Recommendation Fatigue
Discovery algorithms are designed to hold our attention in a perpetual comfort zone. For artists and listeners, a constellation of off-platform guides represents one possible way out.
godmode is a label, management company, and community for individualists who value authenticity, collaboration, and freedom.Today we’re sharing an essay from Will Gottsegen, a writer based in New York.
A couple months ago, perusing my Spotify playlists, I noticed a change to the app’s shuffle feature. Now, as I tapped the icon a second time in an attempt to stop shuffling my tracks, I found that my well-worn library had suddenly been populated with brand new songs, many of which I’d never heard. Spotify calls it Smart Shuffle—a batch of “personalized recommendations that perfectly match the vibe” of the static playlists you’ve already hand-curated—but it felt to me an unwelcome intrusion from the algorithm. The selection and ordering of songs is a way of marking time; it’s jarring to think I might one day return to an old playlist and find songs I never put there in the first place.
Finding new music has always been a form of work (it’s easier to stick to what you already like), but in trying to extract that work from the process of discovery, streaming platforms have created a new kind of listening experience: one more defined by passivity and smooth homogeneity, with less of the surprises you might expect from any human-made mixtape. It’s ideal for those situations where you can’t constantly queue up new music, but also want to maintain a specific vibe (maybe you’re a rideshare driver, or a retail employee charged with keeping your storefront’s music fresh throughout the day). The appeal of removing the work of curation from music discovery is that it frees you up to focus on other, presumably more important kinds of work.
For me, though, constantly encountering these recommendations has amounted to a kind of fatigue. It goes beyond Smart Shuffle: products like Discover Weekly, a continuously updated playlist of “new music and deep cuts picked for you” first introduced in 2015, are meant to keep you listening, and thereby generating revenue for a company that, 17 years after its founding, has yet to turn a profit. But they can also have the effect of keeping you complacent. When was the last time you were truly challenged by something on your Discover Weekly playlist, or your New Music Mix on Apple Music? My own is usually populated by sounds I already know I’ll like: say, a song from the Jessica Pratt album I listen to less frequently than I do her others, or a set of three tracks that all kind of sound like the Julie Byrne album I’ve had on repeat for the last few weeks. Pitchfork’s Jeremy Larson once summed it up neatly: “Even though [Spotify] has all the music I’ve ever wanted, none of it feels necessarily rewarding, emotional, or personal.”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with engaging with things you already know you’re going to like, and our willingness to spend time in this perpetual comfort zone (users have spent billions of hours with Discover Weekly since its launch) can be understood as evidence of the success of these algorithms. And yet, I find that most of my favorite music discoveries haven’t come from algorithmic recommendations. An engine might be able to tell me that because I like Sufjan Stevens and Bon Iver, I’ll probably like Alex G, and because I like Alex G, I’ll probably like Adrianne Lenker. (That is, assuming my recommendations are based solely on my personal taste—lately, Spotify has been successfully prompting exposure for artists by opening up access to Discovery Mode, which gives artists the option to opt in to an algorithmic push for their priority songs, in exchange for a percentage of revenue earned on recommendation-driven streams.) But it might not account for my more unlikely fascinations like, say, late-aughts-era OJ Da Juiceman, or the noisy electronics of Merzbow and Wolf Eyes. Like others who flaunt the idiosyncrasies of their listening with each year’s Wrapped, I feel satisfied by encountering new things, not because they were fed to me, but because I’ve chosen to take on the psychic challenge of trying something I’m not entirely sure I’ll like.
That challenge is made easier by identifying people who can act as guides through unfamiliar zones. Some of my favorite newsletters prioritize recommendations, or mix some form of media curation into whatever else they’re offering. Ruth Reichl and Clare de Boer’s Substacks come with their own recipes; Sacha Frere-Jones and Sam Valenti’s come with music, much of it pretty arcane; and newsletters like Max Read’s come with recommendations for a mix of films, books, and other cultural ephemera I’d otherwise have no reason to go searching for. Like an algorithmically generated playlist, these lists are shortcuts—but the kind that show me to the door without actually walking me through.
And while there are fewer chatty record shop workers and opinionated music bloggers than there once were, an Instagram shoutout from LeBron or Drake can still give an up-and-coming rapper a boost, and there’s a budding cottage industry of online tastemakers that can play a similar role. Spotify already knows this on some level (a playlist called Taste, for example, asks a rotating cast of guest curators to recommend their favorite songs), as do its competitors: Apple Music has always bet big on artist-curated radio stations, and Amazon has recently been promoting a creator-forward online radio service called Amp, which feels almost like a faux-populist take on NTS or Dublab. One teaser video for Amp explicitly encourages users to “ditch the algorithms.”
For music fans, if not the artists themselves, these platforms still represent an incredible deal. Even with a layer of advertising, or the concerns about what companies like Spotify and Apple are doing with the data they so readily collect from their users, the prospect of paying just a few dollars a month for access to what can feel like a boundless archive of music remains a no-brainer. In return for our monthly tithing, the streaming industry gave us a new way to discover and interact with our music at the expense of novelty—the frisson of finding something truly different. It turns out that doing away with the manual work of digging up new music risks something even more fatiguing: boredom.
Thanks Will!
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