I have been reading the new Liz Pelly book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. It is a very intelligent and well done book, though it is more pessimistic than I am about the future of music.
One central lesson of the book is just how many “passive” music listeners there are. In an earlier era they might have been content with muzak, even on the car radio (my father used to do that). But with Spotify, and many other related internet music services, the passive listeners can be very readily identified. They do not mind being fed AI-produced slop, or payola-driven songs in their feeds. For instance, some song producers, often serving up musical slop, will accept lower royalty rates in return for algorithmic promotion. The passive listeners accept this arrangement without complaint — maybe they just want background mood, or maybe they are not listening at all, and do not want the music to be too intrusive.
Obviously Spotify, or whichever service one has in mind, can track your behavior in this regard. Passive listeners can expect a stream of very low quality in the future, meaning quality as I would define it, not as they would.
Is it bad if so many listeners are passive? Well, it is not my ideal of the ideal philosophic republic.
Still, given that they exist I like the idea of setting them aside, segregated into their own easily-manipulated club. After all, they don’t seem to care about Chuck Berry and Brian Eno. Insofar as we succeed in segregating them, I would think many of the remaining algorithms become better and more in tune with what their users want. After all, the noise from the passive listeners has been removed from the calculations.
So I think of algorithms as a way of rewarding the good guys, and avoiding some of the pooling equilibria. What you call musical “slop,” I call the separating equilibrium.
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