"Polish folk-techno or metalcore with Harry Potter fanfic lyrics. "

June 22, 2016 1:17 PM

If You Do That, The Robots Win: Glenn McDonald, music critic and creator of Every Noise At Once talks about how algorithmic music recommendation happens:

So now I work at Spotify as a zookeeper for playlist-making robots. Recommendation robots have existed for a while now, but people have mostly used them for shopping. Go find me things I might want to buy. "You bought a snorkel, maybe you'd like to buy these other snorkels?" But what streaming music makes possible, which online music stores did not, is actual programmed music experiences. Instead of trying to sell you more snorkels, these robots can take you out to swim around with the funny-looking fish. And as robots begin to craft your actual listening experience, it is reasonable, and maybe even morally imperative, to ask if a playlist robot can have an authorial voice, and, if so, what it is?

The answer is: No. Robots have no taste, no agenda, no soul, no self. Moreover, there is no robot. I talk about robots because it's funny and gives you something you can picture, but that's not how anything really happens.

ENAO has gotten some imrovements:
What The Kids Are Into
Deeper Noises At Once
More Noises At Once

posted by the man of twists and turns (24 comments total)

Every Noise At Once, Previously
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:19 PM on June 22, 2016

Oh, this is fascinating. I'm only a few paragraphs into it and it's much more interesting than I expected - I expected some "Here's how we decide what you should listen to" and what I am getting is "Here's how I tinker with searches to really try to understand what people listen to, and some of the challenges I face".
posted by rebent at 1:27 PM on June 22, 2016

Oooh. Looking forward to diving into this, because for months now I've been regaling my friends with the utter weirdness that is my Spotify weekly Discover playlist. Last week's playlist was like a tone poem about what happens when your speed freak trucker uncle goes to Bonnaroo and picks up a hitchhiking Gil Scott-Heron on the way, and for once I actually liked all of it.
posted by palomar at 1:34 PM on June 22, 2016 [8 favorites]

Whatever they're doing it's pretty terrible. I've found the music recommendations from every service I've tried to be from bad to baffling.
posted by Sangermaine at 1:53 PM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Also:

5. Bernie Sanders is right.

It is in the interest of the world of music creators if the streaming music business exerts a bit of democratic-socialist pressure against income inequality. The incremental human value of another person listening to "Shake It Off" again is arguably positive, but it's probably also considerably smaller than the value of that person listening to a new song by a new songwriter who doesn't already have enough money to live out the rest of their life inside a Manhattan loft whose walls are covered with thumbdrives full of bitcoins and #1-fan selfies. Anthem Lights "Shake It Off". Taylor, if you're listening, I'm going to keep playing shitty covers of your songs until you put the real ones back on Spotify. That's how it works.

This is pretty bizarre. Spotify isn't the little guy fighting against rich established artists, Spotify is the Establishment that only someone at Swift's level can realistically afford to take a stand against. Swift and others have pulled their music from services like Spotify because Spotify isn't paying artists shit, but the vast majority of artists have no choice but to do deal with it.

It's just weird to see this guy at Spotify sneering at Swift and blathering on about how "streaming music business exerts a bit of democratic-socialist pressure against income inequality."
posted by Sangermaine at 2:10 PM on June 22, 2016

As a jazz fan who lost my jazz radio station, I desperately, desperately miss having a human DJ selecting songs. The human DJ puts together an interesting playlist where songs interconnect and interact in interesting ways, and just has a better sense of "if you like X, you'll probably also like Y" than Spotify does. I imagine the smaller sample size for jazz fans is part of that, but Spotify and its ilk just don't know how to curate. Which they're not really designed to, and it's fine when it's pop or electronica or whatever that I like but don't mind if I'm just listening to the couple dozen most popular things, but when I listen to music with more history and more ... academic study, I guess? ... having a knowledgeable human who's curating the playlist is really key.

To flip to a classical analogy, I love Aaron Copeland and I love Beethoven but I don't necessarily want to listen to one right after the other just because "listeners in the US who like Copeland also like Beethoven." It's probably true! But there's some context there that's being radically elided.

His point 1 is my longest-standing beef with Amazon and its terrible suggestion engine (which is lately marginally better). With 18 years of my reading history, Amazon still prefers to AVERAGE all of it into the book that most-closely approximates all of my reading interests at once, which turned out to be a YA historical regency steampunk novel with vampires and a faux-Catholic Church set in an fantasy ice kingdom with a female protagonist. Yes, Amazon, I do like YA. And Regency romances. And SFF. And Frozen. And female protagonists. And theology! I DO NOT LIKE ALL OF THOSE THINGS AT ONCE (and vampires are right out). Its total inability to understand that I like books about theology AND ALSO BUT SEPARATELY Regency Romances makes me NUTS. This "averaging of different sorts of things you like" is maddening. It's like the world's worst chef: "You like strawberry pie AND meaty chili AND stinky cheese? I've dumped a pie and a wheel of cheese into this chili and stirred it for an hour, it'll be your favorite!" (Basically recommendation engines are like the time I like my toddler make his own birthday cake and he put in EVERY flavor he liked and it was VILE.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 2:11 PM on June 22, 2016 [8 favorites]

"I've dumped a pie and a wheel of cheese into this chili and stirred it for an hour, it'll be your favorite!"

This is pretty much how I discovered The Fall through Spotify.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 2:49 PM on June 22, 2016 [3 favorites]

I keep having this problem on the iTunes store where it tries to list "New music from your artists." The offered list is usually full of random genre collections by "Various Artists," I think because I have a lot of Broadway cast albums that show up in my library as "Various Artists." Oh, and iTunes also likes to suggest some gansta rap artist/group called Fame, and I have no idea why because I own nothing by an artist of that name, though I do have the soundtrack album to the movie "Fame."

