Category: On Music

How Bad Is Your Spotify?
Turns out mine is bad. I’m also uncool and old. More on that in a bit. Let me tell you how I found out…

I’m a big fan of Pudding.cool. I love their visual storytelling. It’s one of the handful worth typing in by URL. If nothing else, you should sign up for their Winning the Internet newsletter, which is where I found the link to their How Bad Is Your Spotify? project. I was just thinking how bad Spotify had been lately at suggesting interesting playlists, so I eagerly clicked over, hoping to find out why the music service had lost a step in its personalized recommendations.

Instead, I found there was a different concept at play:

Our sophisticated AI judges your awful taste in music.

I recognized this idea immediately. Quickly judging someone’s taste in music was something I often did in my head at the record store where I worked during college, The Disc Exchange (RIP). Like The Pudding’s Spotify project (and every 20-something hipster), I also started from the position that most people have awful taste. To be clear, the Disc Exchange wasn’t Other Music and there wasn’t a ton of attitude at the store. It had more to do with that period in time and an unsettling exposure to the music-buying public that conditioned me to assume the worst in people after awhile.

Here’s how it would work: I would make my one-minute assessment of that a person’s music tastes based on what they asked me, what section of the store they were browsing, or the CDs they held in hand. If I concluded this person was “basic” on this limited amount of situational information, then they would get an “Oh, I bet you’ll like the new Pearl Jam” response when they asked, “Got any recommendations?” At that time it would have been the Vs. album, which btw, is a more than fine recommendation. The position was lazy and loaded with a smug attitude. I regret college record store me. But I also realize that was part of the culture at the time as perfectly nailed by Hornby’s High Fidelity.

So when the fine folks at The Pudding figured out how to give chatbots record-store smugness, I thought “Finally, an AI use case I can understand!”. The folks at The Pudding are smart, so I assume this whole music-taste project was done with their tongues firmly placed in their cheeks. What is more interesting is that on a meta-level, they have just demonstrated how biased “artificial intelligence” is due to the people who make it and the data that goes into it.

How good is your training data?

Like all good machine learning projects, The Pudding developers were using “objective data” to train their machine learning model to judge your Spotify listening history. If you take Pitchfork, Brooklyn Vegan, and hundreds of other music blogs and amalgamate all that coolness into a bona fide artificial intelligence algorithm, well, all you have are facts man….right? I even clicked the fine print to ensure there was some legit tech testing my listening worthiness:

Oh, good, they also included subreddits! Clearly, this was comprehensive science, so I was in. I logged in to give them access to my Spotify account. To ensure this process was free of misinterpretation or bias, I was prompted with qualifying questions:

I thought it was a nice touch that they let the user know the AI was architected by real music snobs with the “lol” and “omg” comments upon looking at my collection—er, Spotify listening history. I remember living in fear of my wall of CDs being judged by people who came to my apartment back in the 90’s. That’s because I also judged people by their collections. “So, you own every album by Marillion? Fascinating.” (Note: That would turn out to be cool AF after all. Another hipster dilemma for another post.)

I did get a little irritated by the ironic question because I’m a Gen X’er whose Alanis and Reality Bites exposure instilled fear of misuse of that rhetorical device at a formative age. What I do know is “Down the Dream” is a badass song by these badass sisters. Check it out:

This song is cool AF no matter what the AI says…

So I double-checked. Nope, I wasn’t listening to Maggie and Terre Roche ironically! In fact, I went down to Mill Valley Music and bought a vinyl copy of that record. Gary, who runs the store, is literally the nicest guy in the world and would never judge you or your tastes—you know, like it should be.

As the AI plowed through my listening history, it discovered other indicators of my Spotify awfulness:

Wait… the Grateful Dead are cool now, right?! Phil Cook is definitely cool. Is being a Lambchop stan a bad thing? Last time I saw them in before times, they were still playing small theaters full of hipsters. I wasn’t sure, but I still had a bit of confidence the AI was going to figure out that this ol’ record store clerk still had it.

Wait…is listening to Mount Kimbie a sign I’m depressed or something?! It’s not Swedish Death Metal, which I would think of as truly morbid. But now I’m at the age when I have no idea about anything anymore. Maybe all of music is a bit miserable like Hornby wondered:

“What came first—the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?”

But now things were getting really awkward. I didn’t want to fuck or marry kill Hiss Golden Messenger, Lambchop, or Bob Dylan. I also want all of them to live a long time, too. This felt like we were training the AI to fear us…again. But I was so invested in this test that I couldn’t back out now. I put my hands over my eyes and started clicking until the test moved on.

