From a Pandora musicologist, Why You Like It sorts music fans into dull stereotypes
Aux Features Book Review
If video killed the radio star, as The Buggles sang 40 years ago, it might be said that Pandora and its digital streaming ilk exhumed terrestrial radio’s corpse and sucked any remaining sustenance from its desiccated bones. Pandora, if you’re not one of its 70 million monthly users, provides a “highly-personalized listening experience,” according to its website, a radio station created exclusively for you. Love Adele, you say? Let Pandora introduce you to Ed Sheeran, Amy Winehouse, and Bruno Mars. Can’t get enough of the Rolling Stones? Have you checked out Led Zeppelin? Jimi Hendrix? The Doors?
Credit this internet sorcery to the Music Genome Project, the HAL 9000 to Pandora’s Discovery One. First devised in 2000, the MGP’s algorithm endeavors to define an individual’s “musical genotype”—one’s personal taste in music. In Nolan Gasser’s Why You Like It, the MGP’s architect and Pandora’s chief musicologist ventures to help readers “understand and empower” their musical genotypes, to aid listeners to listen to music better.
For Gasser, empowerment means not only showcasing how the MGP works—at least in theory—but surveying the latest scientific, sociological, and psychological research about our relationship with music, in addition to explaining the individual components that make music musical (melody, harmony, rhythm, form, and sound). That’s a whole lot of understanding to foist upon an audience, but fortunately Gasser has 600-plus pages to work with. Unfortunately, chapters alternate between enlightening (the sections on anthropology and neuroscience) and sloggy (on several occasions, Gasser writes something to the effect of “I sense your eyes glazing”).
For those looking to learn how the digital streaming sausage is made, Why You Like It offers little insight. Instead of providing actual examples on how the MGP works—presumably due to proprietary software, user privacy, and all that jazz—Gasser invents “seven fictional music lovers” to match each of the seven genotypes (pop, rock, jazz, hip-hop, EDM, world, and classical). “When it comes to musical taste,” he writes, “no one need be a stereotype.” But that’s exactly what he provides, typecast listeners: Subject one listens to pop, subject two loves rock, subject three bops along to jazz, etc.
Gasser further simplifies the playlist for each imaginary subject by devising a list of four songs, always three obvious choices and one subtle outlier. Subject four, for example, is a hip-hop head who listens to Snoop Dogg’s “Gin & Juice” at the gym, Kendrick Lamar’s “i” en route to work, Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” when returning home, and, while enjoying a night out, Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Shining Star.” Before sharing what insights we might garner from this playlist—besides the fact that it belongs to the least interesting person on planet Earth—Gasser fills page after page with a pedestrian history of the genre (“hip-hop and rap music reflect the experience of young, urban, working-class African-Americans”), prosaic biographies of each artist (“Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. earned the nickname ‘Snoopy’ when his mom spotted a resemblance to the cute Peanuts character”), and an esoteric song analysis that might make Dr. Dre dizzy (“The resulting harmony is likewise chromatic, a two-bar progression of F minor—E♭ minor 11/G♭, where the Cs act as a kind of pedal point. Technically, this progression can be labeled as a kind of diatonic variant of the ‘minor Phrygian’ mode”).
In the end, Gasser concludes that subject four is a “relatively older hip-hop fan” who gravitates toward mainstream artists and hit songs with “broad melodic, harmonic, formal, and sonic… elements.” Not only are these insights mind-numbingly obvious, they are what researchers call dry-labbing, the use of fictional but plausible results in lieu of performing an actual experiment.
So why do we like it? Do lyrics not matter? Did our parents, siblings, and friends’ playlists not affect our own? Does sex not sell singles (as well as concert tickets and YouTube clicks)? Can we simply slide ourselves into a fixed genotype?
Thirty-five years ago, another band offered an alternative to the death of the radio star. “All we hear is radio ga ga / Radio goo goo / …Radio blah blah,” Queen’s Roger Taylor wrote, echoing The Buggles, before shifting in a more positive direction: “You had your time, you had the power / You’ve yet to have your finest hour.” Despite Taylor’s wishes, terrestrial radio’s finest hour has likely passed. Digital radio is here to stay, but Nolan Gasser fails to make the case that the Music Genome Project is the way forward.
22 Comments
Spotify really, really thought I’d be interested in live comedy music for weeks just because I replayed one Flight of the Conchords song. Other than that, it’s been pretty good at pulling off the longest, meanest diss towards my music taste possible. “Oh, you want me to cue up Japanese Breakfast and Blood Orange and Mitski, so you can feel cool and plugged-in still? Nope, I’ve deduced that you like dumbassed fuckboy indie pop/rock in 4/4 time, made specifically to be used in stupid advertisements, because you’re a tasteless piece of shit. That’s right, suck it down, you fucking moron.” And I do.
