FEATURE:
Anonymous Homogenous
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Are Our Music Tastes Becoming Too Samey and Digitally-Led?
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I read an interesting feature…
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from The Guardian recently. It asks a question that has been posed through the years. That relates to whether modern music tastes are being directed by algorithms and streaming services. Whether we are all listening to the same music. It is clear that there is a big hegemony when it comes to Pop. There are a few artists that are dominating a lot of tastes and direction. Although Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX and a few others are grabbing a lot of the focus, it is Taylor Swift who dominates. I do wonder if we have ever seen a case of an artist getting so much attention and press coverage. It is great Swift is succeeding and doing something great, though it seems to be a symptom of modern tastes and how we are guided to music. If you look at streaming sites and are in the mood for discovery or something unusual, how accommodating are sites? I tend to find that I am caught in this loop of listening to the same stuff. Daily Mix playlists collate artists I have been listening to. It is divided in terms of genres and styles. Any suggestions that come up are really close to what I listen to. It is easy to get caught in this trap of relying on these suggestions and playlists. Stuck listening to the same music. Looking on the front pages and any suggestions and the same artists crop up. I guess you can turn off these algorithms and not have playlists suggested and built. It makes your music discovery more fluid and diverse. That is not to say that all we are listening to now is Pop or music from this generation. It does seem to be the case that even some of the same legacy artists are proving popular year-in-year-out. What is driving that? It is interesting to ponder:
“That may be true, but what if we looked at it from a different perspective? Think of those aerial shots of the festival site, which attempt to capture the sheer scale of 200,000 people descending on 600 hectares of land for the weekend. Then reinterpret them as a kind of heatmap of taste. There are more than 100 stages at Glastonbury, but certain areas heaved with bodies while others were notably sparse. More palpably than in previous years, there was a sense that everyone wanted to see the same thing. What if, guided by some invisible hand, we were all converging on the same likes and dislikes? What if taste was no longer a question of making finer and finer distinctions, but of being nudged towards uniformity?
Another example of vast numbers of people coalescing around a single musical point of reference comes in the form of Taylor Swift. Her global Eras tour, now completing its European leg in London, is already the highest-grossing of all time: she is expected to make $2bn from it, all told. Her concerts regularly break attendance records and have even been known to cause measurable seismic activity. For audiences in Seattle and in Edinburgh, the earth literally moved. It’s not like everyone on the planet listens to Taylor Swift, but those massive profits and the ground-shaking impact of her gigs suggest that there are an awful lot of us who do.
Her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department, was streamed 1bn times on Spotify in its first week, adding yet another record to the teetering pile. Swift’s megastar status means she’s one of the few artists not reliant on playlists to direct passive listeners to her work, but these often machine-made selections still have a reinforcing effect. There’s no denying that the algorithms streaming and social media are built on have dramatically altered how we listen. Spotify launched 16 years ago and now claims to have 615 million users worldwide: in less than two decades, it has fundamentally changed the way we consume music.
Despite some heel-dragging, the musical establishment has been forced to adapt to its rhythms. In 2014, the Official Charts Company finally started taking account of streams in compiling its rundown of the biggest hits. But this has painted a strange portrait of contemporary taste. As well as five separate Taylor Swift entries, the top 20 bestselling albums of 2023 included the greatest hits of Fleetwood Mac, Eminem, Abba and Oasis. This is the taste of our parents or grandparents, reflected back at us. Streaming was supposed to do away with traditional gatekeepers, such as music journalists and radio DJs, and many speculated that genre would collapse completely. And it’s true that pop, rap and country have become surprisingly fluid and interchangeable. Yet, oddly enough, we’re seeing an increasingly samey musical landscape, in which taste has become trapped in a feedback loop of the algorithm’s making. “Spotify tells you what to listen to,” says Milo, the sharply ambitious student in Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel, Caledonian Road. His advice? “Say no to algorithmically generated playlists”.