I got an initial “Hey, your Spotify looks great!” message. Yay! But then…the AI changed its mind, erased that sentiment, and started to tell me what it (and its creators) really thought:

While I will freely admit a Stones addiction, there was only one week where I listened to Nothing’s Shocking two or three times while running (also still great!). I had to double-check what they meant by stomp and holler to know why that was a knockdown. Actually, that categorization makes sense as I’m all over that playlist…but none of those artists are from the mid-’90s. Or mainstream country. Or necessarily yoga-inspired for a nag champa burndown. Weird.

What is signal and what is bias?

What this exposes is a bias toward whatever data The Pudding’s AI got from Spotify and the biases they put in to train the data. What is the right number of times to listen to something that signals that a piece of music defines me? I think this is part of the Spotify recommendations problem too. How does Spotify balance my “liked songs” with songs I play repeatedly? Then how do they make recommendations from my listening cohorts and look-a-like users when I only wanted to listen to Jane’s Addiction for a week of nostalgia? What about that day I wanted to figure out what Hyperpop was…but didn’t like it? It can get complicated quickly.

As my data scientist friend Will Rice said when I showed him this feature, “the important take home is that algorithms are sold as objective but are actually subjective because of the selection bias for recommendation features”. To Will’s point, I’d love to look through the training data to figure out where Jane’s Addiction or The Roches set off warning bells of my music stankiness. Is Gorilla vs. Bear just hating like crazy on The Roches? Somewhere, someone made a decision about what was cool based on year, genre, etc that echoed through the whole AI’s “objective analysis”.

And with chatbots, the developer biases are always clear. You don’t think the AI learned these ageist and stereotypical putdowns on its own, do you? I mean, I don’t read all the music blogs they’re ingesting to train their machine learning model, but are these the things you say to someone whose music doesn’t jibe with the new arbiters of cool?

Nope. Engineers put those phrases in little reference YAML files in a conversation manager they whipped up for the chatbot to use as responses based on the inputs from my “bad Spotify.” No magic here, folks. Just good ol’ social engineering.

So let’s talk more about the inputs that categorized me as such a stereotypical loser, and remember, this was derived from the objective data!

Well, it’s hard to dispute the data. I love all those artists and songs, so color me awful. What’s interesting is that these results demonstrate where the data inputs fall apart. Here are the telltales:
- The default playlist problem: “Hawk” by Brasstronaught was the first song on a playlist I made in August to listen to while running and working out. Out of sheer laziness and pure self-hatred if I pick a generic “power workout” playlist on Spotify, I kept playing my workout playlist over and over again. In fact, four of the five songs on my “too much” results come from this playlist.
- This song is the first track on new album problem: The only track in my top 5 that isn’t on that workout playlist is the Mount Kimbie song, “Four Years and One Day”. That track is the first track on their album Love What Survives. Two years after its release, I still listen to that album as a default when I can’t think of anything else to listen to because it is brilliant. Unfortunately, that track is not even close to my top five favorite songs on that album, much less in general.
- Another default album problem: I really didn’t listen to a lot of Lambchop this year like I have in years past, and I did it purposely. Their album Is a Woman was my go-to for focus or sleep for a long time. Why did I stop actively listening to it? For the last few years, Lambchop’s “Is a Woman” came up as a top album for me in my “end of year” Spotify reports. It angered me that I was paying Spotify to rent an album that I own on vinyl, CD, and FLAC formats. More on that issue in another post.
- Autoplay and the artist who has 500+ albums problem: The thing about Bill Evans, Bob Dylan, and the Grateful Dead is they have a lot of albums. So listening to them or, more often, letting them keep playing while I do other things overweights their influence on my listening output. If I put on Bill Evan’s Undercurrent and start doing other things, 3 of his albums can play before I turn it off or listen to something else.
My point is the data is more influenced by how I listen to music than by why I listen to it. Continuous play mode, mobile access (“going for a run”), and sheer passive listening brought on by cloud-based music have muddied the signal of what we like and enjoy listening to the most. If you got into my car when I was in high school, it was clear from the wear on my cassettes that The Replacements’ Tim, Husker Dü’s Candy Apple Grey, R.E.M.’s Life’s Rich Pageant, and The Cult’s Electric defined me. I voted with my limited amount of money and space. Now, with unlimited storage for $9.99 a month, there are no clear signals of what I really value unless you come over and see my vinyl collection. Again, like an old.

Figuring out what data we are sending that truly contains the signal of our likes and dislikes will always be challenging. Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, et al struggle with it as their data catalogs get bigger and our consumption becomes more ambient than active. All of these companies choke over and over on recommendations due to the overabundance of non-contextual inputs and data complexity. It’s hard to make personal recommendations at scale.

