Spotify, you know nothing
David Bowie is Michael Dwyer’s favourite artist of all time but he won’t let some ‘vacuous AI’ accuse him of being a middleaged art-rock trainspotter on the basis of what he’s listened to throughout the year.
It’s been a good year for reflection. Last week, a total stranger gave me amirror as an early Christmas present. So I look inside and I see… David Bowie. Man, he’s everywhere. The top four positions, then again at 8, 12, 26, 30, 34, and on and on. Nineteen songs! Obscurities of course. Predictable? Not me.
Spotify, the world’s biggest, nosiest and most presumptuous music streaming service, was the generous stranger in question and Your 2020 Wrapped playlistwas the mirror, generated to reflect the most oft-streamed tunes of each user’s past 12 months.
Look, I can explain the Bowie thing. Firstly, I was doing this lockdown art project, see, and the frequency of any given song was directly related to how tricky it was to arrange on a ukulele. I hate to denigrate artificial intelligence (because that will be a legislated hate crime when robots rule the future) but Spotify is too damn clumsy and stupid to know that.
Secondly, David Bowie is hands-down my favourite artist of all time and I spent far too many hours in 2020 obsessing over the cryptic nuances of Loving the Alien, Sons of the Silent Age and Always Crashing in the Same Car.
But I resent some vacuous AI accusing me of being amiddle-aged art-rock trainspotter who may or may not sometimes paint his hands blue or pop on his wife’s vintage kimono to get into character for a Facebook video.
I also resent Wrapped for telling me that Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways was the only album I had on saturation rotation, like I’m stuck in some beard-stroking rut I discovered way back when the full-blown arc of a flawless LP was the only true measure of an artist’s worth.
Again, for a start, it’s not true that that was the only album I flogged this year. Ever heard of ‘‘vinyl’’, Spotify? Google it.
I resent Alexa too, by the way, for smugly assuming that whenever my carefully considered verbal instructions have lapsed, Love Is the Drug is the song I’m desperate to hear next.
Yeah OK, fine, Roxy Music is probablymy favourite band of all time but listen up, stupid: I prefer their early stuff. If Alexa ever bothered to have lunch with Spotify, she’d know that.
The fear of course is that actually, they are talking behind our backs. Them and Siri and Apple Music and Amazon Echo and Google Home – even if you don’t subscribe to them, which seems to be a negligible detail in the global data-harvesting complex busily building all of us pigeonholes for life, where mirrored walls show ever-sharper visions of what we like and what we need and what we’re definitely going to buy next.
AI recommendations can be mildly startling when they correctly surmise your brand of ink cartridge or your taste in vintage kimonos, but they’re galling when it comes to music.
Since Dylan wore short pants, we’ve subscribed to music as a badge of unique individual or distinct tribal identity. Later in life, ‘‘I like ALL kinds of music’’ became the cliche signifying our insistence on an enigmatic and unquantifiable musical soul.
Except that, well, Spotify’s got our numbers now. When the Wrapped Spotbots invite you to ‘‘Dig deeper into some of your top artists of 2020 with amix of talk and music,’’ you’ll mostly like what you find (mmm, Alice Cooper).
This is because what you like is not so much a question of your fathomless intellect, your mercurial inner world or your uniquely tuned musical sensibility as simply how old you are, what you listened to at breakfast, and the stuff you fell for as a teenager, when the whole worldwas exciting and new and nobody had ever felt the way you did except for (Insert Your Favourite Artist Here).
Back when Love Is the Drug was the coolest thing you ever heard blasting out of a record shop, there was something magic about the geeky girl behind the counter clocking the look in your eye and the spring in your step and leaning over to inquire as to whether you’d heard Phil Manzanera’s solo stuff. Here was one kindred soul on a secret journey with amillion unforeseen destinations.
When it’s an AI sifting your data by genres, eras, tempos, and probably your ink cartridge preference? Somehow, the labyrinth starts to feel more like a rat race and the recommendations – ‘‘Missed Hits: Top songs from 2020 that we know you won’t want to miss’’ – more like designated homework than the alluring whispers of mystically attuned spirits.
So thanks, Spotify, but you don’t know me yet. It’s all about Lou Reed for 2021, I’ve decided. That’ll throw you off the scent.
OK, fine, Roxy Music (above) is probably my favourite band of all time but listen up, stupid: I prefer their early stuff. If Alexa ever bothered to have lunch with Spotify, she’d know that.