Ditching the Algorithm
Services like Spotify have wildly changed my relationship with music. I used to have to work really hard to find things to listen to. I read blogs, I followed actual labels that published things I liked. I put things on my mp3 player and really spent time with them. I was engaged in all aspects of listening to music. I had to be my own kind of algorithm in that I was respnsible for sourcing not only the music itself, but also discovering what I liked and didn't like. Things are a lot different these days. I have the entirity of music at my fingertips through streaming services and I can offload the work of finding anything new to their recommendation systems. It's convenient and simple. I can let a streaming service like Spotify do all the heavy lifting of sourcing all the music for me, and if I like something it will recommend to me more of the same.
While things are easier than ever, and more good music is more available online than it has ever been - why do I feel so disengaged from it? I'm finding that how I engage with music has changed significantly. I spend a lot less time with specific artists and much more time jumping around to different things. I'm not really making my own choices of what I want to listen to. I am taking suggestions on what to hear next from a recommendation algorithm instead of making my own decisions. It is different and strange.
I decided recently to try and wrestle back some control for myself by getting an old iPod and becoming more active in my relationship with music. It's a little experiment. I want to restore some musical agency for myself and see if it gets me having more fun with music.
Do you remember what it was like to manage a digital music collection before streaming services like Spotify existed? It was difficult, and time intensive. You were constantly one hard drive failure away from losing all your songs. The cloud didn't exist yet, so if you weren't backed up to some kind of external hard drive then you'd have to start your collection all over. It happened to me more then once. It was devastating each time. It took a lot of effort to import songs from CDs, or build a collection over time from downloading albums here and there. Connections used to be slow! Sometimes you needed to manually enter all the song metadata yourself when importing them into your music application of choice if the program wasn't able to extract them properly. You had to manage album art too sometimes if the metadata was messed up. It was terrible! It was amazing!
Folks younger than me may not know that there was a period from around the year 2000 to 2006 where computers, phones, mp3 players, were fresh and exciting. Advances in storage and computing capabilities were happening constantly. Internet speeds were getting faster, and computer UX was getting increasingly better and better. Things that required immesnse technical know-how, or things that used to require intensely expensive hardware were becoming accessible. It felt genuinely transgressive being able to download music, or rip it from a CD, and then put that music onto a little device you could take with you anywhere. I don't think any consumer technology since has come close to how powerful it felt to be a young person going from dialup to broadband on the family computer and getting an mp3 player - all in the span of a couple years time.
Managing a music collection digitally wasn't without difficulties though. I wasn't good at keeping my computers backed up. I stopped managing my own collection after a hard drive failure in college where I lost everything - including my homework. Eventually, computers stopped having CD drives entirely. Phones started to get so advanced that having a dedicated mp3 player wasn't really necessary. Now that internet access on phones is so fast you don't even need to keep mp3s. You can just stream whatever you like from whatever device you're planted in front of. Streaming is the default now.
Streaming music over the internet is what we all dreamed of though, right? Endless information at the tips our fingers? If you told my ten year old self who was sharing the family computer on a 56k connection that dropped out whenever someone needed to make a phone call in the house that I'd be able to listen to whatever album I could think of as soon as I could think of it, I wouldn't have believed you. Today we can, and it remains incredible. But that level of convenience does come at a cost. You don't own any of the albums you stream. Streaming services can remove things and you might never be able to find them again. They may not have certain things at all. There are also bad externalities for artists. Streaming services don't pay artists enough, and artists may have to bend their sounds to appease whatever content recommendation algorithm a service has. It has shaken up the entire music industry, and that is probably putting it very lightly.
In the halcyon mp3 era days of yesteryear I had such a sense of ownership and pride in my musical discoveries. I used to find new artists or albums to listen to and spend genuine time with them. I'd put them on the mp3 player and take them with me on the train or the bus, to work and to school. I got to know them. Streaming services like Spotify have removed all of this personal investment and and as a result a lot of my personal enjoyment of music has evaporated. It all feels so impersonal and hyper-commodified.
I don't know if I'll quit online streaming entirely. Trying out new artists or genres has been made so easy that it would be hard to give that up completely. I do want to change how I engage personally though. I want to take my time with what I like and make some more conscious decisions about what I want to hear next instead of being told. I'd also like to start supporting artists more directly through actually buying their music. I'm hoping this experiment in personal engagement goes well. So far, it has been fun stepping back into the past and feeling some of that same excitement I felt back in the mp3 player days when all of this was shiny and new.
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