To flip to a classical analogy, I love Aaron Copeland and I love Beethoven but I don't necessarily want to listen to one right after the other just because "listeners in the US who like Copeland also like Beethoven." It's probably true! But there's some context there that's being radically elided.

I've run into that issue too. Similarly, sometimes it's totally off about exactly what I like about a certain artist. Say, Swing Out Sister. I find when I try to get playlists generated based on them, the systems seem to focus on the fact they had a hit in the 80s and try to play 80s music. But that misses what a great retro-soul-jazz group they have evolved into today - they would fit better with a lot of 60s/70s soul than 80s Brit pop now.
posted by dnash at 3:06 PM on June 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

Also - OMG, so this is what happened to "The War Against Silence" writer? I loved that blog!
posted by dnash at 3:08 PM on June 22, 2016 [4 favorites]

I've found a bunch of things I like through Spotify suggestions. I don't know what that means. I just skip stuff if I think it sounds a bit shit. I don't put effort into liking stuff these days unless someone I trust has recommended it, but I'm perfectly happy to browse Spotify like leafing through books in a book shop.
posted by howfar at 3:20 PM on June 22, 2016

Spotify's Discover Weekly is eerily good in my experience. So good that I have actually bought MP3s of certain songs loved by my son just so I can play them in iTunes and make sure they don't mess with my stats on Spotify.
posted by bonaldi at 3:24 PM on June 22, 2016 [3 favorites]

Seconding bonaldi's endorsement of Spotify's Discover Weekly. It's typically a satisfying mix of things I heard before and liked a lot and stuff I haven't heard of and often enjoy. Glenn McDonald's peak into how they're doing it was fascinating.
posted by layceepee at 3:50 PM on June 22, 2016

Yes, came here to say that The War Against Silence was bedrock-essential early-2000s blog reading for me, and when it went away, I was crushingly sad. It's somehow perfect that Glenn ended up at Spotify.

(I found Every Noise At Once to be as maddening as its name suggests, which just puts me on the wrong side of the feature/bug axis in this case.)
posted by mykescipark at 3:52 PM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

The human DJ puts together an interesting playlist where songs interconnect and interact in interesting ways, and just has a better sense of "if you like X, you'll probably also like Y" than Spotify does

Being able to create playlists comparable to those of a good DJ should be considered a version of the Turing test.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 4:06 PM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

"I've dumped a pie and a wheel of cheese into this chili and stirred it for an hour, it'll be your favorite!"

What sort of cheese?
posted by pompomtom at 4:27 PM on June 22, 2016

Seconding bonaldi's endorsement of Spotify's Discover Weekly. It's typically a satisfying mix of things I heard before and liked a lot and stuff I haven't heard of and often enjoy. Glenn McDonald's peak into how they're doing it was fascinating.

At first, I got a few good things from Spotify's Discover Weekly, if only b/c I listen to a lot of KALX, and then transfer that knowledge to my Spotify play selections, i.e. a good variety. But it's been very diminishing returns for the past few months... KALX, on the other hand, is a neverending source of format-free goodness.

Also, maybe it's just me (or KALX), but I get a shitload of covers on Discover Weekly now. A literal shitload.
posted by mrgrimm at 4:47 PM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm amused by Spotify radio picks but I take it at face value. For instance, no human DJ would play that many tracks from Susanna Hoffs and Matthew Sweet's cover albums.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 4:54 PM on June 22, 2016

I am so, so, so looking forward to the rumored launch of Spotify where I live. We have no Last.FM, no Pandora, no Spotify, no nothin'. Hearing MeFites complain about them constantly is like living off of stale bread and hearing people complain about how the butter on their lobster is regular butter instead of herb butter.
posted by Bugbread at 5:27 PM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Catholic steam punk regency vampire YA? And Amazon has never recommended it to me? Damn, Amazon, it's like you don't even know me.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 5:47 PM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

I miss Songza so, so much for this very reason-- god, those human-curated lists were good. But I've had a lot of luck with Spotify Discover. This article is a cool insight into the tiny fragments of success that make up why.
posted by peppercorn at 6:59 PM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

The human DJ puts together an interesting playlist where songs interconnect and interact in interesting ways, and just has a better sense of "if you like X, you'll probably also like Y" than Spotify does.

It's funny, because when I've DJ'd and mix-taped, I would usually select for a certain kind of mood, and I would end up with okay mixes... but when I hear someone really good, they would shift gears, take risks, and make intuitive leaps that were more interesting than just playing the next song that sounded kinda like what came before..

This is pretty much how I discovered The Fall through Spotify.

The Fall... does not compute with assumptions about music as we know it. I actually like The Fall, but I'm not sure I would describe their sound as music, it's like quasi-music or something. All of the constituent elements of music are there, but fragmented and re-assembled in a different form.
posted by ovvl at 9:16 PM on June 22, 2016

I love Spotify discover, but it was also strangely brilliant to pull out my hilariously retro ipod classic and plug it in for cooking music. PRESS BUTTON PLAY MUSIC YOU POSSESS idk why it's different but it is
posted by Sebmojo at 10:34 PM on June 22, 2016

That was an interesting read, and I just recently commented to a friend that Spotify recommendations have become better. Now I know who to thank.

And I got to hear some music from the Indonesian indie scene, which tickled my inner hipster.
posted by Harald74 at 3:47 AM on June 23, 2016

The Fall... does not compute with assumptions about music as we know it

Long ago I read a Mark E Smith quote to the effect of "we take the stupidest thing that comes to mind and build a killer song out of it" I've tried and tried to find the quote again because it captured so perfectly my past experience making music. It was probably in some moldering issue of NME.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 6:42 PM on June 23, 2016