8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

Digging In Our Heels

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Though universally revered, Martin Scorsese is sometimes viewed as an old-fashioned relic as he digs in his heels against changes in contemporary media. Previously, he got lots of nerdy flack for referring to superhero franchise films as “theme parks” rather than “cinema.” And, recently, in an essay on Federico Fellini, Scorsese went off on algorithms and the overuse of the word “content” to describe artistic output. He’s mainly referring to visual media, of course, and how “the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator” when we refer to it all as “content.” Here’s Scorsese:

“Content” was used more and more by the people who took over media companies, most of whom knew nothing about the history of the art form, or even cared enough to think that they should. “Content” became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode. […] … it has created a situation in which everything is presented to the viewer on a level playing field, which sounds democratic but isn’t.

A platform’s reliance on algorithms that can’t separate artistic intention from specious cash grabs exacerbates this perception. There’s so much talk about freeing ourselves from the gatekeepers, but perhaps ‘old-fashioned’ human curation is a gatekeeping we need. Scorsese again:

Curating isn’t undemocratic or “elitist,” a term that is now used so often that it’s become meaningless. It’s an act of generosity—you’re sharing what you love and what has inspired you. Algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else.

“Scorsese is right,” tweeted music critic Ted Gioia. “Anyone who refers to film, music, or writing as ‘content’ is simply not a trustworthy custodian of anything of cultural value. Unfortunately, these are the key decision makers in media right now.”

I don’t have too much of a problem with media companies calling the music or movies they stream “content.” It’s like a politician using blatant dog whistle language — at least you know who’s in this for the right reasons and deserving of trust. What’s insidious is when we, as artists, are convinced to start using the word “content” instead of “art” or even “our work.” A musician creates a beautiful song, puts sweat into editing an accompanying video, and then thinks, “here’s some content for YouTube” — that’s distressing. 

Language is powerful, and the words we use in our heads change our behaviors. If we start replacing words like “art” with “content” — even just internally — our intentions shift. We start feeding the companies hungry for content. Instead of making music and films for the fans or the human curators, we’re producing content for the algorithms. 

Seth Godin must have read Scorsese’s rant. Soon after the essay’s publication, Seth wrote his own rant on his daily blog: 

Publishing to an algorithm is not the same as publishing to an audience. And living in a culture that’s driven by profit-seeking algorithm owners is different as well. Because without curation, who is responsible? Who is guiding the culture? Who pushes the boundaries or raises the standards? […] …we benefit when we realize that the algorithm isn’t rooting for us and quite probably is working against us. The only winning approach is to earn permission and a direct connection with our fans and then act as curators for ideas (and as our own publishers).

Getting back to the power of language, I touched on this topic on the blog a few years ago when I commented on Cherie Hu’s idea that “The word ‘creator’ does more harm than good.” (Cherie’s original essay is offline, but I wholeheartedly recommend her Water & Music platform, where you can find many of her enlightening pieces.) I wrote this in my blog post: 

It may seem like semantics, but the way we adopt and use language rewires our thinking. Hu’s point— which I never considered — is that the more we refer to ourselves as ‘creators,’ the easier it is to submit to the notion that our creations are in fealty to others. Notice how the services almost all use ‘creator’ — a sampling of examples Hu points out include YouTube Creators, Facebook for Creators, Spotify’s “Creator Marketing.’ So when a platform sneakily claims ownership of our work we’re desensitized against protest.

“Content” is the same. The language implicates employment, that we’re delivering goods in a fiefdom. Responsibility, leverage, and agency shift to the “content provider.”

Buckle down, folks. Dig in your heels like Martin. You’re artists making art. Don’t let anyone tell you anything else. 

The Perfect Playlist

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I revisited this NY Times article from two years ago and it got me thinking about the personal playlist (or, maybe as we used to call it, the ‘mixtape’). The gist: Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto couldn’t stand the music played in his favorite restaurant so he offered to custom-make his own. The original music wasn’t terrible — it was “thoughtless,” lacking any context suitable for the restaurant’s environment or its food. It sounds like Sakamoto spent a lot of time creating the perfect playlist, and it’s one that changes every season. I wonder if he’s still doing it.

The author of the article has some thoughts about the qualities of a perfect playlist:

I would prefer that music not seem an afterthought, or the result of algorithmic computation. I want it chosen by a person who knows music up and down and sideways: its context, its dynamism and its historical and aural clichés. Such a person can at least accomplish the minimum, which is to signal to the customer that attention is being paid, in a generous, original, specific and small-ego way.

Replace ‘customer’ with ‘listener’ and this becomes an attractive argument in favor of human curation.

