From critics to algorithms: how democracy and technocracy came to the music industry
In previous materials ( 1 , 2 ) we talked about systems that influenced the public taste in music right up to the end of the 20th century. In this we will tell about how they began to collapse.
Spencer Imbrock / Unsplash Photo
Technology has created the phenomenon of a music album. They also put him at risk. The first blow was struck by television. Until the 1970s, television broadcasting was not very diverse, almost all television channels in Western countries were aimed at one category of people - office workers. But in the late '70s, cable television appeared, and the owners of new cable channels became bolder in their experiments with broadcast formats.
')
The main of these decisions was the launch of MTV on August 1, 1981. The channel focused on the youth audience, went on the air with the funeral march "Video Killed The Radio Star".
But the funeral had to be postponed. During the first years of broadcasting, the company lost $ 50 million. Music videos at that time were not popular, were used to promote album sales and were not perceived as self-sufficient works of art. Therefore, the first broadcast of the television company consisted of no more than 250 video clips. But by the mid-80s, the channel “went into plus” - and became an international phenomenon.
Thanks to MTV, music content began to compete with entertainment programs on other TV channels. In order to survive in the world of sitcoms and sports, the music had to change. The role of music videos as advertising for records has faded into the background - now the clips themselves have tried to make spectacular, attractive, viral. The performers spent millions on filming - many of the “classic clips” from the 80s and 90s are still on the list of the most expensive . Extravagant videos led to the mass popularity of such artists as Madonna and Michael Jackson.
The digital revolution has further spurred this competition. In the digital world, there is only one currency - human attention. Academic music, pop clips, news videos, articles, photos, all that we call “content”, is fighting for the right to be on the screen of a smartphone or computer.
Photo by Simon Noh / Unsplash
The musical criticism of the “album age” has inherited much from the academic tradition - including the tendency to idealize the abstractness of musical works. In the market where serials compete with music, such an approach is hard to maintain.
Moreover, even in academic art criticism, a critical role is played by the critical theory of media , which approaches art from a materialistic position, emphasizes its social context. Therefore, modern music criticism is increasingly focusing on what is happening “around music”, and some consider the genre of album reviews to be completely dead.
But the main "killer critics" were the voices of ordinary people. The Internet has become a truly democratic media platform where everyone can express their opinions. If a certain position finds resonance, it becomes more visible. The collective opinion of the listeners, whatever it may be, became more audible than the opinion of experts.
The value of expert opinions as such has been significantly devalued over the past 10 years. Digital sites with minimal censorship equalized all positions. The differences between samizdat and the reviewed article have practically disappeared, and popularity has become a more important measure of content success than its quality in the eyes of experts.
Photo by Marc-Olivier Paquin / Unsplash
The last blow to the classical music critic struck streaming platforms. If earlier reviews served as a guide to the purchase of an album, now physical releases are buying units. With the advent of Spotify and Apple Music, anyone can listen to the work that just came out and draw their own conclusions about its quality.
An important role in the formation of musical culture is played by recommendatory algorithms. People dissatisfied with the "taste" trust them more than the critics. One of the first such musical algorithm developed by the social network and the online radio site Last.fm.
Their algorithm compared listeners' preferences , analyzed genre tags submitted by users, and created a rating on this basis. Pandora used algorithms that compare the songs themselves, not their listeners. Each track was assigned classifiers, and on the basis of these data was determined by the "similarity" of musical compositions.
Spotify builds a profile of user preferences, taking into account user actions and behavior — songs that people miss; playlists that they create. Similarly, Apple Music works.
The process of searching for music on streaming platforms is “tailored” to the individual taste, which turns this medium into a kind of echo chamber . The user practically does not come into contact with music that does not correspond to his usual genres and directions. The chance to make a random discovery in such conditions is less than when choosing a disc or record in the store.
Photo by Nadine Shaabana / Unsplash
On multimedia platforms, the situation is a little different. As in the case of streaming services, to draw attention to your song on the same YouTube is a non-trivial task: the recommendatory algorithm takes into account video viewing, CTR (an indicator that is often increased with the help of “clickbate” - sensational headlines and intriguing previews) videos of the same author, repeated views and other statistics.
