Self-driving music
Whenever I read about Spotify, the same critique occurs to me: The company's approach to "discovery" — finding new stuff to listen to — seems to have little to do with the social aspects of listening to music, and the way cliques and subcultures used to form around music, how someone's tastes could seem to give you an accurate sense of whether you would like them or not. It seems to have more to do with refining users' relation to themselves rather than to music. Spotify's approach seems to say: Why discover more new bands when you can discover more about yourself? Or rather: finding new music is a proxy for having more control over how you feel — why route any of that through how certain bands are perceived socially? Why be vulnerable to that?
Spotify's data-driven approach, in other words, shifts the stakes of music away from social interaction, away from music as a marker of identity. It presupposes a world where music is mainly played to one person through headphones and is used quasi-therapeutically to modulate feelings or provide energy boosts — to sustain exercise regimens and provide a personalized background, an unobtrusive soundtrack for one's life. Not coincidentally, many Spotify playlists emphasize activities and moods over genres and artists.
In the world of Spotify, music is a mode of self-care, which makes "having taste in music" a bit beside the point, like having a taste for a particular brand of aspirin. Spotify posits music appreciation as a matter beyond the public performance of taste and cultural capital signaling.
Despite its vestigial sharing infrastructure, Spotify's implicit promise is that it offers a safe forum in which you can reveal your tastes to yourself rather than be compelled to express them. It allows you to consume your identity rather than perform it, much as all the other automated recommendation systems do. The underlying idea is that our taste is not especially dynamic — once the algorithms peg you, they can continue to make us content by feeding us more of the same. At the same time, we don't need to express ourselves to others to have our sense of self reflected back to us; the app can stand in for that social interaction. It lets us experiment with ourselves without apparent social consequences. But the consequence may be a reduced tolerance for social risk.
Spotify's aim is not to help us discover or appreciate music so much as to make us dependent on the platform itself, and what it can specifically do — allow us to use music as audio wallpaper for continually decorating our lives. Thus it must convince us that we need access to all music (and thereby nullify the possibility of our choice of music signifying anything about ourselves) in order to have any music we might need — not to show who we are, but to purportedly enhance how we feel — ready at hand.
If music is more like a drug we administer to adjust our mood than a product we affiliate with to broadcast our identity, then musicians themselves become less significant, more or less interchangeable, like drivers. The song just needs to get you where you need to go. Spotify can then treat musicians the way Uber treats its drivers, as Liz Pelly argued in a recent article for the Baffler. Spotify recently announced that it intends to allow artists to upload their music directly to the platform without a label intermediary. Pelly argues that this will allow Spotify to exploit them more efficiently.
Needless to say, signing directly to Spotify is not a preferable solution for many independent artists. It’s more likely that the onrush of contracts would serve Spotify’s bottom line, giving it the leverage to lower the costs they pay for licensing music. This is how platform economy strategies often look: invest in branding to engender a sense of “trust” with industry actors; hire newly enthusiastic if powerless individuals to work independently with increased personal risk; make use of this newfound ubiquity and wage-giving power to ruthlessly minimize costs.
Spotify's incentives are to provide the maximum number of subscribers the cheapest available music; therefore it will work to make musical taste and artistic personality as irrelevant as possible, as these qualities give musicians leverage. "Here is a glimpse of the future," Pelly writes."Spotify dictates the creative process to an artist, and the line between 'independent' or platform-employed grows ever murkier." Spotify would rather force established artists to lower their prices by acclimating listeners to "good enough" substitutes (similar to what Netflix has done to established networks with its flood of good-enough programming). As David Turner documents here, Spotify puts "fake" artists on mood-oriented playlists, presumably because it is trying to make the point that the artist doesn't matter when the listener just wants to feel some particular way. You don't need Matisse in order to make effective wallpaper.
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Built into that view of music is a theory of how feelings work: in a solipsistic, self-contained fashion. An emotion is wholly individual and internal, it is not — or should not have to be — something created or shared between people. If another person makes you feel good, this view would suggest it is because you have consumed them like a song. And if your mood is affected by being part of a collective, think of it as "contagion," "manipulation," or "mob mentality" rather than an "authentic feeling."
The idea that anyone should want to experience "belonging" or "being in the know" or "having approved taste" as feelings is also marginalized. Pelly notes that "at least one Spotify employee has referred to the company’s aspirations with the Uberish term 'self-driving music,' language which points to a strategy that would see music creation and discovery become more automated and data-driven, and, as much as possible, human-free." You don't need a star system in the same way to sell a music subscription service. It's more efficient to acclimate users to consuming not the vicarious fantasies or collective hero worship facilitated by pop stars but the possibility of personal control and agency over their feelings.
