Spotify Trapped
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A quick note before we get started. There is some grown-up music on this episode. Plus, I have a little bit of a cold, so my voice sounds a touch scratchy. Here is the show. On Wednesday, like a lot of people, I got my Spotify wrapped. My number one song was a 25-year-old hit.

Back that ass up by Juvenile. Um, yeah. I had cancer surgery at the start of this year, and this song from my senior year in college was my post-cancer psych-up song. It's honestly pretty great when you need some motivation.

Anyway, according to Spotify, I played it more than anything else this year, followed by two Chapel Roan songs and the Moana soundtrack. If you have been on social media this week, you have seen lots of people posting their Spotify wrapped, their most played songs and artists.

This year's Wrapped even had a Wrapped AI podcast if you wanted a verbal rundown of your habits.

Spotify has our data. It runs on data. Data on what we listen to, what we like, what songs are similar to ones we like, and what its algorithm can suggest to us. So today on the show, why the Spotify algorithm exerts such control over what we listen to, and how to break free, if we even want to.

I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around.

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Spotify works in a couple different ways. You can choose a song yourself, pick it, and play it. And then you could use Spotify's discovery mode. That's when you let the company's algorithm do the work for you. I asked reporter Tiffany Ng to explain how it all works to me. She just wrote a big story on Spotify and its algorithm for MIT's Tech Review.

Spotify has something called a day music data intelligence program or platform. And what it does, it's a mix of mathematical understandings of audio, like from each song and kind of listening data. So it combines like a lot of human social behaviors or the way that people enter data about how people interact with music or songs on the platform, as well as like questions

quote-unquote objective data like BPM, like pitch, stuff like that. So then it creates this like abstract mathematical map kind of of like where each song lives, where each musician, artist live. And what Spotify Discover Weekly does is that it kind of takes your listening habits into account and places you in this map. So it's like mapping the criteria of the song you liked onto...

what a template of other songs like that? Yeah, kind of. It has not very strict distinctions of like this song is or isn't pop so-called, but like loose categorizations based off of like social data, like how people who are also listening to the song group this song with other songs or what they title their playlists, like things that you don't think are actually taken into account.

I think that's one of the things that really surprised me in your reporting is that even if you think you are making an active choice, I am playing this song, I'm listening to this genre, the algorithm is still quietly influencing you. And one thing to note about this algorithm is that there's kind of essentially three buckets of...

songs or musicians relative to you. So then there's like what you listen to on a day-to-day basis, like the songs that you replay. For me, it's like the top three songs on my like songs. And then there's like the stuff that you might listen to or sounds like what you're currently listening to. And then the third bucket is like

everything else, like everything that is so far or kind of far from what you'd listen to, so much so that it doesn't really appear on your radar. And what these algorithms or I'm thinking Spotify radio, Discover Weekly, Daily Mixes, and now even on their genres, like if I go into browse and then I click, I don't know, pop or something, all the songs are still curated in a way that are pop songs for you. And all these playlists are kind of

stick to the first and second bucket of music and this huge mathematical map. I think a lot of people who haven't thought deeply about this might think, oh, well, if I listen to Discover Weekly, right, it's suggesting music that I might like based on my past listening habits, that that is a way to broaden your world, to learn about more, to listen to more. But in this story you wrote, you say that...

Actually, having Discover Weekly makes our listening experience less expansive, less broad. Tell me why.

It gives you what you crave, which is something that's not exactly what you're listening to. It makes your listening habits very routine. The ideal thing for a consumer like me is like I would go on my walk or I would go on whatever thing that I do while I'm listening to music and I just press like a big button, right? Like this button will give me all the songs that are new that I will like, right?

based off of what I've already listened to them in the past. And like, my first thought is, well,

the algorithm only recommends what it thinks I'll like based off of what I've listened to in the past. But like, what if I'm, you know, what if I've never listened to like a genre like math rock or, you know, I think I'm thinking of like crazy genre names, but that, that exists within the Spotify ecosystem. But it's like, you don't know you like it until you've tried it. Or you don't know what you don't know. Yeah. You don't know what you don't know. And it's like, you end up kind of being stuck by what you do know. And the other thing is like,

It normalizes algorithms in the listening experience, which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing. It's just it makes the listening experience one experience instead of, you know, in the past, if I wanted...

To discover new music, I'd ask my friends what they're listening to. I might go to a record store, try something new. I might read about what new song I should listen to or follow, you know, more of music journalism, like charts and stuff. But now it's so easy that it kind of narrows down what I would immediately reach for, I think.

So I'm going to tip my hand here a little bit. I'm 48. I grew up getting mixtapes from friends, like these carefully built playlists. My high school best friend was much cooler than I was. So everything she gave me felt like something I had to listen to, even if it wasn't what I would gravitate towards.

Does that experience exist anymore? The, here's my cool best friend saying, listen to this rapper? I think it does, but probably, or in my anecdotal experience, just like at a smaller scale than it did in the past. Like I still have friends who curate beautiful playlists for me. I know friends who send each other playlists as like, you know, a gesture of kindness, et cetera. But I think the idea of creating a playlist for your front, like there's even...

