively of course, it’s not like I’ve better things to do. But I’ve been looking. It gets me thinking about Somali Youtube naming conventions. I’m transfixed. I go onto youtube again, and this time I type in “Hees macaan”. Yes, I’m on the trawl for delicious songs. I get thousands of hits. I go through the first page, and the second, and the third. There is no correlation whatsoever between the deliciousness of the music and the number of hits. Some songs are evidently more delicious than others AND YET, they are lower in the search result. The horror. The word “macaan” has been overused, I conclude. We need better naming conventions.
So I look to Cadaan Youtube, and I notice that Cadaan youtube gets billions of hits. Some of their videos have a billion hits! That’s more hits than *inserts culturally relevant reference that makes it glaringly obvious that I’m young and cool*. I look at their music videos. The naming convention seems to be quite straightforward: song name + artists name. The assumption in these names is that 1) you know who this person is 2) you know where they belong in the grand scheme of things (year, genre, etc) and 3) that you will find it without any help from anyone. Korean Youtube, I recently discovered, will always have band/artist names in English with the song titles in Korean. This is to allow non-Korean speakers to find this music.
So I return to Somali Youtube, you know…for the culture. It seems that for most of the new music, the video titles are very descriptive. Even the superstar Farxiya Fiska has incredibly descriptive video titles. They all seem to always have the year of release in the title and a general description like “good song”, “beautiful song”, “great song”. In fact that it seems for the larger part, that older music videos/plays from before the war are safe from this type of naming convention. When one searches for a “Mooge” song, they find that the general format is always ARTIST NAME + SONG TITLE.
Why the key difference then? Well, it’s all to do with the way Youtube search works. When you search for something on Youtube (or Google), you’re not only searching the title field of the video. You’re also searching thousands of other metadate stuff AND info from the description, the commas page, etc. But this is an oversimplification of how it actually works. You see Google has two neural networks designed to give you the best possible results. The first is to do with ranking, so it takes whatever you’ve searched for and ranks them according to how close they are to the string you’ve actually typed in. The second neural network is all about you.
It basically tries to understand you as a user of the website, and starts to build models of what you’re actually like. So, imagine, it goes through your Youtube history, and says boom, this person loves watching this type of stuff. It then looks at other people like you, and says, wow, ok, let me use all of this data to build some kind of collaborative filtering system. So, when you type in “Farxiya Fiska”, it already knows what you’re most likely to be looking for. Everytime you go on a video, and then go off quickly, the system records it. It says “this is probably not what they were looking for”. Everytime you rewatch a video using a specific query, it records it,. “if he searches Binti Cumar, he’s more likely looking for this song cos he has watched it bare times”.
But that still doesn’t answer the question of why new Somali music videos have such weird title names that are vague. Well, the short answer is, these artists know exactly what they’re doing. They want their music to be discovered, and they’re aware that this is the tactic that will bear the most fruit. If you’re in an industry that doesn’t have huge marketing budgets and thus can’t get people aware of your music organically, your best is to piggyback of general key terms that people will almost certainly be looking for. Chances are people aren’t going to look for Farxiya Fiska’s new song by name because they don’t actually know that it exists! What’s more likely to happen is that they’ll search “hees cusub” and Youtube uses that search query as well its own neural network stuff that I mentioned above and says “hey, you’re probably looking for this song by Fiska, cos bare people like you clicked on it and watched it”.
I think that it’s easy to assume that Somali Youtube doesn’t know what it’s doing. It absolutely knows what it’s doing. And to you it might seem like a terribly disorganized mesh where positive adjectives feature A LOT. But these artists aren’t librarians or curaters. They’re not here to make Youtube a nice spaces for us to search and find stuff easily. They’re trynna eat. And tbh, we’re all, one or another, slaves to these algorithms and general descriptiveness with dates is how Somali artists choose to deal with it, just as Korean artists choose to accompany their videos with English translations.