🔗→ Annoyed by Restaurant Playlists, a Master Musician Made His Own

Choosing Your Input and Collaborating With Ghosts

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I’m fascinated by Steven Soderbergh’s year-end Seen, Read list. The director’s started each new year since 2017 with a day-by-day record of everything he watched, read, and listened to in the previous year. Soderbergh recently unveiled 2019’s list, and it shows that he began the year watching a documentary on Area 51 and ended the year with an obscure ’40s film noir. And judging from everything in between, his media intake is constant and all over the place.

You may wonder how a busy film director and producer has all this leisure time. But is it leisure time? Here’s author and music critic Ted Gioia on the Conversations With Tyler podcast:

In your life, you will be evaluated on your output. Your boss will evaluate you on our output. If you’re a writer like me, the audience will evaluate you on your output. But your input is just as important. If you don’t have good input you cannot maintain good output… I know for a fact I could not do what I do if I was not zealous in managing high quality inputs into my mind every day of my life… This is the reason why I’m able to do this, because I have constant, good quality input, that is the only reason why I can maintain the output.

If you work in a creative field, then you need to have a firehose of input. And that input will directly influence and guide your output. The input isn’t material to copy but is there to provide steady inspiration, affecting creativity’s mental space.

Steven Soderbergh’s media diet is unguided and seemingly unfocused, which opens him to surprises and unexpected creative inspirations. And, in response, his output jumps around genres and styles. There’s not a typical Soderbergh film though there are common threads and themes.

One can also guide the input to focus the output. I remember reading an interview years ago with Robert Smith of The Cure about his creative process. He explained that before recording an album, he selects a playlist of songs that conveys the mood he’s hoping to capture. Then he listens to nothing else but these songs for the entire time that he’s working on the record. That helps him maintain the mindset he’s after, shaping the tone of the album. This practice might be dangerous now that inspiration’s sometimes interpreted as theft, but I believe it’s a great idea to lay these creative foundations. Artists are always collaborating with ghosts, after all. It’s good to curate which ones you let through the door.

🔗→ Seen, Read 2019
🔗→ Ted Gioia on Music as Cultural Cloud Storage (Ep. 79)

Robots vs. Curators: The Battle Begins

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Techcrunch:

Spotify … announced a major change to how its playlists will operate, with the news that some of its previously human-curated [editorial] playlists will now be personalized based on listeners’ tastes. […] “Some playlists will now be personalized for each listener based on their particular taste. This means that for those specific playlists, no two will be the same,” the company shared in a blog post.

Spotify says it decided to make this change after finding that users listened longer to the personalized playlists, during a trial of the new system. It also notes that the new system will increase the number of artists featured on playlists by 30 percent and the number of songs listened to by 35 percent — metrics that artists will surely like.

I’m a huge fan of increasing discovery opportunities, so I welcome and am intrigued by this news. Though I wonder if Spotify’s creating a musical version of the ‘Facebook bubble,’ where listeners with narrow tastes don’t get introduced to artists outside of their established spectrum. The algorithmic playlist change could be beneficial for new artists among listeners with an already broad predilection and great for classic, already well-known catalog artists with everyone else.

Matty Karas isn’t having it. He wrote this rebuttal in the 3/28/19 edition of the Music:REDEF newsletter:

But sometimes I really, really don’t want personalization. Like when I decide to click on my preferred ANTI. I don’t want to hear the re-sequenced version of the album that Spotify thinks would be best for me, and I don’t want to start on track 2, no matter how great track 2 is. If I wanted that, I would’ve clicked directly on it. I want to hear the album Rihanna actually made, sequenced and mastered. That was the intention of my click. Likewise any of the playlists that I follow. I follow them because I like the music and the flow and/or I like and trust the curator. The unspoken agreement between me and them is they’ll put thought and effort into the playlist and I’ll listen. Period. […]

Labels love this, I’m told, because it’s a way to get more tracks and therefore more labels on any given playlist. But who wants that kind of democracy? I want the four most interesting, pertinent, appropriate tracks you’ve got, not one from each of the three major labels and one from a token indie. Does anybody not want that? […] I want my curators to lead. If they’re just passively following me, why exactly am I following them?

Luckily there are many curated third-party playlists out there, but those are for the ‘broad’ listeners mentioned above. Maybe we’re selfishly expecting the majority of listeners — the ones who, in the past, mainly listened to music via commercial radio on car commutes — to explore and embrace new artists. Spotify’s giving the majority of its users what they want (and I won’t lie —algorithmic playlists are fascinating and fun) while the rest of us can dig into curated niche selections like this. Or this.

