* To be read in the style of The Lumineers' breakthrough smash 'Ho Hey'. I, for one, welcome our new neon-soaked algorithm overlords. It's a scary thought, especially if you consider yourself a music buff.īut hey*, we could probably use the distraction from such concerns, so kudos to the Spotify gods for getting us through the day, one nonsensical genre at a time. " soon plans to produce more of its own (surely branded) "storytelling" and original content. what will become of music criticism in a world without records? Will publications review discovery feeds and write profiles of playlists? What good will criticism be when all of music has coalesced into algorithmically preordained Muzak?" Pelly suggests that music criticism could become extinct as media continues to embrace playlist culture, arguing that Spotify's branding of the word 'discovery' removes the need for us to do it ourselves. On the flip side, Liz Pelly's epic essay on Spotify for quarterly arts magazine The Baffler makes for bleak and paranoia-inducing reading if you subscribe to the idea that streaming services bring us one step closer to an eventual doomsday scenario where machines just don't need us anymore. “They’re just trying to find mathematical ways of approximating the effect that humans get from music so the scores can be intelligible and reliable.” The machines are not pretending to be people. “(People) imagine metal humanoid robots sitting in chairs with silver headphones on nodding mechanically to songs and making up their robot minds,” said McDonald. Speaking to the Toronto Star last year, McDonald played down the notion that this could all lead to the kind of future that Arnold Schwarzenegger tried his best to prevent in the Terminator movies. McDonald's particular brand of alchemy involves the use of a tool known as ' machine listening', which does what it says on the tin machines listen to the music in a bid to find the perfect match for the oddly-named genre in question. stomp and flutter: Like stomp and holler, but with airy fluttering instead of earthy hollering. But let's not forget that slightly sinister aspect mentioned earlier. These genres emerge based on how it sounds, how people describe music, and how they listen to it. The weird thing about 'Stomp and Holler' - apart from the obvious - is that it's not really a genre at all, but a specific playlist comprising of over 60 songs and thus a handy way for Spotify to lump in a bunch of like-minded acts who do indeed stomp and holler in search of "driving rhythms, intricate instrumentation, and full harmonies". With such a highly important job, you'd expect him to sport a ridiculous title all of his own, and that's why he has the words 'Data Alchemist' above his office door.Īnd with a name like that, it's perhaps no surprise that he's responsible for genres like 'Permanent Wave' (Arcade Fire qualify, apparently) and 'Neo Mellow', which is actually a pretty hilariously spot-on way of describing Ed Sheeran.
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