No streaming platform can accurately predict taste; humans are too dynamic to be predicted consistently. Instead, Spotify builds models of users and makes predictions by recommending music that matches the models. Stuck in these feedback loops, musical styles start to converge as songs are recommended according to a pre-determined vocabulary of Echo Nest descriptors. Eventually, listeners may start to resemble the models streaming platforms have created. Over time, some may grow intolerant of anything other than an echo.
Before there were Echo Nest parameters, the 20th century music industry relied on other kinds of data to try to make hits. So-called “merchants of cool” hit the streets to hunt for the next big trend, conducting studies on teenage desire that generated tons of data, which was then consulted to market the next hit sensation. This kind of data collection is now built into the apparatus for listening itself. Once a user has listened to enough music through Spotify to establish a taste profile (which can be reduced to data like songs themselves, in terms of the same variables), the recommendation systems simply get to work. The more you use Spotify, the more Spotify can affirm or try to predict your interests. (Are you ready for some more acousticness?)
Breaking down both the products and consumers of culture into data has not only revealed an apparent underlying formula for virality; it has also contributed to new kinds of formulaic content and a canalizing of taste in the age of streaming. Reduced to component parts, culture can now be recombined and optimized to drive user engagement. This allows platforms to squeeze more value out of backlogs of content and shuffle pre-existing data points into series of new correlations, driving the creation of new content on terms that the platforms are best equipped to handle and profit from. (Listeners will get the most out of music optimized for Spotify on Spotify.) But although such reconfigured cultural artifacts might appear new, they are made from a depleted pantry of the same old ingredients. This threatens to starve culture of the resources to generate new ideas, new possibilities.
Not pictured: Picard wondering why two of his senior crew are like this, Worf grumbling because unprofessional, and Riker, Troi, and Tasha holding back their giggles.
A while back i felt a lil annoyed that the hit game Valorant with quite the money pool diddn't have a gay agent and so i put my self in the field, by trying to find the gayest agent. Have fun.
I made earlier this year for the R platform but, here the vibes are better
I may or may not have a comic that I am REALLY supposed to be working on, but a little Star Trek comic won't hurt, right? (I am lying. I've done nothing but draw Data for weeks, he is not harmless.)
The Data staring at a turned-off monitor to experience the emptiness scene but it's me looking at my phone with all the tumblr gradients because the images won't load