Comment by throwaway2037 18 hours ago
I am confused. Spotify and Netflix both have recommendation engines that include a wide variety of factors, including popularity with other users and "closeness" to your favourite musical styles. I assume these are AI/ML models of some sort. Essentially, these automated engines have replaced the music director from 1990s radio stations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkfpi2H8tOE
That's "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson. It's 8:21 and quotes both the Tao Te Ching and the US Postal Service. It peaked at number two on the UK Singles Chart in 1981. Why? Because John Peel curated a radio show on BBC Radio 1 and happened to like it. That's the advantage of human curation: Every so often you get a John Peel in the booth and hear something so off-the-wall no well-written algorithm would ever mix it in with everything else you listen to.
> Essentially, these automated engines have replaced the music director from 1990s radio stations.
They haven't. A nearest neighbor pseudo random walk from one viral song to the next doesn't replace a music director who could give you thematically, aesthetically or conceptually coherent selections of music.
There's an interesting observation about this at the individual album level, the death of the concept album. Albums that tell coherent two hour long narratives are effectively dead because the almighty algorithm favors the exact opposite. Disjointed, catchy , viral, hook centric music that's short enough to fit over a TikTok clip.
The medium is the message, thinking the Spotify algorithm replaces a music director is like thinking the Youtube short algorithm replaces a film director.
I think a pseudo random walk would be a good algo for diversity. Long form anything is being challenged, but form is an epoque attribute. In 10 years people will be lamenting how the young generation is lost in hourlong songs and encyclopaedia length posts, maybe… The only thing that got lengthier is cinema as subsumed by mini series. But it indicates a complexity in dynamics that may be harder to pin down than we think we do on the surface.
That's precisely the problem. Everyone gets a different experience. No shared cultural experience. Until recently, everyone in the same village/town/city/country had the same experience, and could talk about it.