Elephant, get into that room. Let’s talk about Apple Music. The industry is expecting the company to copy Spotify and start introducing their own sophisticated algorithmic playlists. However, I’d like to see them lean into curation. Apple Music has flirted with playlists compiled by influencers and other notables, but they are hardly visible — the ones that exist are sort of difficult to find. If Apple can get Oprah and Spielberg on stage to promote its TV offering, then why not enlist playlists from heavy hitters? And I’m not talking lazy extensions of Beats 1 shows. Perhaps Frank Ocean’s ‘Songs I Listened To Growing Up.’ Mitski’s ‘Songs I’m Playing on the Bus While On Tour.’ Convince Four Tet to move this over to Apple Music. Put some fun and personalization into it — what makes that Four Tet playlist so cool is that there’s no doubt he’s adding the songs to it himself.

Let Spotify have the algorithms. Apple probably won’t be able to catch up anyway. Apple Music already subtly differentiates itself by being friendlier to the album format — they should go all in on the taste-making curator as well.

🔗→ Spotify expands personalization to its programmed playlists
🔗→ Music:REDEF – March 28, 2019

The Best of Music to Check Out

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How have end-of-the-year album lists changed since the advent of streaming? I think they’re entirely different, both in how the lists are compiled and how we, as music listeners, read them.

‘Best Of’ lists weren’t as freewheeling as they are now. There was pressure for the publication and its critics to have selections in the top slots that were familiar to the reader, even if just casually. And it seemed that lists were limited to a top 10 or 20 — 25 if we’re feeling crazy. After all, these were suggestions of music you should buy. Previewing these releases, if you were so bold, meant taking the list to the record store and asking the person at the counter to play a little bit off each record. You’re out of luck if there aren’t any open in-store play copies.

These lists are no longer meant as suggestions for purchasing — it’s music to check out. Fire up your favorite streaming service and take the top ten for a stroll. Or, if you’re feeling ambitious, sample the entire list. But that can take a while as today’s end-of-the-year album lists can go to 100.

The differences don’t stop there. While the pre-internet year-end music lists in Rolling Stone or The Village Voice included selections that generally spanned all genres, online publications offer specialized options. It’s curation, in a sense — find the site or blog whose taste you trust, and that’s the ‘Best of’ list meant for you. And these specialist sites (and even more general music sites) have no attachment to keeping things safe and familiar — it’s not rare when an album you haven’t heard of occupies the number one slot.

I’d argue that, in most cases, these are no longer ‘Best Of’ lists, but they’re more like playlists. That is, playlists of albums rather than songs (though there are ‘best song’ lists, too), curated by the taste that guides a blog or a site’s editorial staff. A top ten has always been subjective, sure, but now we’re talking about albums that we should sample, not purchase with hard-earned money. In a way, this makes these lists less subjective. “These are the albums that we enjoyed this year and, if you like our site, perhaps you will, too.” The difference is listener investment, and, though there are also some negatives to that (which we may discuss someday), it does inspire risk-taking.

I’m not saying the critic doesn’t believe his or her #1 album is the best of the year. But I do feel the path to making that choice and the other choices that populate the rest of the list are less determined, less rigid. And I’m happy with that.

I’ll be sampling a handful of ‘end-of-the-year’ lists over the next several weeks. It’s a December tradition. I’ve picked my favorite lists, and I’m going through them, giving each album at least a three-songs-chance before I decide “yay” or “nay.” I’ll make a note of the ones I like the most and will go back to them later for repeated listens.

This last part is essential. One significant difference in charts then and now is that if you purchased the #1 album, it had better be good. You lived with it for weeks and got to know the album, sometimes even if you weren’t crazy about it. That’s the attachment of investment that streaming doesn’t offer. As music fans, we now have to be intentional in our listening. Streaming is nothing more than a tool for access, but it encourages a casualness by nature. The majority of music listeners have always listened to music casually, so there’s nothing lost there. But if we’re die-hard music fans, it’s necessary to be aware and vigilant in our habits as streaming users.

OK, here are the ‘end-of-the-year’ lists I’m listening through:

Once I’ve exhausted those (unlikely, as it’s a lot!) then I may explore what I haven’t listened to in the more general lists, such as Pitchfork’s The 50 Best Albums of 2018 and The Best Electronic Music of 2018, and NPR’s Best Music of 2018.

Happy hunting! I’d be curious to know your go-to end-of-year lists … and your #1 album picks.

