The future of music is at risk: music discovery is no longer an emotional experience
I’ve got Nostalgic by ARIZONA playing on this flight to Atlanta and I’m tearing up. Music has the ability to trigger emotional connections unlike anything else. Extensive research has been conducted on how music is used to regulate arousal and mood, to achieve self-awareness, and as an expression of social relatedness. (Schäfer et al, 2013)
One’s taste in music has long been seen as a window into one’s sense of self, and place in society—Robert Prey
Nostalgic by ARIZONA struck a chord with me for a number of reasons — it triggered vivid memories of past relationships, imagery from my childhood and noticeably shifted my mood from sombre to grateful. Music is all about emotional connection. But music discovery today is no longer an emotional experience.
Well, if you’re just a member of the general public, and you have all this music available to you, what do you listen to? How many of these things are you going to listen to at the same time? Your head is just going to get jammed — it’s all going to become a blur, I would think. — Bob Dylan (Interview with The Independent, 2015)
Streaming services have made access to music infinitely easier. There are 40,000 songs uploaded on Spotify everyday and 500 hours of video is uploaded on YouTube every minute. We’re living through a time of information overload and decision fatigue. “Given that the amount of music circulating on the internet increases all the time, the need for the compression of cultural data and ability to find the essence becomes more focal than ever” (Kuoppa, 2018, p. 21).
However, as streaming services accumulate power, their editorial teams and algorithms are churning standardized recommendations that are flattening individual taste, encouraging conformity and stripping listeners of social interaction. We are all listening to the same songs and there are millions of songs that have been played only partially or never at all. A service called Forgotify exists to “give these neglected songs another way to reach your earholes”.
With the power to categorize and surface music, streaming platforms take on the role of taste-making, but also the authoritative role of gatekeeping through the anonymous spotlighting of specific songs. They have a profound effect on the social and cultural value of music — influencing peoples’ impressions and opinions towards what kind of music is considered valuable and desirable or not.
From an artists’ perspective, despite platforms subverting the power of labels and claiming to level the playing field, they’re creating new power structures with algorithms and editorial teams controlling what playlists we listen to, to the point where artists are so obsessed with playlist placement that it’s dictating what music they create. Take a listen to the next few new songs you hear on streaming services: see if the chorus doesn’t comes first and if the music is loud and not dynamic. Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back in Black’ has sold over 40 million copies — it’s the biggest hard rock album ever released; if it were debuted today, it’d likely be a flop.
The problem is that I don’t identify as much with these choices as what I once pirated, discovered, or dug up. When I look at my Spotify Discover playlists, I wonder how many other people got the exact same lists or which artists paid for their placement. I feel nostalgic for the days of undifferentiated .rar files loading slowly in green progress bars. There was friction. It all meant something -Deb Oh of debop.it
Gone are the days of filtering through Napster to rip songs onto mixtapes for your friend, of record store adventures flipping through vinyl, of “I knew them before they were famous”. Richard Hampson at Imagesound emphasized how music has “always been about feel and human touch…and algorithms are removing that.” Deb Oh runs a service called DEBOP that protests against this. It’s a super high-touch music concierge service where she hand-picks each song and pairs them with custom liner notes — with the most affordable package costing $50 for three hand-picked songs.
It’s no surprise that the vinyl revival is real. From 2010 to 2017, LP sales have grown 4X in the US. Record stores allow for a free-range wandering flipping through vinyl, but you can also go into the Rock section and browse through the catalog there. Then there’s the friendly record store owner. Let’s call her Diana. You can chat to Diana for her recommendations and she’ll tell you what her top picks are. But she’ll also tell you why she picked them, what they mean to her and why she’s sharing them with you specifically. Diana is a curator.
“You need machine and programmatic algorithms to scale; and you need humans to make it real.”
Solely relying on algorithms to understand the contextual knowledge around music is impossible. At present, human effort, popularity bias (only recommending popular music) & the cold start problem is unavoidable with music recommendation, even with the advanced Hybrid Collaborative Filtering models that Spotify employs. Pairing algorithmic discovery with human curation will remain the only option —with human curation allowing for the recalibration of recommendation through contextual reasoning and sensitivity, qualities only characteristic of humans. However, today this has caused the formation of new power structures that place the careers of emerging artists in the hands of a few expert curators at the major streaming platforms.
As a society, we have continuously looked to others to both validate specific tastes and inspire us with new tastes. Predominantly, people have looked to tastemakers to provide trusted music recommendations. (Silber, 2019)
The original music tastemakers are radio DJs. They put a name and voice behind their taste-making and built a brand for themselves through their personality and taste in music. Then payola became an issue. And then radio died.
Today the identity of human curators tends to remain anonymous to the public. Who created that last playlist you listened to on Spotify or Apple Music (if it wasn’t Spotify or Apple Music)? Many people appreciate the sole fact that a human is creating recommendations for them and may even see these curators in a similar light to a trusted friend, or even a personal DJ.
Going back to Diana, the record store clerk. It’s likely her song pick for you will be much more meaningful than something an algorithm or anonymous editor at Spotify picked for you. And what if Diana was your best friend? Or your partner? Or your favorite artist?
The incentive structures today doesn’t allow curators to truly thrive — and in general, curators don’t really see themselves as “curators”. They create, express, organize — and the outcome of their work is curation. It feels inevitable that new incentive mechanisms enabled by blockchain technology will solve this — given individuals can be recognized in the lineage from artist to listener. Just think about the gap between consumer love & monetization within music.
I’m not just being nostalgic. The future of music will see a circling back to human curators. The future will need us to scale human curation and bring the joy back to music discovery. And we’ll finally make it an emotional experience once again.
