The Age of Abundance
When we can listen to literally anything, what do we choose, why, and who — or what — decides?
Good post by Om Malik yesterday on the notion that music in our current day and age may have lost that loving feeling. It’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit myself recently.
It’s weird. Had you told the 16-year-old me that in the future I would have access to not just all of my music in my pocket, but all music ever recorded in my pocket at any time, anywhere, my mind would have been blown. The 36-year-old me has exactly this, and here I am to complain about it.¹
In all seriousness, there is something worth talking about/thinking about in our amazing world of musical abundance. Because we can listen to anything at any time, we’re often left with the paradox of choice problem on steroids. What do we listen to when we can listen to literally anything? Often, unless there’s some specific song stuck in our heads, we just default to what we’ve listened to in the past. Or, increasingly, we leave it up to the algorithms.
I’m an Apple Music user, but if anything, the situation is both more pronounced and seemingly better on Spotify. People seem to love the Discover Weekly area of the service for new music discovery. This is all music personalized to your tastes. In our age of data, this makes perfect sense.
And yet, as Om points out in the move from word-of-mouth recommendations to algorithms, something is lost. At first glance, this may sound crazy. Again, we have all music at our fingertips now, and the algorithms know everything about our tastes — our actual tastes, not just what we say we like in public, because they have the listening data — such a system should be perfect. On paper, perhaps. But much like the humans that rejected the perfect version of the Matrix in those movies, many of us find ourselves rejecting this world. Perfect, as it turns out, is not perfect.
In the move to perfection, we’ve left serendipity and randomness behind. I’m sure at this point, folks at Apple or Spotify or the like (or their fans) will point out that there is an element of both serendipity and randomness baked into these recommendations — you’ll recall this was a big selling point of the Apple Music predecessor, Beats Music, back in the day — but it’s just not the same.
I’m sorry, it’s just not the same.
I’m reminded of the complaints about the early iPod shuffle. People — myself included — loved the device, but felt the seemingly random (shuffled) music wasn’t quite random enough. So Apple had to make it less random to make it seem more random. Yes, this really happened.
Anyway, I’m conflating two different issues here. One is the paradox of choice. The other is the ascent of algorithms in discovery. But the two are not only inextricably linked here, they actually reinforce one another, exacerbating each problem.
Some of my favorite music from my childhood is actually music that by all accounts I shouldn’t like. But because of the context in which it was presented to me (whether it be by a person, or because of the place in which it happened), I love it. An algorithm could not know this — which I realize is an extremely dangerous thing to say in our world of machine learning — but it’s not that it’s random, it’s that it’s not random. It’s life.²
And now life will soon enough include everyone having access to all music at all times. And yet this may paradoxically run the risk of decidedly less variation in what we listen to. At it’s core, it’s seemingly similar to the problem Facebook and others are facing with their all-encompassing social networks actually just serving to further divide people into pre-existing segments.
The algorithmic world we live in puts convenience and speed ahead of these abstract concepts of human consciousness and connections. Facebook has blunted the idea of friendship, and relationships, LinkedIn has turned business relations into a spectator sport of likes, follows and recommendations. Algorithm writers forget that we all need narratives, stories we need to tell each other to have a real connection.
And so I wouldn’t be shocked to see a rage against this machine. Whether that be through a new way to share music in person (beyond vinyl, as cool as that resurgence has been) or through a new class of curation. Life, uh, finds a way.
¹ For the record, the 16-year-old me would not have been surprised by me complaining about such a thing...
² Yeah, yeah, life is random. You get my point.
