Introduction: The Bends
It is March, 1995. I’m 17 years old. Radiohead’s second album, ‘The Bends’ just came out. I am stretched out on a makeshift sofa. I listen to the whole album. By the end, my eyes are filled with tears.
Listening to ‘The Bends’ for the first time was like hearing the walls of creative limitation collapse. It did more than entertain and engage, it conjured a new landscape of creative possibilities. This simple act of listening to an album is an overwhelming emotional experience that has stayed with me for 30 years.
Chapter One: Is Anyone really Listening?
More music is heard today than ever before. It motivates us at the gym, serenades the housework, and accompanies paying our bills and taxes. Streaming platform’s playlist centric business model frames music by mood, theme, or genre rather than artist and album. For all the phones, laptops, TVs and tablets, the HiFi is relegated to the preserve of the audiophile and/or muso.
Music is all around us, but are any of us really listening?
Chapter Two: In Metrics We Trust
Every track uploaded to Spotify is analyzed for a series of metrics, from loudness, bpm, and key, to valence, energy, and danceability. Employed in tandem with third party playlist data applications such as Chartmetrics, these metrics allow curators to pinpoint exactly when tracks are skipped, and establish the musical characteristics likely to have triggered the skip.
Chapter Three: Feedback Loop
While providing welcome access to curators, pay-for-submission sites like Submit Hub and Groover also provide curators with a target rich environment of potential tracks for their playlists. This coupled with metrics, allows curators to cherry pick tracks and deliver very exacting feedback for rejected tracks.
Inevitably, ambitious artists eager for greater exposure will attempt to tailor future releases to reflect the exacting feedback of the curators. The result is a feedback loop where curators can demand ever more exacting musical characteristics, gradually whittling away at the various musical bumps and hiccups [aka variety] that trigger listeners to skip.
Chapter Four: The People Get What The People Want
In fairness to the curators, they are, of course, only responding to the tastes and listening habits of the general public. And as curators [and by extension artists] become more adept at providing listeners with exactly what they want, the listening public become increasingly accustomed to a consumable flow of variety-free music. This, in turn, results in listeners becoming ever more intolerant of variation. And so, the feedback loop continues to grind away at any deviation from or challenge to the generic and the conventional.
Conclusion: Muzak, Not Music.
Setting time aside to listen to an album can be considered active listening. Streaming a playlist to serve as a soundtrack or accompaniment to your life, can be considered passive listening.
In an active listening experience, artists are rewarded for the creation of dynamic and emotional music that grabs and holds onto the listener's attention. In a passive listening experience, artists are rewarded for the creation of music that does not intrude on or distract from the given mood or actively of the listener.
In the current climate of playlist centric music distribution, it can be argued that artists are, in effect, encouraged to create muzak, not music.
If music is akin to food, then muzak can be considered ultra processed junk food. A little junk food now and again does no harm, but a daily diet of junk food will leave the body malnourished, and sickly. Our souls require sustenance every bit as much as our bodies. Perhaps we should afford more time and attention to what we eat.
Metrics and Muzak: The Feedback Loop of Playlist Centric Music
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