It is true that algorithms are creating an issue. Maybe we are relying less on radio and more traditional sources when it comes to music discovery. That is not to say that music sounds the same. There is variation and difference. It seems to be the case that, the more we rely on the digital, the more homogenised our music tastes become. The fact that, when it comes to the albums most bought, there is that singularity of Pop being represented. One artist getting so much of the market share. Questions could be asked in regards to the media circus and focus that has been put on Taylor Swift. Is the Pop market too singular and same-sounding to engage a wider audience? Are we living at a time when Pop and other genres are too simple and repetitive? In another article published recently, Tom Breihan studied seventy years of past Pop. Even if songs now are shorter and less complex, that is not to say they lack depth. The modern Pop scene is fascinating:
“In a study published in July, researchers from London’s Queen Mary University algorithmically studied the melodies of decades’ worth of US Billboard chart hits, and came to the conclusion that the melodies driving those songs have grown less complex over the years. The researchers stress that this isn’t a qualitative judgment, and they’ve taken pains in the discussion to compensate for the popularity of rap music, a genre where melody can often be incidental. Still, the existence of this kind of study can serve to bolster certain bar-room conversations. If you’re convinced, for instance, that the music of your own youth is superior to whatever’s being made these days, then you can now cite a scientific paper to claim that today’s hits are just dumbed-down slop.
The earliest days of the Hot 100 coincided with the rise of rock’n’roll, when the new breed of stars competed with and sometimes sought to emulate an older generation of big-band crooners, and those guys prized a certain sophistication in vocal phrasing. The doo-wop groups of the late 50s and early 60s also built their melodic structures mostly out of vocals, so maybe that skews the graphs, too. Still, I don’t think a song like Elvis Presley’s Are You Lonesome Tonight? sounds any more melodically rich than, say, Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero. Maybe I’m just not hearing the Midi files or looking at the notation.
But nobody looks at Midi files or notation when they’re processing pop music. It’s an in-the-moment art form, one much more dependent on technological rupture and societal context than pure melody. In recent years, for instance, the pop charts have become the dominion of online fan armies who attempt to manipulate chart figures to juice their favourites’ stats. In the US, pop consistently sits at the centre of conversations about sexuality, class and especially race – and those won’t show up on a chart of melodic notation.
This year, one of the big stories on the Billboard Hot 100 has been the preponderance of diss tracks, with Kendrick Lamar and Megan Thee Stallion reaching No 1 by taking explicit shots at their rivals. Another has been the ongoing conversation between country music and hip-hop, as Beyoncé, Shaboozey, and the duo of Post Malone and Morgan Wallen have landed huge hits that fall somewhere in the Venn diagram of two genres that play vastly different roles in US life. Maybe those songs have simple melodies, but that doesn’t mean the songs play simple roles. Pop music is more than melody. Maybe you can’t see it if you’re looking at sheet music, but the pop landscape is as fraught and fascinating as it’s ever been”.
Although many of us go deeper than streaming-led suggestions and away from the modern charts – which still seem to be skewed towards certain artists and do not give a full picture of modern music’s diversity and eclectic nature -, there is this danger many of us face. Listening to the same music. Either getting caught sticking with music we are familiar and comfortable with, or being directed by modern charts, vinyl sales, megastars in the media. In an effort to obtain the same sort of acclaim and traction as modern superstars, are artists consciously releasing music that sounds similar to an artist like Taylor Swift so that they can get included In Spotify playlists?! That homogenisation occurs. I am not sure we are quite there yet, though that first article I quoted raises some interesting points. It is worrying that vinyl sales seem to have one or two modern artists dominating and then a selection of familiar older artists. Maybe people exploring more of the past and classic artists because they feel the modern scene lacks real appeal. A rebellion against the fact modern algorithms do direct us to the same artists. I don’t know. I have noticed I listen to the same music and tend not to break out of bad habits. Listening to certain stations and genres like Pop, it can be very repetitive. So many modern artists consciously sounding the same because that is what is deemed commercial or popular. Other genres and types of music not been played as much. Perhaps streaming does dictate what we hear and creates this false impression of modern music. A very samey playlist. Once was the time when our peers and friends helped shape our music tastes. Our parents too. Now, technology has a much bigger role.
