The Discover Weekly playlist that lands this Monday in my Spotify deck jolts me, packed as it is with jack-yo-body, hi-NRG-style club tomfoolery. Top of the 30 tunes that Spotify’s AI has selected for me is Marek Mela’s “Bring It” (“bring it bring it bring it bring it bring it”) followed by Christian Fletcher’s “Your Body” (“I don’t care about nobody I just want your hands on me”).
The selections throw me because my Spotify saves and faves are quite different — fragmented and downward-leaning storytelling-cum-moodbursts like “Farewell Transmission” done by Kevin Morby & Waxahatchee (“mama here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws”), and Massive Attack’s “Ritual Spirit” (“who’ll mend this broke beat star”).
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A paranoid mystic of meth might suspect that the voracious machine-learning behind Spotify’s curatorial flagship — the streaming giant’s deus in machina — has reached singularity, deciding after scrutinizing my tastes to intervene and save me from my moroseness.
After all, the ever smarter-and-smarter machines of this now 19-year-old Swedish-founded company have ample stocks of human nature to scrutinize and learn from: around 675 million monthly users worldwide. Yet the playlist’s betwixt-song ads hint that Spotify is less Jesus than Janus, the two-faced god of antiquity. For, on the one hand, my personal Discover Weekly wants to boost me with sound, to see me getting nasty on the dance floor, but on the other hand it wants me to get equally busy with McDonalds and MiraLAX. “Follow your gut and your mood will follow,” says MiraLAX in the ad that plays after “Your Body”.
The stool-softener slogan makes a neat fit with Spotify’s AI-individuated playlists, however, which flow out each Monday to the more than 200 million subscribers of Discover Weekly. These hundreds of millions of people have spent billions of hours letting their moods follow the algorithm’s gut feelings about them. And in the infinite intestinal loop of it all, Spotify’s AI simultaneously studies the reception of those 200+ million playlists it generates and delivers. Because Spotify can listen to how people listen.
When Spotify bought London-based audio technologists Sonalytic in 2017, the streamer said the acquisition’s capabilities would be used to improve personalized playlists — like Discover Weekly. This tech-entity now within the world’s largest music streaming service goes way beyond noting when a user clicks ‘add to likes,’ or by tracking listening duration. Sonalytic touts its surveillance wares as “highly robust to changes in pitch and tempo, the addition of background noise, distortion, filtering, compression, looping, EQing and much more.”
This is all part of hoovering up sound anywhere and everywhere of use to it in order to, as it boasts, “delve deeply into the listening habits of the whole planet.” Creepy much? But wait — it gets worse, way worse, for this goes far beyond tracking people’s listening habits. In the supposed interests of developing better individualized playlists and suggestions, Spotify even listens to what people say and how they feel.
The year after buying Sonalytic, Spotify filed a patent application titled “Identification of Taste Attributes from an Audio Signal.” According to the 2018 application, Spotify’s invention leapfrogs the cumbersomeness of streaming services needing to query users about what they like in order to make good suggestions. Instead what the invention does, according to the patent details (patent # US 10,981,948 B2, successfully granted Jan 12, 2021), is use device microphones and speech recognition software to “retrieve speech content” and then analyze and identify it for attributes including: “emotional state of a speaker”; “age of a speaker”; “accent of a speaker”; “physical environment”; and “number of people in the environment.” Furthermore, “user’s friends” can be subject to analysis.
And so, by subjecting hundreds of millions of people — billions, potentially, given that this intimate, extreme, Ear of Sauron-style surveillance records and studies even bystanders in the vicinity of users — Skynet, sorry I mean Spotify, can more efficiently make a “determination of preferences for media content.”
Now I’m feeling really weird. But it’s listening, so I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want it to know that I know. But maybe it knew I knew before I knew I knew. Maybe it tried to circumvent my full consciousness of this nightmare by serving up mindless dancefloor tracks. Exterminate rational thought. Get jiggy widdit.
OK, so what else’s in the playlist that Spotify AI chose for me? Here’s number 15, “Butts Bumpin’” by Paige Tomlinson: “Jumpin’ bumpin’ bass keeps pumpin’/Crowds are hyped and butts are bumpin’.”
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