Music Discussion and Information

One of the most curious features of vinyl’s rebirth is that many albums are bought by people who don’t even own record-players; the point, it seems, is to play the music on your phone while swooning over the sleeve, as if the record is an objet d’art.

Why Is The Obscure B-Side “Harness Your Hopes” Pavement’s Top Song On Spotify? It’s Complicated.

But then something bizarre happened: In the last few years, the song has rocketed up to become number one on Pavement’s Spotify page, ending up with over 28 million plays to date, seven million more than “Cut Your Hair,” a legitimate and enduring ’90s hit. Quickly, and without any obvious reason, it stopped being a rarity and started to become a standard, appearing in coffee shops and bars and gluten-free bakeries. So how did this happen, exactly? And better yet, should this have happened?
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Glenn McDonald, who holds the title of “data alchemist” at Spotify, had taken an interest in the case, and decided to look into it. What he found is that the sudden jump in plays for “Strange” began in January of 2017, which was “the same time Spotify switched the ‘Autoplay’ preset in every listener’s preference panel from off, to on,” as Krukowski recounted on a follow-up blog post. McDonald explained to Krukowski that the Autoplay feature actually cues up music that “resembles” what you’ve just been listening to, based on a series of sonic signifiers too complex to describe. In this case, “Strange” had been algorithmically determined to sound similar to a lot of other music, and was frequently being Autoplayed to the point that it took on a life of its own, and eventually eclipsed the band’s other tracks. It continues to do so to this day.

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But he is concerned with the ways that incidental algorithmic designs have industry-wide power: “It’s just kind of stifling to have that amount of control, and have it in one company,” he says. “And then not only that, but to have it made by engineering decisions. This is very consistent with a lot of our culture right now, that we’re willing to surrender to Facebook and Google engineers very important decisions.”

www.stereogum.com/2105993/pavement-harness-your-hopes-spotify/columns/sounding-board/