YouTube’s business motivation is understandable - their main goal is to keep the audience on its platform. The more videos users watch, the more advertising they can show, and the easier it is to offer them other videos that will be guaranteed to be viewed to the end.
All this greatly complicates getting new music content into the “recommended” category. Even if the clip will gain views, without having a “clickbate” preview and a sensational title, it will still have to compete with the most diverse non-musical content, the creators of which are doing everything possible to raise the popularity of their channels.
Platforms are trying to reduce the effect of "echo chamber" by attracting to the process of "live" curators. This approach uses the vast majority of streaming services. Former journalists are now creating copyright playlists and thematic collections. But this work cannot be compared with music criticism: supervised playlists and weighted, substantiated critical essays are not the same thing.
The main task of music criticism is to separate the eternal from the temporary. And, in a sense, playlists perform the same role. The fact that a certain composition is included in the playlist tells the listener that it is worthy of his attention. But if a good review can make the reader take a fresh look at a song or an album, reveal previously unknown facts about the music or the artist, then playlists are deprived of this additional information load. In the end, the listener, who does not understand why he should be interested in the composition, presses the skip button and returns to the usual tracks.
Whether curatorial will save digital distribution of music is unknown. Without music critics in their traditional understanding of “work” in finding new and developing musical taste, it falls entirely on the listener's shoulders - you have to independently search for new genres and trends, find information about performers and figure out what the author wanted to say. Fortunately, now all this information is much more accessible than in the heyday of music criticism.
Our materials for additional reading:
Retired - we are discussing once popular audio gadgets that are already “out of date”
The history of audio technology: synthesizers and samplers
What are the features and objectives of sound games
Zoo professions related to the audio industry
What happens in the audio podcast market
Super-precise sound focusing - how metamaterials will help
Russian scientists recorded the music of cosmic pulsars
Pay what you want: how this model manifested itself in music
From critics to algorithms: labels, corporations and musical culture of the 20th century
From critics to algorithms: the fading voice of elites in the music world
Spencer Imbrock / Unsplash Photo
Transformation criticism in the age of multimedia
Technology has created the phenomenon of a music album. They also put him at risk. The first blow was struck by television. Until the 1970s, television broadcasting was not very diverse, almost all television channels in Western countries were aimed at one category of people - office workers. But in the late '70s, cable television appeared, and the owners of new cable channels became bolder in their experiments with broadcast formats.
')
The main of these decisions was the launch of MTV on August 1, 1981. The channel focused on the youth audience, went on the air with the funeral march "Video Killed The Radio Star".
But the funeral had to be postponed. During the first years of broadcasting, the company lost $ 50 million. Music videos at that time were not popular, were used to promote album sales and were not perceived as self-sufficient works of art. Therefore, the first broadcast of the television company consisted of no more than 250 video clips. But by the mid-80s, the channel “went into plus” - and became an international phenomenon.
Thanks to MTV, music content began to compete with entertainment programs on other TV channels. In order to survive in the world of sitcoms and sports, the music had to change. The role of music videos as advertising for records has faded into the background - now the clips themselves have tried to make spectacular, attractive, viral. The performers spent millions on filming - many of the “classic clips” from the 80s and 90s are still on the list of the most expensive . Extravagant videos led to the mass popularity of such artists as Madonna and Michael Jackson.
The digital revolution has further spurred this competition. In the digital world, there is only one currency - human attention. Academic music, pop clips, news videos, articles, photos, all that we call “content”, is fighting for the right to be on the screen of a smartphone or computer.
The entertaining aspect of music and its superficial attractiveness have become the main indicator of mass success. The importance of packaging a creative product, the brand of the artist and the context in which to present it has increased dramatically.
Photo by Simon Noh / Unsplash
The musical criticism of the “album age” has inherited much from the academic tradition - including the tendency to idealize the abstractness of musical works. In the market where serials compete with music, such an approach is hard to maintain.
Moreover, even in academic art criticism, a critical role is played by the critical theory of media , which approaches art from a materialistic position, emphasizes its social context. Therefore, modern music criticism is increasingly focusing on what is happening “around music”, and some consider the genre of album reviews to be completely dead.