Cranking the Wheel

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vice.com
Why Are Spotify Pretending They Don’t Decide What We Listen To?
What their US Songs of Summer 2017 playlist says about how we break popular tracks.
vice.com
Why Are Spotify Pretending They Don’t Decide What We Listen To?
What their US Songs of Summer 2017 playlist says about how we break popular tracks.

“Spotify playlists, and Spotify charts, and Spotify plays, have become the number one tool that labels and artists and managers are using in order to break artists and measure success,” said industry analyst Mark Mulligan, speaking to Wired earlier this year. “If you get things working on Spotify, that’s going to crank the wheel.” Anyone who’s opened Spotify and found themselves clicking on their Daily Mix playlist, or fired up the app’s Discovery Weekly playlist already knows this. The app, and the impact of its playlist placements, are now an almost unspoken reality of the industry’s digital growth.

And so we come to this week’s news, of Spotify playing coy about what determines the song of the summer. In a blogpost published on Wednesday, the streaming service’s US team announced a – you guessed it – playlist of the tracks that they “predict” will soundtrack your BBQs, house parties and whatever other photogenic events you’ll be attending in the sunshine. “To create this year’s Songs of Summer predictions,” they wrote, “Spotify tapped the insights of its genre and trend experts, analysed its streaming data and considered factors such as a song’s performance on the charts, on key Spotify playlists and how it’s performing over time. The team also factored in buzz on social media to create a list of songs perfect for essential summer moments.”

At a glance you’d look at this and think, ‘oh cool, Spotify are predicting the future. That’s fun! They’re fun!’ But when you take a closer look, a couple of issues become clear. First, that you walk right into a chicken-and-egg situation. Do songs chart well because it’s been playlisted dominantly, and thus listened to by lots of people on Spotify? Or does it make that Spotify playlist position because it’s performing well on the charts? We don’t know about those inner workings within Spotify. But it’s bizarre for the company to both aggressively use reams of data to thrust certain songs under our noses, then act as though it doesn’t consequently set the agenda for what casual music listeners grow to like.

Your Favorite Label In The Age Of Streaming

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Hollywood Reporter:

Amid some big changes in the music industry, new RCA Records CEO Peter Edge and longtime colleague Tom Corson, who was promoted to president and COO in August, have officially shuttered historic labels Arista and Jive. J Records, launched by Clive Davis in 2000 as an “instant major,” will also see its artists bequeathed to RCA.



In the digital age, one might think these closures mean there is little value, awareness or loyalty to a label by name, but the execs insist it’s quite the opposite. “The concept is that there is value in branding RCA and not having it confused or diluted by other labels,” says Corson.


That’s an odd quote in answer to a statement about label identities not having value, as, of course, there is no real identity to the RCA ‘brand.’ The writer’s statement is perceptive, and brings up a good point. Labels seem to matter less and less as we rely on proprietary software for streaming music. Apple Music and Spotify only mention the label of origin on a release’s ‘page’ as a required copyright line in fine print at the bottom. One certainly can’t search for a favorite label and listen to a streaming ‘playlist’ of its new offerings, unless it is a pre-packaged playlist that someone put together to focus on that label. Spotify at least lets labels have profiles, which come up if you search for the label name. But these don’t offer much information beyond label curated playlists … not even a list of the latest releases.

I’ve written a bit about the problems with curation on streaming services, and removing label identity could be seen as a part of that issue. The labels that inspired me when I was young (Factory Records, SST, 4AD, and so on) had attraction as a type of curator, in that I knew what I was getting into – for the most part – if, for example, I listened to a 4AD release in the ’80s. There are certainly some great indie imprints active now that benefit from a closely moderated identity, sonic and otherwise. Or, at least, they could benefit, if the streaming services would give labels some credit.

But the quoted article above may reveal the problem. The major labels, being the ones that shout the loudest at the streamers, don’t need or care to foster this sonic identity. One could say Jive had a sound … there are a group of classic dance records that come to mind when I think of the label, and it could be argued they were identified by a certain pop style in recent decades. But that’s hardly important in the age of streaming, so it’s fine to make things less complicated and throw it all under the RCA blanket. And that makes sense for them … label identity, and having streaming services highlight labels and their intrinsic sounds, can only benefit the independents.

The Hit Charade: On Algorithms and Creativity

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MIT Technology Review:

Just as computers cannot yet create powerful and imaginative art or prose, they cannot truly appreciate music. And arranging a poignant or compelling music playlist takes a type of insight they don’t have—the ability to find similarities in musical elements and to get the emotional resonance and cultural context of songs. For all the progress being made in artificial intelligence, machines are still hopelessly unimaginative and predictable. This is why Apple has hired hundreds of people to serve as DJs and playlist makers, in addition to the algorithmic recommendations it still offers.



