The Algorithm Is Gonna Get You
If you’ve ever felt your personal space invaded by the number of times you’ve seen a Facebook ad appear moments after a phone call discussion about a product or service you were just talking about then the photo below would not be soothing.. Do you feel the same way when you hear music after you were just thinking about a song, band or memory associated with a time, place or moment? Maybe not! Music is a different beast..more on that in another article.
It was a chilly evening when I took this photo on Newman Street in London and I just really laughed...hard.
I had just been with the pop editorial team in meetings nearby the UK office. We were discussing ways to work together, manage a global hits team and get better at establishing a workflow for editors around the world. When it came to functioning with data, algorithms and understanding how to develop songs worldwide, etc. this was going to be essential. This photo could have put a big ole bummer on what had been one of my best days and weeks on the job. But, I just really did pause...and laughed. But was I understanding clearly what all of this meant? Was it funny or tragic?
Of course the algorithm is gonna get you.
If I had seen this well done graffiti several months earlier I may have given into fits, questioning the validity of my own existence. At that time, I had just experienced a massive conference call where Daniel said, (and I'm paraphrasing Ek’s broken, but confident English here) “The system is going to get so great it’s going to anticipate what you need and give it to you before you even know you want it”
Maybe my head is just wired differently but I felt a deep, cold rush of blood away from my head. GULP! Is this what my hand crafted, world-class playlisting is leading to? Could this have been the moment that practical human curation was ending? I have to tell you that everything I heard Daniel say seemed to come true just months later. I often thought working at Spotify was like living out weird, alternate versions of the movie Time Cop but without Claude Van Damm’s impossible kitchen counter splits. At other times it was like living inside a WB Yeats poem hearing about the omniscient, Algorithmic beast, “its hour come round at last, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born”.
To be quite clear, I didn’t know what YOU needed, wanted or hoped to hear out of the 40+k tracks being uploaded into the system each day (more actually!),and neither could any of the extremely talented ears of my peers. I had an idea though .I had my ear, experience, way more than 10k hours and I understood how the playlist system worked to hand deliver ‘aha’ or ‘wow’ moments in the lists to you if you used them.
There was always the ALGO monster hiding in the shadows of the system. The beast. Waiting to........Well, give you what you want!. This thing devoured music. It was going to know what you wanted better than I did and would do so in an effective way and it didn’t care for a 401k, insurance.
For all the self-doubt and drama, here’s how I began to understand things in a different way; The algorithm is gonna get (read: understand!) me so good that it’s going to make music discovery, even as an editor, sharper and make it possible to get music to someone who wants to discover it!
I came to see that the Algo was meant to lessen the load on how much time I spent slaving over the perfect sequence of 50, hand crafted tracks (that a majority of people were going to hear in shuffle) being the main focus of my job over a series of playlists I edited.
This seismic shift in thought was about care for the very blood coming into the platform each day. It was all about scale and the very quick need to deal with the amount of music the world had to offer you and me and the sharper ability to discover as much as you wanted.
The algorithm is going to get you indeed. Just maybe not in the nefarious way you thought.
Till next time, John