The phenomenon of mass popularity
But the main "killer critics" were the voices of ordinary people. The Internet has become a truly democratic media platform where everyone can express their opinions. If a certain position finds resonance, it becomes more visible. The collective opinion of the listeners, whatever it may be, became more audible than the opinion of experts.
The value of expert opinions as such has been significantly devalued over the past 10 years. Digital sites with minimal censorship equalized all positions. The differences between samizdat and the reviewed article have practically disappeared, and popularity has become a more important measure of content success than its quality in the eyes of experts.
Photo by Marc-Olivier Paquin / Unsplash
The last blow to the classical music critic struck streaming platforms. If earlier reviews served as a guide to the purchase of an album, now physical releases are buying units. With the advent of Spotify and Apple Music, anyone can listen to the work that just came out and draw their own conclusions about its quality.
Algorithms and Metrics
An important role in the formation of musical culture is played by recommendatory algorithms. People dissatisfied with the "taste" trust them more than the critics. One of the first such musical algorithm developed by the social network and the online radio site Last.fm.
Their algorithm compared listeners' preferences , analyzed genre tags submitted by users, and created a rating on this basis. Pandora used algorithms that compare the songs themselves, not their listeners. Each track was assigned classifiers, and on the basis of these data was determined by the "similarity" of musical compositions.
Spotify builds a profile of user preferences, taking into account user actions and behavior — songs that people miss; playlists that they create. Similarly, Apple Music works.
The process of searching for music on streaming platforms is “tailored” to the individual taste, which turns this medium into a kind of echo chamber . The user practically does not come into contact with music that does not correspond to his usual genres and directions. The chance to make a random discovery in such conditions is less than when choosing a disc or record in the store.
Photo by Nadine Shaabana / Unsplash
On multimedia platforms, the situation is a little different. As in the case of streaming services, to draw attention to your song on the same YouTube is a non-trivial task: the recommendatory algorithm takes into account video viewing, CTR (an indicator that is often increased with the help of “clickbate” - sensational headlines and intriguing previews) videos of the same author, repeated views and other statistics.
YouTube’s business motivation is understandable - their main goal is to keep the audience on its platform. The more videos users watch, the more advertising they can show, and the easier it is to offer them other videos that will be guaranteed to be viewed to the end.
All this greatly complicates getting new music content into the “recommended” category. Even if the clip will gain views, without having a “clickbate” preview and a sensational title, it will still have to compete with the most diverse non-musical content, the creators of which are doing everything possible to raise the popularity of their channels.
Curators will save the situation
Platforms are trying to reduce the effect of "echo chamber" by attracting to the process of "live" curators. This approach uses the vast majority of streaming services. Former journalists are now creating copyright playlists and thematic collections. But this work cannot be compared with music criticism: supervised playlists and weighted, substantiated critical essays are not the same thing.
The main task of music criticism is to separate the eternal from the temporary. And, in a sense, playlists perform the same role. The fact that a certain composition is included in the playlist tells the listener that it is worthy of his attention. But if a good review can make the reader take a fresh look at a song or an album, reveal previously unknown facts about the music or the artist, then playlists are deprived of this additional information load. In the end, the listener, who does not understand why he should be interested in the composition, presses the skip button and returns to the usual tracks.
Whether curatorial will save digital distribution of music is unknown. Without music critics in their traditional understanding of “work” in finding new and developing musical taste, it falls entirely on the listener's shoulders - you have to independently search for new genres and trends, find information about performers and figure out what the author wanted to say. Fortunately, now all this information is much more accessible than in the heyday of music criticism.
Our materials for additional reading:
Retired - we are discussing once popular audio gadgets that are already “out of date” The history of audio technology: synthesizers and samplers What are the features and objectives of sound games Zoo professions related to the audio industry What happens in the audio podcast market Super-precise sound focusing - how metamaterials will help Russian scientists recorded the music of cosmic pulsars Pay what you want: how this model manifested itself in music From critics to algorithms: labels, corporations and musical culture of the 20th century From critics to algorithms: the fading voice of elites in the music worldSource: https://habr.com/ru/post/454398/
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