Algorithm Anxiety

and attempting to resist the unrelenting allure of Filterworld

Feb 22, 2024

‘Love it, but, do you think the intro could be half the length?’

Anyone with A&R experience has heard this phrase numerous times, and I’m not ashamed to admit that it’s left my mouth more than once. Whilst sat in stuffy listening rooms, ploughing through new mixes, demos and half-baked ideas, it’s nigh on impossible not to second guess how a song might be received by the imagined audience that awaits. Except many of these songs never make it to the intended audience, stunted by the algorithm before reaching their intended destination.

I remember a particularly pernicious and unsubstantiated rumour several years back, that a certain streaming service purposefully punished songs where the introductions ran longer than six seconds.1 Untrue? Absolutely. But believable? Sure. Never have creatives been more at the mercy of forces as mysterious, dynamic and quite frankly arbitrary.

Now, imagine the sort of anxiety this spawns, but generated every single time an artist attempts to plant anything in the digital garden we all share. It’s crippling.

There have always been gatekeepers to impress prior to reaching a substantial audience, be it record labels, radio producers or journalists, yet now we insist that artists generate troves of positive data prior to deeming them suitable for ‘general consumption’. The lowering of the barriers to entry over the past decade has created the illusion of song equality; in reality it’s never been more imbalanced. Getting your music on streaming services is a little like every record store in the world agreeing to stock your release; except it’s out back in a storage unit the size of the Disney World carpark, improperly labelled, spine facing inwards, oh and the lights are off. Without either the blessing of editorial recognition, or the uncertainty of algorithmic success, nobody is going to find it.

Speak to near enough any artist and they’ll lament the reliance on and the inconsistencies of social media channels, that reward quantity over quality, whilst promoting the outlandish, sensationalist and even the downright offensive. Artists are encouraged to be marketers before they are musicians, needing not just hits in the form of songs, but also hits in the form of social media posts, and an unsustainable amount of it. Continual content, if you will.

Every time an artist releases anything resembling new content, be it music itself, a TikTok or a simple Instagram post, it’s the equivalent of rolling the dice in a casino. And it’s not enough to hit the jackpot once; artists have to ensure they’re doing this with a regularity that’s financially, emotionally and creatively unsustainable. All the while each spin of the roulette wheel serves the best interests of the platform itself; as the cliche goes, the house always wins.

If you’ve ever managed to sit through the entirety of a Mr Beast video, or one of his interviews2, then you’ll be acutely attuned to his own algorithm anxiety and how he has built his empire off the back of manipulating it. He often discusses how he analyses in intricate detail every segment of his videos, A/B testing the YouTube thumbnail and title, working out which celebrity cameos are effective at maintaining view time. The quality of the content is completely disregarded, each aspect of the video chiselled to within an inch of its life to ensure the viewer remains glued to the screen. Is this the future we want for music? Artists as performing monkeys, performing monkeys as data analysts.

I’ve known of artists and their teams casting out entire songs and their marketing campaigns because a snippet hasn’t reacted in the way they’d hoped it would on TikTok. It’s not just the artist held hostage by the algorithm, it’s the entire team of creatives that surround them. On top of that, I’ve lost count of the number of panicked messages I’ve had from artists within half an hour of sharing a social post, asking if they should delete it as it’s not performing in the manner they’d expected. Much like the intent of the platforms themselves, artists are sold on the dystopian promise of perpetual growth - the notion that there are always more fans to win over, if you simply create the right content.

And what of the impact on culture itself?

This necessity to impress the algorithm, leads to what Kyle Chayka in his brilliant new book, Filterworld, refers to as ‘flattening’ of culture - what’s worked before is regurgitated as most likely to work again.3 Anything that seeks to push the boundaries of culture lies in the territory of risk and is widely avoided.

Take the ‘sitting in the car, playing my new song to my ex/mum/brother etc.’ for the first time trend. Why in the car? Why this person? This charade falls flat on it’s face when given more than a second of rational thought (this isn’t how songs are created etc.), yet for fans mindlessly scrolling, seeing two individuals sat behind a car dashboard, it gives a framework of understanding and a trouble-free sense of familiarity and for artists it gives them something they’ve seen work before, regardless of how relevant it is to them. It’s a performativity born out of desperation and confusion; grasping at the straws of viral relevancy.

Increasingly I find that when I open my streaming app of choice, I’m met with the most mundane, middling representation of my personal tastes, and find it frighteningly difficult to break from this circle of safety. Music I’ve heard before, or if not, that sounds shockingly similar to that; enough to massage my frazzled brain but rarely move me. Our own digital universes are becoming one repetitive, disgustingly polished For You page, confining us within these siloed echo-chambers that serve us the most unadventurous version of ourselves, actively encouraging us to consume more of the same, ad infinitum.