It's this function on Spotify. A blend is when Spotify takes kind of two Spotify profiles and it creates this new playlist where it combines the songs that you listen to and the song of whoever you created a blend with.

into one single playlist. And the idea is that it merges the tastes of two people in practice. Anecdotally speaking, it's just kind of like this is some songs that they listen to. This is some songs that I listen to. They both happen to be in this playlist. I'm not really discovering anything new. When we come back, how algorithms aren't just changing what we listen to, but how those songs are actually written.

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There's always been a formula to writing a hit song. But as it turns out, Spotify is changing that too. Artists are now tailoring their work to try to appeal to the algorithmic recommendation system.

In the process of reporting the story, I did a lot of research and kind of talked to a lot of musicians who, you know, obviously interact with Spotify or put their songs on Spotify. And one thing that they talk a lot about is kind of like algorithmic anxiety. Like, how do I create songs in a way that would put me on the radar or like win this so-called algorithmic jackpot? A lot of like art music business music companies

Podcasts for musicians talk a lot about how to hack the Spotify algorithm, what the algorithm is looking for. And the reason that is such a big topic and such a topic of interest for musicians is that if you're on the radar, if you're for some magical reason landing exactly in the spot that Spotify is looking at,

algorithmically, your song is going to be recommended to a lot of people at the same time. But that's millions of listeners all at once. Yeah. And like that's so much exposure for an artist. And what ends up happening is, and sometimes you can click into an artist profile and it would be painfully evident. It's like they'll have a song that has like 20 million streams and then all their other songs would be like

a thousand, you know, 10,000, very much smaller number. That's not to say that like this kind of exposure is bad for each musician, but the experience of creating music is a little less about if I were a musician, like what I want to put out there. And it's, it becomes for some musicians more about like what will get me out there, you know? And I think for me, the most

notable example that, or memorable example is when Olivia Rodrigo did Diary of a Song interview, I think that's like a New York Times segment, where she was talking about how she made driver's license. There's like a section where she's like, oh, I wanted it to be fast paced, but I also wanted this note to be in the song originally, because I thought a lot of people would make TikToks out of it. I wanted it to go...

I wanted there to be like a little like thing in it because I wanted people to make TikToks where they could like transition into it. And I thought that if there's a little thing that would like be a cue and people did make TikToks like that. So I'm really happy about that. But it goes, I love that. Olivia Rodrigo is making a song, not necessarily for the algorithm, but she's thinking about it. Like who's to say that other people aren't, right? Yeah. The three minute song instead of a four minute song, a certain kind of beat, a certain series of notes.

That also goes into the length of a song or the cadence of a song. So some musicians have said, I spoke to a musician, her name is Cheryl, and she said, oh, like the hooks have to be within the first 10 seconds now. A song can't be longer than three minutes. You know, it's also like you put out EPs, you don't put out full albums. And the reason for that is that it's the way that Spotify works.

rewards artists or how artists have described existing on Spotify is mostly through like relevance and consistency. And it's very similar to TikTok, right? Like because the For You page is so important on TikTok, you have to consistently post instead of, you know,

people following you the way that, you know, they would have in the past. Right. In a linear feed or in a recency driven one. Yeah. So then like what ends up happening is like musicians would have to put out music very consistently. And like I said, the whole thing about shuffling, putting, creating an album that tells a story from start to finish is not...

as top of mind or as important as it was before because people might shuffle your album like it might all you know fall to pieces like not the way that you want people to listen to your music but that's the way it is now there are people and you wrote about them who are trying to beat the algorithm what are they doing a lot of things actually I think the biggest thing to

To summarize, a lot of this is, like, gamifying the music listening experience as well as, like, being social. And both these things require intention. By being social, I mean maybe just talking to your friends about it. Maybe...

joining a Facebook group or I'm thinking Facebook group because there's this great Facebook group called oddly specific playlists where people post prompts, very quirky prompts and other people respond like Reddit threads are also very popular. One thing that I did think is kind of interesting is discord channels. So like the premise of some of the discord rooms is that like as a user, you can kind of virtually enter a room that other people may be already in. And then you would have like a listening party and,

That would be pretty cool. It's like there's someone curating music and you're all listening together. For a lot of what exists on Spotify, there's a lot of ways that we would have previously discovered music. So one thing that I would have done in the past is like on their browse page, which is not as visible as it used to be.

Makes sense. I would tap into different genres. Like, you know, sometimes they have moods, you know, for you to sort through. And all those playlists on Spotify are made for me. So then on the artist or the creator tab, you'll see made for you. And that's because Spotify is like proactively limiting what you see because they think you'll engage with it.

