This article is a preview from the Spring 2018 edition of New Humanist
How do you listen to your music? It’s a question that, in 2018, might be more meaningful than what genres you listen to. The medium has always been the music, from the three-minute pop song tailored to the 10-inch shellac format, to the 80-minute CD setting the standard for album length. The increasing dominance of streaming means that it’s now also the gatekeeper and the consumer, a symbiotic and still-evolving relationship in which the roles of listener, artist and technology are looser than ever before.
I curate my Spotify library with intent; Spotify curates my listening by nudging me towards what its algorithms, with access to vast amounts of data about my consumption habits, think I’ll want. Artists are cogs, whether in the machine – decontextualised into mood playlists – or, depending on their level of privilege or willingness to be paid peanuts – outside it.
Discussions about this state of flux tend towards either doom-mongering or evangelical extremes. Both can be true. On the one hand, it’s hard to underestimate how revolutionary it is for music fans to have instant access to a superabundance of music. Whether you’re alarmed by the prospect of handing the keys to your taste to shadowy music industry executives, or algorithms reducing its complexity to automated computer logic, the democratisation of music knowledge still hasn’t lost a radical thrill – particularly to those who remember the barriers of cost and physical availability of pre-digital music fandom.
Not that it always goes as far as one might imagine. Sure, I can bring myself up to speed on where the British jazz scene is at in 2018 in an afternoon, and patch over areas of ignorance at the click of a button. But how can my Spotify library truly feel my own when a plethora of artists, particularly within the dance and electronic worlds, opt out altogether? Or when most of late R&B icon Aaliyah’s back catalogue is absent due to the legal mess abandoned in the ruins of her old label, Blackground? Or when one of today’s megastars, Taylor Swift, takes her discography off Spotify and puts it back on again for the pettiest of whims (gazumping pop rival Katy Perry on her album release day)?
When those in charge use this language to wax lyrical about our brave new streaming future, it’s thoroughly disingenuous. Last July, Tuma Basa, Spotify’s global head of hip-hop, claimed that “the gatekeeper era is over” in an interview with Billboard – in which he wielded his power as a gatekeeper. He is the curator of the immensely influential (eight million followers and counting) Rap Caviar playlist. “I’m not going to listen to the whole song,” he shrugged when asked about the winnowing process in putting the playlist together, pointing towards the evidence of data – “we can tell the passive listeners from the active listeners” – as a kind of deflection from his own power.
As the music journalist David Turner argued in a series of pieces for Track Record, such utopian language masks a reality in which the inequality gap in music widens ever further. “The opportunity for independent acts to get on Rap Caviar is next to impossible,” Turner points out. Moreover, in an attempt to back up its rhetoric about a levelled playing field, Spotify is not above recommending supposedly independent new artists with major label ties, or allegedly filling mood playlists with “fake” artists – nondescript music credited to hitherto unknown performers. (Spotify denies doing this.)
But there are advantages for artists who might not have been given as much of a chance via traditional channels such as radio or the music press. In terms of chart success, streaming has upended the music industry norm whereby a single’s impact is measured in its first-week sales.
Instead, we’re seeing the return of the slow-burning hit. Stripper-turned-Instagram-celebrity-turned-rapper Cardi B may have signed a deal with Atlantic Records in June 2017, but the fact that no female rapper had scored a Billboard number one since Lauryn Hill nearly two decades previously underlined how marginalised women in the genre were – particularly when trying to cross over to mainstream audiences. Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow” was the record that changed that. It hadn’t even been intended as her lead single; but once Basa had granted it the keys to Rap Caviar, its rise was exponential.
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Unexpected, unplanned successes like “Bodak Yellow” are the counterpoint to the argument that fully automated aesthetic selection that reduces music to utilitarian function – a playlist for working out, a playlist for destressing – represents a flattening of culture into incentivised blandness, as Liz Pelly argued in the Baffler at the end of 2017. Pelly’s fears are well founded; look one way, and there’s a brilliant surprise hit gaining momentum. Look the other, and streaming data is the punchline to the joke that was the utopian hope of the cultural long tail. Twenty per cent of the songs on Spotify have never been listened to, writes Michael Bhaskar in OR Books’s recent essay collection The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online, while the top 0.1 per cent dominate the charts. Faced with superabundance, consumers, it seems, want curation, not a free-for-all.
Who is doing the curating? Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s ambition, in his own words, is “to soundtrack every moment of your life”. It’s a statement perturbing in its inhumanity, in seeking to undermine the need for active decisions while purporting to serve you – and it reveals, too, that opening up vast new worlds of possibility and discovery are the side product of streaming, not the purpose. Curiously, Ek uses the language of individuality as well as equality in outlining his vision: the algorithmic ideal, for him, is one in which Spotify is able to create a personalised service for each user based, essentially, on who the computer determines that they are.
The paradox of the Spotify experience is that while it enables listeners to tumble down their own personal niche rabbithole, it’s also geared towards casual, passive listeners. The front page is dominated by pre-existing playlists; the weekly pre-eminence of New Music Friday emphasises the imperative to stay up-to-date with what’s popular (or, rather, what Spotify has determined will be popular).
Active choices – to listen to a particular album, for instance – morph into passive listening, as the default setting is for algorithms to automatically choose what you listen to next rather than the music stopping.
This can reveal the flaws in assessing a listener’s taste via data. Teasing out aesthetic connections that exist sideways is often more accurate than mere sonic similarities: the intense feeling and art-prog shapeshifting of R&B auteur Dawn Richard’s innovations lead me back towards Tori Amos, for example, rather than her more diffident contemporaries such as Kelela. When, on a hungover Sunday, the luxurious melancholy of Sade segues into Mary J Blige’s raw pain, it’s jarring: despite my love for both artists, I’ve never wanted to listen to them in the same sitting. And then there’s the wider context by which a song becomes loved in the first place: the way a hitherto unremarkable track can keep cropping up unbidden during a stressful time of life, or the song that means something to you because it means something to someone you love. Utilitarian function shouldn’t be disdained as part of music’s importance to us – but it’s not the whole story. Only humans, not machines, can determine the rest of it.
Spotify is the logical end point of other social media platforms. Like Tumblr, it kills all but the most looming megastars with its lack of regard for original artistic context. Like Twitter, it creates a FOMO-style anxiety about not living in the present, of actively choosing not to keep up with the latest hits. In another paradox, the vast back catalogues available on the platform also send older listeners deep into the realms of nostalgia. “Centralised influences and centralised incentive models ... create boring ass music. It creates boring ass culture,” warns artist Mat Dryhurst, the creator of a project called Saga, geared towards artists taking back control of their work.
While Spotify is a reminder that the roles of gatekeeper and provider were in fact the same in the first place, for listeners the question is less about battling cratedigger and dilettante impulses than putting the machine in its place. Buying into Spotify as a vehicle for consumer control is an illusion. Using it as a tool – one of many – and engaging with it on our own terms seem manageable.