The internet, once heralded as a space for free expression, is instead becoming a suppressor of independent thought.

And so much of this goes against how and why music exists; I don’t listen to music to receive banal platitudes that I won’t navigate away from - I listen in order to explore new and challenging worlds. In recounting how as an inquisitive teenager, I discovered A Tribe Called Quest, now one of my favourite artists of all time, I realise that it’s a route nearly entirely restricted on algorithmically driven streaming platforms where data trumps context. A single line lifted from Last Call, the closing track on Kanye West’s debut The College Dropout, ‘the fans want the feeling of A Tribe Called Quest / but all they got left is this guy called West’ brought the NY outfit to my attention. An algorithm would likely never make this connection.

Similarly, in my early teens I frequented a forum called Dancing Jesus where new music junkies participated in the sharing of the latest and greatest new music.4 Over time I came to know which users and their tastes I aligned with the most, taking on recommendations regardless of genre or background. As editorial voices fade, and data driven suggestions dominate, we lose that killer connection.

Take Spotify’s misleadingly titled ‘Radio’ feature, where you can generate a playlist of similar sounds based on the starting point of any artist, combined with your previous consumption. It couldn’t be further from true radio, where the listener is at the mercy of the DJ; where they’re granted the ability to throw a curve ball, or even A Tribe Called Quest-esque connection; surprising, delighting and emboldening those tuned in.

Where once, we ‘opened’ the Internet and made a conscious decision to log-on, it now exists all around us; our mobile phones serving as the ever-present companion to the humdrum of real life. I often jokingly compare our mobile devices to the dæmon’s in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Material novels - as much a part of us as we are of them.5

The fallacy of the very existence of the algorithm lies in the illusion of choice; that the selections you make are somehow entirely representative of you and your free will. The reality is that by using platforms that are so algorithm-heavy, you are actively making a choice to not make a choice. Sure, you can seek out your favourite artist, and pledge to only ever use the search function, (which itself is algorithmically programmed) but you will never entirely escape this predetermined pathway that the app has laid out for you. Don’t even get me started on the impact of financially means-tested features such as Discovery Mode. 6

Streaming platforms would rather serve us a world of personalised beige, than one of brilliant colour and imperfect but daring inspiration.

How Spotify currently present the context to their recommendations

It’s a reminder that these platforms are built by tech-first firms, intent on keeping us hooked to their pages, rather than built by culture obsessives, seeking to push the boundaries of creativity. The passive listener is shown a world of contentment and predictability, whereas the intrepid explorer is dampened in their efforts to leave their comfort zone.As this ripples across the industry and the world of music creators, this ‘flattening’ becomes a regurgitation of sameness; promoting the safety of the known. The niche musician, or the outsider, is consigned to the confines of obscurity.

The more I listen to soft, introspective indie-pop, the more I’m fed soft, introspective indie-pop, creating a vicious circle nigh-impossible to break from without a significant dose of intent, itself increasingly difficult to orchestrate. A First World problem? Sort of, yes, however these algorithms act in similar ways across the breadth of our digital cosmos. The death of Molly Russell, a London teenager who took her own life in 2017, shows the harrowing end algorithms can lead to: a 14 year old who had searched for self-harm content online, and then was repeatedly fed more of the same by social media platforms until it overwhelmed her.7 Where a human would have stepped in, the algorithm gripped tighter.

It’s not just in music either. Take the film industry; which has seemingly become a rehashing of pre-existing IP, be it the Marvel universe, the DC franchise or the endless rafts of remakes; swapping innovation and new stories, for the comfort of familiarity. The straight to Netflix TV shows and films are forced into playing the attention game; living with the perilous knowledge that unlike those on the big screen where the viewer has paid up and feels more driven to stay in their seat, those on streaming services are a mere click away from being banished to the digital ether.

The artist is rewarded not for creating art that necessarily represents them best or inspires their audience, but rather for making the ‘least skippable’ song, in essence simply conjuring up dopamine fodder. Forgettable, but not skippable.

A personalised digital world, catered exactly to our tastes, is one free of challenges, of disappointments, and of spontaneity, all of which add to the colour of daily life. Loving a piece of art only makes sense when set against the backdrop of what you’re staunchly adamant that you aren’t a fan of, and that’s only derived through experience.

Even now, as I type this while twenty songs into fearful heatwave wednesday afternoon, a personalised playlist, I’m struck by how okay all the songs are, as in I’m not really inclined to skip any, but neither am I driven to dive deeper into their stories. Background noise for a world deserving of so much more vibrancy.

So Much In Between

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