Innbundet

You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song began in a Google doc I had provisionally titled Every Noise at Once: New Fears and New Joys From the Streaming Liberation of All the World's Music. The first chapter-list I made there was mostly just a chronological free-association of stories I tell. That structure was useful in suggesting that there was probably a book's quantity of words involved, but when we started...

Large Language Models, by encoding our language, also encode our beliefs about ourselves, exactly as confused and conflicting as they seem to us when we read them, too. When we ask these models to answer questions, we would like to think we are invoking our most aggregated collective wisdom, but more realistically we are usually eliciting the mean of our conditioned beliefs. We talk to ChatGPT as if it has patiently...

Filter "bubbles" are charmingly weightless, delightful to pop. Sure, there's a slight soapy residue afterwards, but check your backpack: there are probably still a few old hand-sanitizer packets you shoved in there during the pandemic. Except sometimes you reach out, flirtatiously, to pop the shimmering bubble, and hit an intransigence made of polarized glass. Less bubble, more dome.   Spotify generates a lot of...

It's probably not the one I wrote. It would be weird if my book were your favorite book. It's a geeky book about music-streaming and music and algorithms and technology and curiosity and morality and where we are right now, and your favorite book should probably be an immortal novel about how we always are, or something you have re-read every year since you were 12 because it reminds you what you love and believe.  ...

My kid was that small once, too, so I know why this one sounds excited when she says "They have smoothies!" The world is full of strange things, and slowly you learn what some of them are, and that they are delightful. You learn to convert a world of unknowns into a world of delights, one pattern at a time.   And I was a parent of a kid that small once, too, so I know why this one, there in line at an airport banh...

The technical goal is to organize music so it is explorable. Exploration rewards curiosity. The product goal is to help listeners find joy. Joy is various. The feature goal is to connect individuals to communities. Music is a social energy. The business goal is to make money for artists. Not from. There should be one reward system, consistently applied. All financial contracts should be public. Listeners are...

There is no chapter about generative AI in my book about music streaming. In part this is because while I was writing it, things were changing in AI so quickly that almost anything future-looking I tried to say would have been abjectly obsolete by the time the book was printed. But mostly it's because music's most pressing problems are cultural and economic, and do not require incomprehensibly complicated technical...

Or have you? If you haven't, and you want to, you can now do so in paper or screen form, on either side of one of the oceans. It comes out in June from Canbury Press.   US: bookshop.org or amazon.com or kindle UK: uk.bookshop.org or amazon.co.uk or kindle UK     If it's news to you that I wrote a book, I announced it here. Some of the verb tenses have changed since then, but the future tense in which I have been...

Spotify's Loud and Clear site includes an analogy between musicians and football players, ostensibly to explain how "aspirations" to make money from creative/athletic pursuits are more widespread than actual career success.   This comparison is not original or unique to Spotify, and does make some limited sense. With both art and sports, you can choose to spend your time on them, and the process of making music or...

I like legislation as a tool for social change, so I'm positively predisposed towards the Living Wage for Musicians Act as a tactic, and I agree with its goal of making it possible for more people to make better livings as musicians.   But I don't think this proposed law, as written, will work.   Here's how it would operate:   Music-streaming subscriptions in the US would have a federal government fee of 50% added...

Talking to Robots About Songs and Memory and Death Infinite Archives, Fluctuating Access and Flickering Nostalgia at the Dawn of the Age of Streaming Music (delivered at the 2024 Pop Conference)   Let me tell you how it used to be. Songs were written and sung and recorded, but then they were encased in finite increments of plastic, and our control over our ability to hear them relied on each of us, sometimes in...

If you are interested in hearing me speak, in person, and you live in LA, you have two opportunities coming up.   On Friday, March 8, I will be at UCLA speaking about human complications of simple numbers in music data, as part of a day-long Music + Data Symposium. The event is free, but seating is limited and you should register in advance.   On Saturday, March 9, at 9:00am, I will be at USC speaking about infinite...

The systemic moral imperative seeks the distribution of power over its concentration, and thus the reduction of inequities of power. Money is usually a good proxy for power, so it's tempting to regard any redirection of money to the preexistingly unwealthy as moral. But this is both a dangerous conflation of cause and effect, and an attractive nuisance of potentially misleading measurement.   In fact, the most...

When you go to an artist's page on Spotify, there's a big Play button at the top. This seems reasonable enough. Playing their music isn't necessarily what you want to do, but it's one of the most likely things. What does it mean, exactly, to "Play an artist", as opposed to playing a particular release? Hit the button and pay attention to the track-sequence you get, and you can quickly figure out what Spotify has...

