Sweet little lies: Deceptive statistics in the album charts
academic.oup.com
Sweet little lies: Deceptive statistics in the album charts
By refusing to recognize anything that can’t be quantized to a one or zero, this analysis misses everything in between. It depicts an autotuned reality, where every note must be averaged up or down to the nearest quantized notch. The subtleties of a vocalist’s interpretation—what true music lovers listen for most—are discounted as “noise.” The emph
... See moreDouglas Rushkoff • Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
I often quote the example of a metal band who produced this one acoustic ballad. That ballad was great and ended up in a big editorial playlist, generating a lot of saves and listenership. However, the band suffered algorithmically. Algorithms learned that their music was adequate for ballad lovers, recommending it to more of them. When that happen... See more
Julie Knibbe • Unlocking Spotify Algorithms: Proven Strategies from 2 Years of Boosting Artist Visibility on Streaming Platforms
What Does Music Mean to Spotify? An Essay on Musical Significance in the Era of Digital Curation
Asher T Chodosacademia.edu
But critics and music historians hate sentimental love songs, so these artists and songs struggle to get a place in the history books. Transgressive rockers, in contrast, enjoy lasting fame . . . right now, electronic dance music probably outsells hip-hop. In my opinion, this is identical to the punk-versus-disco trade-off of the 1970s. My predicti
... See moreChuck Klosterman • But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
So I’ve discovered, with experience, that when you buy a thick book with tons of graphs and tables used to prove a point, you should be suspicious. It means something didn’t distill right! But for the general public and those untrained in statistics, such tables appear convincing—another way to substitute the true with the complicated.