At least Spotify’s recommendations are safe recommendations unlike Youtube which recommends me Neo-Nazi propaganda because I watched a Criterion Channel video once.
This is true. The worst Spotify can do is say “Your tastes are frozen in amber from 2005.” It’s not like I’m going to get redpilled by the latest Modest Mouse album.
I think the best recurring example is “it looks like you watched some videos documenting/unpacking/detailing racism, that must mean you’re interested in all videos featuring racism.” I get that the Al Gore might have some trouble recognizing the act of quotation, but YT’s recent change to a single user recommendation list rather than a video-based one means that you’ll just keep getting the same things over and over.What it really should do is maintain the “watchers of the video you just finished also watched” format but ruthlessly prune the suggestions you skip over and add any videos you previously actually searched out to watch next.
I don’t know if it’s because it does this for everyone who doesn’t pay for it, but I learned the hard way that the free version of Spotify doesn’t work the same way on mobile as it does on PC when it let me play two songs I wanted and then insisted that I listen to Khalid.
Good for Khalid for getting on the front page, or whatever, but there is not one whit of my musical interests – much less what Spotify is privy to – that would suggest any interest in listening to this, or anything like this. I haven’t bothered calling it up on mobile since.
“All we hear is radio ga ga / Radio goo goo / …Radio blah blah,” Queen’s Roger Taylor wrote,
echoing The Buggles, before shifting in a more positive direction: “You
had your time, you had the power / You’ve yet to have your finest
hour.”
I think this is a misread of Queen’s lyrics: “radio ga ga” and so on aren’t meant to echo folks like The Buggles; they’re meant to mock/criticize them.
As a dull stereotype, I don’t mind.
People love to write off terrestrial radio but the medium persists, and according to what I’ve read, still has great “reach” for advertisers or some other dumb buzzword. The bottom line is, if they can still sell it, your FM station isn’t going anywhere.At least until self-driving cars become a truly feasible mode of transportation. Once the last worries about keeping your eyes on the road are swept away (like there aren’t already a shitload of drivers watching YouTube and just winging it on their daily commute), radio’s last stronghold for listeners, drive-time, will fall and your wacky morning zoo wakeup crew will be leftwandering the streets, holding up cardboard scrawled with “Will tell hacky jokes and read you the time for food.”
Without FM radio, how would Uber drivers blast their customers with thirty minutes of local supermarket commercials at 85 decibels?
Depending on one’s taste FM can still be quite good. While there are no listenable indie or jazz stations around Detroit I can get three great local classical stations and I’ll take them any day over satellite stations or streaming platforms.
CJAM usually isn’t too bad for indie/college rock stuff.
Yes, jazz and indie, quite, depending, as one does.
That is also HIGHLY dependent on one’s location. If you live far enough away from a population center, the radio available is canned classic rock, canned modern pop country, and canned alternative rock.
I you don’t drive long distances it’s good to hear the same five songs. You know it’s probably going to be something you know.
Stereotyping their audience and narrowing their content to a malnurishing trickle of crud? How dare Pandora infringe on the A.V. Club’s turf!!
> If video killed the radio star, as The Buggles sang 40 years agoI stopped reading after this part to curl up in a corner and weep. Thanks for reminding me how old I am.
I did learn something from this, anyway.Sure, it was that Snoop Dogg’s middle name is Cordozar, but still.
My local radio stations are having a moment. We got a new style Oldies only instead of hits from the 60s it’s all 80s all the time. It’s amazing! And since then, the other five stations in my car have increased their 80s too. Meanwhile, Amazon music and it’s agenda……About half the stations I play end up popping up with Coldplay and his voice just gets on my last nerve and no matter how many thumbs down here it comes again.
That makes me want to kill myself. 80s stations need to get their own nomenclature, but the reality is in a few years there just wont be any real oldies stations left at all anyway. 80s music sucks. (And I should know, I was born then.)
I still use Pandora, having never hopped aboard the Spotify train. I like that it helps me find new music I probably wouldn’t have heard of otherwise. I never bothered to create multiple stations for different purposes though, so I’ve presumably overloaded my one station with more songs than it can track over the years. At one point I did try creating stations specifically to hear one song only to discover that a station created with a seed of one song would never play it (instead you have to pick a different song from that album), which was why my original station had ceased playing the song I had created it with a long time back. After sending them an email about it, they seem to have fixed things. I no longer use their phone app though, with the removal of an easy way to turn off the app itself a major turn off.
But can they explain what it is about getting older that makes you either start to really like contemporary pop or absolutely hate it?
Science can’t explain that dude choosing to wear that jacket