More of the Same

In 1996, it wouldn't be uncommon to turn on the radio & hear Paula Cole, the Sneaker Pimps, Outkast, the Butthole Surfers, the Fugees, Rage Against the Machine, & the Squirrel Nut Zippers. It was an exciting time to be alive, when alternative (which is to say experimental) & commercial weren't mutually exclusive adjectives.

It was the age of mixtapes & then mix CDs, & a generation of music fans who learned to curate & sequence tracks just by listening to radio DJs. It wasn't uncommon for someone to say their favorite style of music was "anything but country or rap," because rap & country were segregated formats. The vast chasm between those two genres was the world of top 40 & alternative radio programming.

In this era, ska & swing (for better or worse) nudged their way into the national spotlight, making their way into GAP commercials & hit indie movies like Swingers. It wasn't out of the ordinary to hear steel guitar over drum machine beats. Or the Spanish-language Buena Vista Social Club segueing into New York hip hop. Surprise was an essential part of the experience.

The alternative movement itself first reached the mainstream when radio started playing Nirvana & Pearl Jam in between hair metal songs. No one sought out the Smashing Pumpkins' buzzsaw fuzz pedal guitar tones. No one could've predicted that they wanted to hear the Butthole Surfers' trance-y, drone-y sing talking over hip hop beats & sitar. Or Bjork's Icelandic chants. You can't choose these things off of a menu, you just have to be confronted with them.

Spotify has made this type of experience nearly impossible to replicate.

The passive listening problem

Many users rely on Spotify's algorithmic recommendations for music discovery, & claim to discover new artists all of the time. But algorithmic recommendations by definition appeal to your biases. What was so great about human curated radio is that it was surprising & sometimes even confrontational. Algorithmic recommendations are anything but.

Spotify has an incentive to put you into a passive listening mode so that you don't disengage. That means avoiding disruptive modes like surprise. This is true to such a degree that they've developed the DJ feature not to surprise you with new recommendations, but to ease the transition between songs it already knows that you like.

“That was Deee-Lite, an iconic dance group from the 1990s. I know you’re a big fan of songs from the 1950s, so let’s ease into some Buddy Holly…”

Yes, there are profoundly good user curated playlists on the app, but Spotify makes these practically impossible to find, instead surfacing hyper-niche & more-of-the-same playlists & programming.

The age of conformity

With Spotify as the dominant platform for music listening, it also shapes the way artists perceive that their music is being heard. An artist may think twice before recording a 6 minute song, as it's less likely to find placement on playlists. They might steer the production of their single to sound more like another artist who already has traction, hoping the algorithm promotes the song to that artist's fans. They may eschew making choices that are bold or norm-breaking, which may place them on an algorithmic island.

I'm convinced that many of my favorite songs from the 1990s not only wouldn't find an audience in today's industry, they might not have even been recorded. At least not in the ways they were.

Algorithm-based recommendation engines tend to arrest development of users' tastes, as recommendations are created relative to the user's taste as it is right now. As users grow to depend on the algorithm, it becomes harder & harder to break out of that original preference pocket, & continued listening only re-affirms the algorithm's original presumptions. And this can make it, over time, far more difficult for artists & music itself to evolve.

Consider that the Beach Boys started out singing 1950's-style teen vocal pop like Be True To Your School & were making elaborate pop arrangements like God Only Knows a few short years later. The Beatles started out with standard R&B tunes like I Saw Her Standing There & were recording progressive pop like While My Guitar Gently Weeps before too long.

The algorithm actively discourages this type of evolution.

In conclusion

There's certainly a place for mood-based or activity-based passive listening. But we're all harmed when this becomes the default mode. When every holiday playlist you can find has the same 40 songs. When you can play one song & then hear the exact same goddamn reggaeton beat at the same tempo with the same drum samples for the next six goddamn hours. It's bad that surprise & growth have been removed from the experience. I think there's a way for Spotify to maintain the passive playlists, but to also surface human-curated playlists & stations that resurrect a lot of the healthy aspects of '90s alternative radio. If they only come to realize that passive engagement isn't the only metric to optimize for.