This is why I get most of my music recommendations from Worldwidefm.net, Aquarium Drunkard, Bandcamp Weekly, and Mixcloud DJs. Humans still make better playlists. It is also why I think we’ll see a comeback in favor of human-based recommendations. Even Spotify is betting on humans to make better playlists and why they launched a service that enables everyone to create podcasts with licensed music late last year.

What The Pudding really judged was my “newness,” which was pretty weak this year. This was more clearly pointed out in my Last.fm recap:

So while I’ll own my flannel-shirt wearin’, mid-’90s craft beer persona proudly, I do get the point that I need to up my new-music game. Anyone got any recommendations? No AI’s allowed.

Hat tip to Ben, Monteiro, Om, and Drew, who all inspired me with their physical ‘zines (YES), blog posts, and newsletters this year. All of you contributed to my development and overall happiness throughout last year with your insightful, heartfelt writing. Thanks!
January 3, 2021
The Best of Everything

So many people have written great posts or tweets about Tom Petty and their favorite Tom Petty moments. I’ve loved reading how Tom Petty moved them or was a part of their life. Thought it might feel good to share a few of my own.

I’ve never not appreciated Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ role as musical soundtrack provider and milestone marker through my adolescence to adulthood. Here are a few of my favorites moments:

One of the very first 45 records I bought with my own money.

MTV hit my house in 1982 and pretty much dominated my television viewing until I left for college. One of my favorite early videos was “You Got Lucky”. Looking back, it’s easy to call the sci-fi themed video’s production hokey. But if you were 11-years old and just coming off obsessions with first generation Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek reruns and Star Wars, it was a signal that these guys were simpatico with your current sense of awesomeness. Plus Tom got out of the space mobile with cowboy boots on! From that moment on Tom Petty and Mike Campbell were space cowboys from the future in my mind. I never thought of them as classic rockers. As a tribute, I am half entertaining the idea of buying old boomboxes, putting Tom Petty tapes in them and burying them in the ground so future space cowboys can stumble across them and discover Tom Petty a la the “You Got Lucky” video.

A few weeks later I went back to the Record Bar in the mall to buy Long After Dark, the album that contained “You Got Lucky” with some birthday money. With birthday level dollars, I could step up and buy whole albums instead of just singles. I had pretty much wore out the 45 by that time, so I wanted to dig in further.

I already had Queen’s Greatest Hits (w/ “Under Pressure”!) under my arm and was walking up with Long After Dark to the counter. These were big important purchases that would take most of my birthday $20, so I asked the clerk who was shelving stock if the rest of Long After Dark was as good as “You Got Lucky”. I remember her saying something like “It’s pretty good, but I would go with Hard Promises.” Without another word, she went back to the P’s, pulled Hard Promises and showed it to me. I can’t remember much else about the exchange other than I agreed to go with Hard Promises and she put Long After Dark back in the featured rack. Side A of that album is still one my favorite A-sides ever. Backing up “The Waiting” with “A Woman in Love (It’s Not Me)” is just killer. It also began my love of record stores and the people who work in them.

I went back a few months later and got Damn the Torpedoes too. I had figured out that he did “Don’t Do Me Like That’, which I had loved as well. I never did buy Long After Dark for some reason.

The next Petty album I bought was Southern Accents which will always be important in my musical development. I almost didn’t buy it because I didn’t love the “Don’t Come Around Here No More” single or its video. What got me was the title track and the song “Rebels” which was played on KZ-106, our classic rock “hot rockin’” radio station in 80’s Chattanooga, TN. It was the first time I became aware that being “southern” was a thing you could be proud of in some way that didn’t feel completely redneck. Lots of my friends really identified with the Hank Williams, Jr. type of southern identification…huntin’, fishin’ and football. I tried that stuff but it didn’t fit me well. I realized that’s not who I was was or wanted to be. Before Southern Accents, 15 year-old me wanted to be from the U.K. or California. That’s because my heroes at that age were from one of those two places: The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, Black Sabbath, etc. Those people were cool! After this album, I could point to other southerners as culturally cool too.

Like Petty, I didn’t know too much about the Civil War, being a “rebel” or what the confederate flag really meant at the time. I didn’t think it was something that even existed in “modern society”. That’s because I grew up in Chattanooga which has a lot of Civil War History. There are tons of old Civil War monuments here that have New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other northern states names on them. It was always clear to me who lost that war and who the losers were. Being a confederate just didn’t seem like something you wanted to be or celebrate. Later on, we both learned a lot about those terms and symbols and how they meant something other than just “being from the south”.

