Spotify daylist: algorithms don’t just react to your music taste, they shape it
Retrieved on:
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
Today’s selection has the slightly strange – and yet very specific – title “lo-fi anti-folk wednesday early morning”.
Key Points:
- Today’s selection has the slightly strange – and yet very specific – title “lo-fi anti-folk wednesday early morning”.
- We are familiar with algorithms on tech platforms choosing music, TV, products or even travel destinations for us.
- The articles in this series explore the questions and bring answers as we navigate this turbulent period of life.
- For many people, our music choices have gone from being informed by radio, music press, magazines and TV shows, to a fine-grained level of personalisation.
Predicting – and changing – tastes
- Streaming platforms in general have the data about us, but they also have the data about everyone streaming on that platform.
- Research has shown that the focus isn’t necessarily upon accurately predicting taste, but on trying to predict things like attention or engagment in its place.
- When we imagine our tastes, we assume there is a starting point.
- We imagine that our tastes exist and that these algorithmic systems are learning to respond to them.
A recursive society
- It is through constant exposure to these personalised predictions that our taste itself mutates in response to what we are exposed to.
- In a recursive society we are surrounded by repeated analytic and algorithmic processes that have continued over a significant period.
- The result is that society and our individual experiences are a product of recursive processes in which the automated analysis of data shapes and impacts the choices we make and the choices made about us.
- We can’t separate music taste from the algorithms.
- Even if you stopped using streaming platforms and their recommendations today, they have influenced you.
- You may not remember a time before you consumed music and other culture through streaming platforms.
Daylists and our identities
- If algorithmic systems are shaping our tastes, they are also shaping how we understand ourselves.
- Spotify daylists tell us something about how our tastes are being anticipated in ways that keep us using these systems.
David Beer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.