Saved by Emily Li and
Why I Finally Quit Spotify | the New Yorker
It’s approaching problems the way every late-stage internet platform does, at least before it discovers its limits: by presuming total victory and control over the industry it’s been working to enclose. Spotify’s success as a basic streaming service eventually entitled it to a central role in how music is made and distributed. Why shouldn’t its suc... See more
John Herrman • Spotify Is Eating the Entire Music Business
Mike Evans added
Spotify, for example, has invested heavily in its own curation services — both algorithmic and human — after finding that many of its listeners were baffled by superabundance, burdened by excessive choice and uninterested in charting their own paths through the digital wilderness.
ROGERS BRUBAKER • Hyperconnected Culture and Its Discontents
To start I like to describe where music consumption is now. It's quite obvious to avid music consumers that you can create a better playlist yourself than could an algorithm. If you really wanted to sit down to create that perfect playlist for your day, you'd probably be able to do a pretty good job by yourself doing it. Spotify will do an okay job... See more
Daniel Ek • A Chat With The King of Music: An Interview With Daniel Ek
sari added
If platforms like Vine and TikTok aim to make us all content creators, subscription platforms like Spotify aim to make us all content curators, picking our favorite tracks and sharing them with friends and the internet at large. While curating our music choices might give us a brief flash of empowerment, like we’ve somehow escaped the clutches of c... See more
Tim Maughan • Platforms, Creative Communities, and the Need for a Radical Reimagining - The Reboot
sari added
As all forms of media have moved into streaming, when everything seems to be a single click away, it’s easy to forget that we can also have physical, non-algorithmic relationships with the pieces of culture we consume in our personal time. We store books on bookshelves, mount art on our living room walls, and keep stacks of vinyl records. When we w
... See moreKyle Chayka • Filterworld
This problem is almost impossible to fix in a culture that relies heavily on algorithms. The algorithm is, by definition, a repeating pattern that always looks backward. It does something in the future based on what worked in the past.
So the algorithm that recommends music or videos on a web platform will never deliver a totally fresh and new expe... See more
So the algorithm that recommends music or videos on a web platform will never deliver a totally fresh and new expe... See more
Ted Gioia • How to Know if You're Living in a Doom Loop
Matthew Jay added
This is another articulation of the problem I’ve found with music streaming following the demise of Rdio. Am I just being fed back more of the same, and how can I continue to find new things? I’m not sure an algorithm is the answer.