Skip to main content

The Cultural Value of Algorithms





I am aware that there are misgivings amongst the musical community about Spotify's business model, and from the bits I know, these are perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, it is useful and productive consumer model, and it's this I want to briefly write at you about.

Spotify's catalogue is huge, an ever-expanding horizon that seems to want to engulf the soundscape in totality. It's easy to use, and you can usually find the album or artist you want to listen to. But it's true genius is in its algorithms, specifically the ones it uses to create the playlist it constantly nudges you to listen to.

Now, because of how pushy it seemed, I avoided my Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlist like the plague for ages. This was a mistake. Or maybe, because I hadn't listened and followed enough, they just weren't right for me yet. Now, however, I spend a good two days paying attention to them, and then expanding my aural sphere to at least 3 of the recommendations per week. When it learns what you like, the hit/miss ratio works very much in your favour, I find.

We all know the flipside to this: oh, it's gathering your data and learning about you! Panic! Horror! I'm not advocating we take leave of our senses and just hand over this sort of information about us to just anyone, but some amount of it is necessary. There's no way we can build the high sci-fi world of our dreams without it. By all means be wary of data nabbers, slurpers and peddlers, but also realise that it does help you in ways you easily overlook. At least 20% of the music I listen to on a regular basis has come from algo-generated suggestions, possibly more.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Logical Fallacies - Why do they matter?

I came across a wonderful poster image by a talented artist, Michele Rosenthal , which depicts a robot debate: Granted, these aren't all the logical fallacies that exist, but it covers the most obvious, and most abused ones. But why are they important? We currently live in an age where we have access to more information that at any other point in history, and yet somehow we still think that arguing from emotion, or with our cognitive dissonance blinders on, is both right and acceptable: it isn't, not by any stretch of the imagination. Postmodernism may have a place, but not here. Yes, you absolutely are allowed to feel they way you want to, but debates are places for facts and ideas that need to be scrutinised rigorously, not with playground threats and character assassinations. "I feel" is not an argument that belongs in a debate - your feelings are valid for you, yes, but you can not simply refute the evidence-based assertion of vaccinations work with the st...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Alphabet Soup: A Quick Guide to Post-Nominals

This week, I’ll walk you through the ever-growing list of post-nominal letters you can add to your name through qualifications and certifications. Being a student myself, I’ll start with exploring the academic route, then go through the more popular, and best recognised, vendor and standards organisations’ certifications, highlighting their worth for your CV and career development. It’s not a comprehensive list, by any stretch of the imagination, and is geared towards a more general CyberSec professional, rather than focusing on any one aspect of the industry. I’ll try and shy away from too much debate by running away very quickly to avoid the one about CEH vs. OSCP, and leave it to you instead. *Disclaimer* I am a university student, and haven’t actually done any of the following certifications, at least not to completion. I have explored each in a reasonable amount of depth to see their benefits and worth and consulted with holders of a few to gain their insider opinions. I a...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's all about the angles

I could describe the surroundings for you perfectly, down to the way the grain went on each of the wood panels on the floor, I could talk to you at great length concerning the cobwebs knocking at my door or the baying crane flies attacking the windows, baying for the bleeding luminescence seeping from the screen. I could go so far as to describe each and every instrument playing on the track I was listening to, the perfectly clear Irish lung-pipes of Cara Dillon’s songbird vocals. But I won’t, because none of that matters, at least not in this context, or perspective. It all comes down to angles you see. Not the angles of everything around us, but our angles. The tilt of the head to listen more intently, the hunch, or straightening of the back to become comfortable. The adjustment of glasses to see an image properly, or in this instance, to see the image no-one else may have seen. It doesn’t take much to shift your physical perception of anything, but it opens up a myriad new worlds, ...
Post a Comment
Read more