There are all these other apps, too, that you wrote about that try to look at this in a different way. What are they doing? There's an app called Radio. So it's like spelled radio with like, I want to say five O's, like a lot of O's. This app...

is instead of one big button, like that, like the big green button you see on Spotify that lets you shuffle or lets you play your songs, it puts you in something that looks like the cockpit of a plane. And it's like all cartoons and you're kind of navigating through this map. And there's like a time dial where you can select a decade. And it's,

It's great. I love this app so much. And like, let's say I want to listen to Cantonese music from the 90s. I'll set the time dial to like the 90s and then I'll tap on like Hong Kong. It would play a song that is of that era and it's completely randomized. And where this app gets all this information about songs is like it's crowdsourced.

It randomizes the whole listening experience. It takes you out of what you're familiar with. And it's a little uncomfortable at first, but it's great because it's like, where else am I going to find the song? Because it's so different from what my usual music listening experience is. Listening to you, what you seem to be describing is a degree of pushback on...

I think a certain kind of tech mediated culture that a lot of us who use the internet have become familiar with, right? Like my Instagram algorithm is going to find me the perfect neutral brown sweater, probably worn by other middle-aged moms in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. And it's both personalized, but it's also really passive because,

And I think with something like music, with art, there is an element of randomness and emotion that, I don't know, gets blunted by some of these technological tools. And it feels like there's a little nascent movement that recognizes that.

I think to the point of kind of the expressive aspect of music, one thing that I've thought about a little bit more is that musicians have kind of turned into personalities and their music as well, right? Like how do you create relevance?

in ways that work on Spotify or elsewhere. And it's like, how does this relevance feed into the popularity of your music? How does this music... And music in a lot of ways has always been something that people identify with the way that you express yourself as well. But it's like, it's almost as though...

This might be a little extreme, but like for myself, like if I joined Spotify in like the 2012 Tumblr era where I only listened to, I don't know, Lana Del Rey, it feels like that defines me on this algorithm in a way that like obviously it's kind of steered a little bit further away from that. But it's almost like when I enter a platform, the way that this algorithm learns me is

has such an impact on how I just choose to listen to music in general. And like, to your point about like the great, sorry, brown jackets and this homogenized aesthetic, yeah.

I feel like there's a very similar thing happening in music. It's like whatever sound, like the certain musicians that you listen to become part of how you identify outside of just listening to music. You know, those characters become limited in a way where previously the cool thing might have been like, I know all these obscure musicians that you don't know. And now it's like now all...

all these musicians are kind of making the same music. Like, what do I do with that? Is there a way to know what people want? Like, do they want to be served a song because an algorithm has determined that? Do they want to go out and go to an old-fashioned music store and, like, leaf through albums? Do we even have the ability to put numbers on music

that kind of desire right now and how people want to find and experience culture.

That's a great question. And my immediate thought is kind of like we talk about how Spotify has this very complicated way of organizing music behind the scenes. And to me, that's not so much like, oh, this is completely irrelevant to us. That's completely separate from my listening experience. It's a way for us to explore music outside of the algorithm because it's like

Here, there's this platform that sorted all the music or quote unquote, all the music in the world in this like very complicated, high tech fashion. And the reason why it sucks for me or it sucks for a lot of people is that like, because they want to make it easy for you to navigate this complicated world of music, they've created this big green button and they've created this very easy listening experience that puts you in like a bubble in this big,

big map but um one thing that we could do as users listening listeners of spotify is like

kind of take intentional steps to step out of our bubble. And to do that, it's not actually that difficult. You can put a random search term into Spotify, generate something that might just have that word in the name of the song. It might be, like I said before, tapping through artists' profiles, seeing what they're listening to, seeing what songs appear on their playlists.

They're all connected in a way. All we have to do is kind of take these breadcrumbs and like follow them in a way, you know, maybe it's to spend like 30 minutes in an afternoon doing that. I've done that in the past. Do you think it's fair to say we're at an inflection point where people feel like they want to push back against this stuff a bit?

Definitely. I think not just in music, like I think fashion, for example, there's all these micro trends that are very visible, I think more so in music.

Within the world of fashion, I feel like it's a little bit more visible than music where like a trend that goes viral on TikTok, you'll see both in stores and on the streets. Like everyone is dressed up in this like whatever cottagecore look when it goes viral. And I think like in the world of music, it might be like this is trending. So then suddenly some kind of magical trend.

algorithmic thing happens and then suddenly everyone's listening to the same thing or or instead of everyone listening to the same thing like groups of people become limited to one sound um and then instead of some having some sort of overlap as it would have previously we're just kind of stuck in our our bubbles tiffany thank you so much for coming on thank you so much

Tiffany Ng is a tech and culture writer. And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell, Patrick Fort, Ethan Oberman, and Shaina Roth. Our show is edited by Paige Osborne. Alicia Montgomery is vice president of audio for Slate. And TBD is part of the larger What Next family.

And if you like what you heard today, the number one way to support this show is by subscribing to Slate Plus. You get all your Slate podcasts ad-free, and it makes a really nice holiday gift. I am Lizzie O'Leary, and we will be back next week. Thank you so much for listening.

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