The album and its subject matter immediately started me down a path to a different kind of southern culture and a new take on southern music. One that would lead me to R.E.M., Gram Parsons, the Byrds and a whole bunch of alternative country artists that made me think differently about a southern culture that was more open to art and different ways of thinking than was offered to me before it.

I could write a whole other post about memories I have around the Full Moon Fever and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Greatest hits albums. They were literally the soundtrack of my college years. I didn’t buy either album as they were played non-stop in my college apartments, car trips, parties and events throughout that time. I know every song and lyric by heart on both those albums, and there are literally too many memories to recount.

The next seriously meaningful Petty moment for me was buying this Wildflowers cassette in New Orleans as I drove cross country to move to California in my 1988 Hyundai Excel. It sounded like freedom and I think I listened to it 3 or 4 flips in a row before I took it out. I remember the production sounded so good! Even on my cheap Hyundai speakers, this album sounded like a road dream. Put it on the next time you are on a road trip and see what I mean. I’ve probably listen to this album at least three or four times a year since. It’s funny, some of the songs that I thought were weak at the time, I love now. For example, “Honey Bee”. Of course, Dave Grohl already knew that song slayed in 1994.

A few years after I moved to San Francisco, the Heartbreakers did a residency at the Fillmore. I didn’t live far from The Fillmore, so I would go down and try to get a ticket from a fellow fan at face value. I got to go to four shows which were amazing. Tom and the band looked like they were having a blast too. I remember thinking how cool it was to see an older cowboy-looking guy from Petaluma rocking out next to a Haight hipster on some Petty staple or choice cover and it didn’t feel weird. Petty really did cross the cultural divide with people. I also remember there were great openers as well. I saw Bo Diddley open!

Over the next 20 years, I would see a few more of their shows, one at festival. I would listen to the new albums over streaming services. Whether a show or a new album, the product was always good and was never a disappointment. As it goes in life, moments in adulthood are harder to remember, capture or reference musically than those from your formative years. But I was still a fan and there are tracks on The Last DJ and Mojo that I love.

My last Petty moment was seeing him with Mudcrutch in Boston after a Red Sox game at the House of Blues last Fall. There were no TP & the Heartbreaker staples, but the crowd still loved it. You could feel that he was doing it just for fun. Like he was still looking for that magic after all these years. And when he locked in with Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, you could still see they had “their thing”. It was great to watch.

So there you have it. These were some of my favorite moments that Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers provided a soundtrack to over the years. Thanks for everything Tom.

Wherever you are tonight, I wish you the best of everything. And I hope you found whatever you were looking for.

October 5, 2017
You Forgot It In People
Record Store Day reminded me that buying music is more fun with people involved.

Broken Social Scene’s “You Forgot It In People”album whose title I lifted for this post.

It’s been a little over a week since the music geek holiday of Record Store Day has passed. For those who don’t know, this holiday consists of rubbing (or for certain records throwing) elbows for the right to spend $25-$45 for albums pressed on plastic that you probably already have access to through Spotify, YouTube or your MP3s. It’s a real throwback for music fans and artists because people actually go to stores, talk to other humans and buy music again. It also serves as a stark reminder of how impersonal the music experience is now and what we’ve lost in the transition to digital.

Unfortunately, the record store is not going to return to its former glory no matter how much vinyl sales keep growing. To be clear, there will always be a little record store selling vinyl long after Urban Outfitters stops selling vinyl as a fashion accessory. That’s because people who love music will always seek out places to be with other people who love music too. I know that’s why I still go to concerts and music festivals.

So after my last Record Store Day (“RSD”) experience I started thinking about how digital music could capture more of the store experience. Right now, most digital music services are just about delivery and algorithmic programming and I am getting annoyed with it. Opening up a digital music service is bad a combination of overwhelming and boring.

It’s overwhelming because I have more music than I could ever listen to in a lifetime available. Unfortunately, this large number of listening options available tends to make my mind go blank. “Um, The Rolling Stones… I guess?” seems to be my brain’s typical response. Music services know this is a problem, so they prompt the user with suggested playlists to deal with this “what do I listen to now” problem. Or worse “this is what’s popular in your network” activity feeds. I love my friends, but I mostly hate what they listen to daily. Unfortunately, I find all these algorithmic programming options uninspiring. These suggestions also make me feel like a lame demographic:

I’m sure the algorithm is right and something in the data analysis that Spotify is gathering from my listening habits is spot on with these recommendations above. I definitely need a deeper focus, a happier work disposition and some idea of what today’s “viral hits” are as I don’t have a clue. But I don’t pay Spotify to give me the tough love reminder that I’m just an aging hipster in need of an attitude adjustment.