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There are music apps that can actually help broaden our music tastes and rewire habits. In terms of getting caught in this loop of listening to the same thing. This feature from Steve Kupferman of The Globe and Mail, provided a different perspective on technology and it can be beneficial when it comes to music discovery. How some apps can open your mind up to discover artists that might not have otherwise have been on your radar:
“I found that I was still developing fixations on particular artists, but now they were brief. At one point I spent a few weeks listening to a Chicago-based group called Finom, whose most recent work I can only describe as sounding as though it is written and performed by sexy androids with music-theory PhDs. The app guided me to an artist called Jim Sullivan, a spaced-out wannabe cowboy singer who cut two very good albums before literally disappearing off the face of the Earth in 1975. (He was last seen in a remote part of New Mexico.)
How we – by which I mean the app and I – got here from Elliott Smith is a mystery to me. The app’s makers say its algorithm weighs a number of different factors, including how frequently users group particular songs together on playlists they create. The app also automatically analyzes songs for qualities such as “danceability,” “energy” and “instrumentalness.”
But to me the process did not feel as though it was being directed by software. My mind felt like it was spreading feelers at random and sending up shoots.
And this is precisely what is so pernicious, and so wonderful, about the algorithm. I have a whole new musical sensibility now that feels as though it came from within, but that actually was imposed, at least partly, from outside. The precise ratio of algorithmic conditioning versus personal free will at play here is at best a trade secret, and at worst completely unknowable – a matter of philosophical debate.
Rewiring a person’s musical preferences was once seen as a social act, or even an act of love. It was something that used to be done by radio DJs, or cool older siblings, or mixtapes compiled by dorky guys trying to express mind-enveloping romantic obsession to their crushes without freaking them out.
Nobody gave any thought to what it might mean for us, as a society, to automate this process. For all we can tell at this point it could be the end of music as we know it. We could be entering a world where music is no longer a marker of identity, but rather a product of it – a world where songs are no longer recommended algorithmically, but are actually written algorithmically, to tickle the pleasure centres of each individual listener.
But that’s not where we are today. For now, even though I feel as though my mind may have been colonized by Big Tech, I also feel … great? Discovering new music after my long period of incuriosity had effects I couldn’t anticipate and can’t quantify.
I think my emotional aperture has expanded, ever so slightly. Listening to music on public transit or while walking through the city, which I had not done for years, is a cheap and effortless source of joy. For the first time in my marriage I can play music for my wife that isn’t “too depressing.” I went to a concert, after a decade of mostly avoiding them, and saw a crowd of a few hundred people who all have at least one thing in common with me.
And my relationship with music is no longer a source of weird, neurotic shame. In a small but important way, I feel like I’ve been transformed for the better. Everything else had changed; this was the last thing that hadn’t.
There are so many ways big online platforms have damaged the world. Even the streaming app is notorious for leveraging its market dominance to underpay musicians.
But as bleak as the future of automation sometimes looks, dealing with the music app has made me wonder if there’s still hope that these new systems will find ways to integrate with human minds that aren’t exploitative – that promote grace and humanity, rather than the opposite. I now think it’s possible, though I wouldn’t say it’s likely”.
Whilst I do think modern Pop is not overly-simple and samey, I do think that a lot of artists are falling into something narrow. A lot of artists possibly reacting to what is recommended on streaming services and making music geared to that. There is this danger with algorithms all providing the same suggestions. If we rely on technology alone, then there is this worry then our music tastes will start to merge and be the same. Some apps are a bit different, yet many people (me included) are not broadening our listening tastes as much as we should. I think that radio plays an important role. Getting suggestions and new music from there. We can also discover older artists that we may not have considered. Discovering music websites that give suggestions about new acts. Looking to traditional media and outlets rather than being directed by and dictated to by streaming and digital. We can’t and shouldn’t discard streaming sites and apps. However, there is something to be said about their influence when it comes to our music tastes. Maybe not set up to explore the full depth and breadth of modern music. A colourful and expanding landscape is not fully being covered. That is worrying. Modern Pop being focused very much on a select few artists. It can easily create this homogenisation. That is something that we need to get out of. Whilst those who love music will be curious and go out of their way to broaden their tastes, technology should react to that. Lead us to interesting discoveries. Ensuring that they do not have the same artists in their algorithms. It is not only music where algorithms do have a huge role. T.V. and film. We do need to explore this in more depth as the way music is recommended to us on streaming sites is…
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A troubling trend.