More recently, algorithms have begun producing playlists that can feel a lot more nuanced and tailor-made. The world’s biggest streaming service, Spotify, which has more than 75 million users, is pushing the state of the art, using vast amounts of data to make personalized recommendations.



Spotify’s deep-learning system still has to be trained using millions of example songs, and it would be perplexed by a bold new style of music. What’s more, such algorithms cannot arrange songs in a creative way. Nor can they distinguish between a truly original piece and yet another me-too imitation of a popular sound. (Spotify’s Chris) Johnson acknowledges this limitation, and he says human expertise will remain a key part of Spotify’s algorithms for the foreseeable future.


Though some consider human curation to be elitist, I feel music fans and listeners welcome and crave it. Who doesn’t enjoy a trusted source giving suggestions of cool new music to discover? It’s been the secret of success for certain radio shows, record store clerks, magazine music reviewers, and music blogs. The whole mixtape phenomenon is built on it. My SoundCloud stream is built on it. Basically, if you’re into discovery, you’re into the trusted recommendation … or, in modern industry-speak, “curation”.

Despite my love of human recommendations, I am genuinely curious about Spotify’s algorithmic ‘Discovery’ playlist and want to dig more into it. (There are some technical issues I have with Spotify’s OS X app that keep me from using it more which I won’t go into here.) The team at Spotify seem very confident in what the technology is able to do, and anything that encourages listeners to check out new music is all right by me. But I can’t help but wonder if a human / tastemaker guided algorithm – a mixture of computer recommendation and ‘music fan’ supervision – might be the way to go. From this article, it sounds like this is where we are headed.

An area that I find frustratingly overlooked is the realm of the Pandora-like ‘sounds like’ radio stations. These don’t work for me, not on any of the services, and this ‘radio’ would be my most accessed feature if they did. Pandora drove me crazy because (as an example) I’d program a Joy Division station, and then would hear “Love Will Tear Us Apart” every single time I chose it, but didn’t necessarily want to give it a ‘thumbs down’ and banish the song from its repertoire. I might want to hear it now and then … but not every single time. Of course, I’m not picking solely on Pandora here as none of the services get this radio feature right. If I create a ‘station’ based off Brian Eno’s “Lizard Point” – a beatless, droning composition opening his album Ambient 4: On Land – I’m sure all the services will give me large doses of ’70s art rock instead of the ambient music I’m looking for.

Apple Radio – the one pre-dating Apple Music – tried to address this to a degree with a slider allowing the user to choose if he/she wanted to hear more of the ‘hits’ or, with the slider all the way to the right, to choose an adventurous discovery-oriented path. It wasn’t perfect, but the concept was solid and I would have loved for Apple to fine tune it rather than ditching it altogether in Apple Music at present. Regardless, we’re a long way from computers getting it right (and potentially achieving music snob A.I.) but it’s a fascinating study to see the aims and attempts to move us closer. And, once again, all this effort going into helping listeners find new independent artists is a terrific thing.

The Discovery Dead End

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Cuepoint:

“Discovery” has certainly been the buzzword for the last few years, but the problem is that we still haven’t figured out the next steps after someone hears a song. I listen to music all day long but not much of it sticks with me, just because I get no direction from streaming platforms. I have to manually search for artists I like when I’m listening at home, and I have to actually remember to go back through a playlist and search for an artist if I hear something I like when I’m out. And I’m someone who cares about music more than most people.



There are a couple of possible remedies for this. One, streaming services could offer more links out to follow artists on other platforms. Spotify and Apple Music both have their own internal platforms, so I certainly understand why they want to keep people in the services — the problem is that both these internal platforms kinda stink.



In the end, just being “discovered” on a playlist doesn’t mean much to an artist. If services truly want to help artists monetize and build careers, the least they can do is direct listeners to other opportunities to follow, engage with, and support the artist. But artists also have a role to play, by making sure that their content is worth engaging with.


This harks back to an earlier post regarding the social Internet unwisely evolving into a series of closed ecosystems. The author’s points are valid, and keeping an artist’s fans within a closed network (and one that’s not that great, i.e. Apple’s ‘Connect’) doesn’t cultivate a positive experience for the user. An excited fan wants access to it all – the band’s social networks, websites, maybe even a Bandcamp link for purchasing the music (of course, I understand why Apple may not consider that last one). This not only helps the artists but I feel a richer, well-rounded fan experience will make users more enthusiastic about the streaming service they are using. This more than makes up for the trade-off of potentially sending users to an external site … they’ll certainly come back knowing that their requirements as music fanatics will be catered to.