There’s got to be a way to make digital music more personal and enjoyable. Or at least something more akin to the RSD experience. Here’s a few ideas I had below.

Make an event out of new music.

When I was in college, I worked at a record store in Knoxville that did “midnight sales” when CDs came out. Like RSD, midnight sales were totally manufactured commercial events driven by the perception of scarcity. Lines of people waiting in the parking lot at midnight for Nirvana’s “In Utero” CD so they would be the first to have it… at least until 10am the next day when everyone else could buy it. The midnight sales were parties where you met a lot of people who liked things you liked. I think that still holds true and why people are still willing to line up at record stores at 10 a.m. on a Saturday to buy music instead of just buying it off eBay or Discogs the next day.

Why isn’t there an equivalent live event online when new albums come out? Not just a live concert, but a place where I can hear more about the album from the artist. Maybe see what other people think while we listened to the album live together?

I’ve got a little bit of experience in doing similar types of events for video games and movies from my last company Whiskey Media. Whiskey Media built entertainment brands like Giantbomb and Comicvine (which are now owned by CBSi) that were hybrid publishing and community sites. We would broadcast our hosts playing new video games or talking about movies live and the fans loved it. Thousands of people who would show up to watch and participate in chats during these live broadcast. You can check out what they are like yourself tomorrow (April 29th) at Giantbomb if you want to see exactly what I’m talking about, or check out an old clip of one of ours shows below.

It would be real easy for Amazon’s Twitch and Google’s YouTube to do these type of live “Fan Parties”. They just need to invest in great hosts for the events. If I were Spotify or Apple I would start thinking about these type of music release parties. Otherwise, they potentially lose their promotional power to Google and Amazon who can easily turn on this ability to connect fans with artists on their platforms.

Less exclusives, more rewards for supporting music.

The digital music industry has tried to create excitement around different kinds of exclusive models for awhile now, notably iTunes getting the Beatles or Spotify having Led Zeppelin exclusively. Tidal’s whole strategy seems to be based on exclusives which they have already caught a ton of grief about already.

With RSD, the exclusives exist in the form of limited edition vinyl that are distributed everywhere. The only fans getting the shaft are folks who live in towns without record stores. Or as I found out, showing up two hours late on RSD and missing out on that Alabama-shaped St. Paul & the Broken Bones release you really, really wanted.

Anyway, both of these “exclusive” methods are flawed. With digital exclusives, the artist risks alienating fans by making them choose between digital platforms. Consumers are not going to subscribe to three different services just to listen to all their favorite artists. The limited distribution leads to limited income.

When it comes to RSD exclusives, it’s not a sustainable business model because it happens once a year and most of the product is targeted to limited edition rarities for hardcore music nerds like me. This model does not “scale” as they say.

I think it would be better for digital music services to reward hardcore fans who show up for an album launch and buy the music instead. Let the distributors fight for debut rights instead of exclusive rights. Sure, it’s possible that the bigger, wealthier distributors might disproportionately get rights to bigger artists as they have in the past. If that happens, it will just make the smaller distributors work harder at breaking newer artists. That has worked out well for my favorite music distributor Bandcamp, which has already given a $100 million to artists. The more platforms we have fighting to promote new music the better I say.

Here are some ideas that as a music fan I would be glad to hand over $20 for when new albums come out:
- Expensive benefit: Limited edition vinyl/cassette/t-shirts with digital purchases made on the first day of release.
- Moderate priced benefit: Send posters & stickers for the first 100,000 (or pick a number) that buy the album in the first 24-hours at full price.
- Cheap benefit: Collect Twitter, Instagram or Facebook usernames on checkout. Then post a link to a page with a collage of all those first week buyers, until the artist creates its own version of the Million Dollar Homepage. Randomly Tweet or Instagram those buyers and tell them thank you.
I’m sure there are better ideas by smarter people or maybe these ideas have been tried already. The point is music consumption needs to go back to being a better cultural experience and not the isolated experience it is today. Sure, there’s still concerts and record store days, but music’s future is online. Digital distribution is just not that fulfilling and is partially why people still look to buy physical artifacts or interact with their sometimes nice, sometimes crotchety record clerk guy. The companies who bring people back into the music experience will do exceptionally better going forward.

Special thanks to my super talented friend Lessley Anderson for edits and thoughts on this rambling post. If there are any errors or you don’t like the thoughts, don’t blame her. Also, you should see her band Baby & the Luvies if you’re in SF!
April 27, 2015