I love how the phrase "self-driving music" not only evokes the automatism of self-driving cars, but also suggests how music is supposed to drive the self through the day and not serve any particular social functions. Music is for getting you through an hour on the treadmill; and contra Madonna, it does not "make the people come together." (It doesn't seem to "turn the bourgeoisie into rebels" either.) Much as self-driving cars supposedly will free us up to do more important things behind the wheel than steer, self-driving music will free us from the mundane decisions about what to like so we can instead think of how we want to feel. Spotify wants to liberate us from whatever pleasure comes from exercising our own judgment so we can experience something more pure: the freedom from being judged.
Normally I would pivot here to insisting that music is fundamentally social, and that it is impossible to remove humans from the process of music consumption because music is mainly a means for human connection, and derives its meaning and its emotional resonance from that. And I still think that is true. But if I am
honest with myself, I have to say that my interest in music has done as much to isolate me as to give me a sense of belonging. From a very young age I was preoccupied with my record collection often to the exclusion of talking to people, and I can't remember a time when I wasn't fiercely protective of my taste — that is, a time when I wasn't morbidly aware of what was safe to disclose and to whom. And who knows how many people I've alienated over the years by not so subtly judging them about the music they like.
I'd love to be one of those people who is truly indifferent to what other people think about the music they like, and I often pretend to be that person, but in reality, I am far too sensitive about it. Nothing makes me squirm quite like the person at a party who has commandeered the stereo to play the music they think everyone needs to hear. In part I envy their courage and confidence and indifference, but mostly I become acutely aware of everyone else's indifference to what they are playing. I end up feeling a kind of vicarious shame, like watching someone bomb at a talent show.
These feelings also come out for me at karaoke — I'm not generally timid about singing, but the idea of choosing songs that everyone else has to hear makes me very uncomfortable. It feels to me as though there is no middle ground between "pandering" to other people (or my condescending estimation of what other people like) or "imposing" my esoteric, hard-to-fathom choices on them. It's lose-lose for me; if I pick something for them, then I've effaced myself, but if I pick something for me and they like it, I've proved to myself that my tastes are not so special after all.
For too long, I've wanted the music I like to differentiate me, which I've understood as meaning that no one else can claim it for themselves. Part of being "into music" for me has been the need to often disavow being influenced by other people and to concoct elaborate self-glorifying origin stories for why I like certain things, how I discovered some band on my own initiative (reading magazines and latching on to unfamiliar names, selecting records more or less at random from discount bins) rather than admitting a friend introduced it to me.
Spotify's discovery systems seem like they are ready to liberate me, obviating the influences others have had on me or disguising it as metrics or burying it within algorithms where it can be disavowed or reinterpreted as a reflection of myself and not proof that I derive myself from others. But it also wants to rob me of the self-defeating (but nonetheless delectable) pleasures of being a taste contrarian. If I don't have the option to be reactionary in my tastes, I may not have any taste at all. Would that be a bad thing?
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I got a new car recently, which means I can now plug my phone into the stereo. My previous car was old enough that it didn't have an aux input, let alone a USB port. It had a six-CD changer. I drove around with books of old CDs, the cases of which I had thrown out years ago. I sold that car to a friend of a friend's daughter, and I just left those CD books in there — hundreds and hundreds of CDs. I had no use for them anymore, but more than than I wanted to be able to imagine that the new owner might actually play some of them, even if just for laughs. But it is more likely they immediately got dumped in the trash.
I agonized over trying to make the discs in those books representative of my music collection as a whole. Some of them were ad hoc discs burned for specific road trips, some burned on random whims. Songs would come up on shuffle on my phone, and I would think, Oh, I should burn that for the car. But it was such a cumbersome process to swap out the discs in the player that mostly I listened to the same things: Forever Changes plus side one of Da Capo by Love, Kimono My House and Propaganda by Sparks; a mix CD of Fairport Convention songs; Friends and 20/20 by the Beach Boys. Most of the time I was in the car I was alone, and I would sing along. "Let's be friends. Let's be friends."
For my new car, I dusted off my old 160 GB iPod, thinking it would be great to have access to all those albums, and to be able to scroll through them on the dashboard display panel and all that, but it hasn't worked out that way. Most of the time I just end up listening to podcasts.