Collective listening is a cultural investment. Collected listening data can be valuable for music streaming services' selfish business purposes, of course, but it's generated by music and listeners, and should be valuable to the world and to music first.   It was my job, for a while, to try to turn music-listening data into cultural knowledge. My opinion, from doing that, is that there are four fundamental kinds of...

The glum Digital Music News headline reads "Spotify Daylist is Blowing Up—Too Bad the Creator Was Laid Off", and although I haven't specifically talked to the person who came up with Daylist since the layoffs, I don't think they were affected in this round. The explanation in the body of the story is a little more specific:     This is mostly true in what it actually says. I wasn't the only person working on the...

Whatever my job is or, currently, isn't, I still really want to know about new music, and there were exactly two excellent methods for this and I made them both and I'm not allowed to use either one any more. So I keep poking at approaches to this problem using public tools, and the Spotify API is still the best of these. I've gone so far as to implement a version of the obviously-intractable brute-force approach of...

I did my job with love and belief. This was always obviously risky. I had no illusions that the love was returned, or that it is even possible for a public corporation of non-trivial scale to behave in human ways at all.   It's easy to find cogent advice for how to modulate your emotional attachment to your job, so that losing it is not like losing a part of yourself. I cheerfully recommend ignoring this. The world...

There were a lot of things on Every Noise at Once that updated daily or weekly, and some of them will lose value only slowly now that they can't be updated. The one that loses almost all of its value at once is the weekly New Releases by Genre.   There were no new-release features in Every Noise at Once at its literal outset, pre-Spotify when it was powered by second-hand Echo Nest data and the Rdio API. I found a...

Between the Echo Nest and then, via acquisition, Spotify, I spent 12 years doing a slowly mutating job of trying to use data and math and computers to help all the world's music self-organize. It seems to be the unanimous opinion of people who send me nice notes on email and Twitter and LinkedIn that I did valuable things at Spotify and from Spotify, and that laying me off was some combination of corporate error and...

The job I used to do at Spotify was to experiment with what could be made out of listening data, but the experiments that worked were then automated to run on appropriate schedules. These stopped working temporarily when my employee account was deactivated, but were revived, and some data-driven daily playlists are updating again. Currently no data updates are making it to everynoise.com, though, and all the big...

everynoise.com is and was a projection of things I worked on at the Echo Nest, and then Spotify. As of this morning, I'm not working there, and I expect most of the things I did will no longer be done. The domain is mine, but the processes that updated the site have already stopped running, and the current server may stop serving at any moment. Once that happens, I will try to bring back at least a wistful memorial...

I read a lot of other people's writing about streaming and music, in the press and in books and on Twitter (or its scattered mirror-shards), and I almost always end up annoyed that the story is most consistently told from the point of view of an outsider with speculative information and dour grudges. There are occasional exceptions, like Nick Seaver's Computing Taste, but that's a work of anthropological...

In a 2009 post about music-data modeling, I posed the reasonable human question "What Beatles album is 'Day Tripper' on?" and bemoaned the various ways in which all available music-data sources failed to effectively answer it.   My human answer was this:   This is partially a trick question, of course, as "Day Tripper" was originally a non-album single, but it has been on several Beatles compilations over the years,...

Rolling Stone published this recent story (https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/spotify-sleep-music-playlists-lady-gaga-1223911/) about the streaming success of the sleep-noise artist/label/scheme Sleep Fruits, who chop up background rain-noise recordings into :30 lengths to maximize streaming playcounts.   Sleep Fruits is undeniably and intentionally exploiting the systemic weakness of the industry-wide...

[I woke up this morning with this almost-fully-formed idea in my mind for what I guess would have been a trailer for the upcoming season of Last Week Tonight.]   We open on a close-up of a newspaper with the banner headline   INAUGURATION TOMORROW   and the subhead   President-Elect Announces National Socially-Distanced Hot Dog Cookout   The newspaper then doubles and flies into both sides of a split-screen.   On...

The 2020 Pop Conference starts this week! It's online and free, so you can come!   But you do need to register!   My PopCon contribution this year is not a talk, it's a web explorer for the music that defines, unites and distinguishes kids around the world. It's called The Aqueduct of Youth.     It's part of a panel called The Platforms of Youth: Meme-ing, Marketing & Streaming, with five other explorations of "Old...

I grew up in Texas, which is where Juneteenth originated. Either nobody I knew talked about it (and pretty much everybody I knew was white), or they did and I managed to forget. Either one of those is pathetic.   This year is different. This year Juneteenth comes in the middle of a literal viral pandemic and an essential moral revolution to assert the should-be-beyond-obvious truth that Black Lives Matter. I know...