David Macias thinks he knows what might ail you: an over-reliance on the algorithm in the modern music industry. It’s a system that the Thirty Tigers president believes keeps feeding music fans more of what they want, or are presumed to want, until they get burned out on the safe and overly familiar. This problem is something Macias diagnoses — along with some ideas for creative fixes — in his first book, “Circulation: How Culture Moves in the Age of Algorithm,” which comes out Jan. 14 from Whitefox Publishing.
Macias brings some visionary credentials to the project, having been lauded for how his company Thirty Tigers, which he co-founded in 2001, has thrived in the world of independent music. It operates under a unique model, being a music distribution, label services and management company that lets artists maintain ownership over the records that are released under its umbrella. So he had a good track record of observation and innovation when he started having thoughts about how algorithm-based music consumption, which theoretically should help listeners discover new music, might actually be walling them off from discovering scenes beyond the ones they already know.
In the meantime, in a recent sit-down in Nashville during AmericanaFest, he talked with Variety about some of the key ideas in the book. And I think that it’s because the things that we know to do were mattering less and less, and because the logic of the algorithm has just sort of taken hold. I mean, I’ve seen estimates of anywhere from 70-80% of all the media that we consume is now recommended to us by an algorithm, which includes social media and things like that… “Honestly, I was kind of at a… I don’t want to say crisis point.
It wasn’t like I had to drop employees or thought, ‘This isn’t fun anymore. I’m leaving.’ But also, you know, I’m now in my sixties, and I was kind of like, if this is what it’s going to be, then maybe there’s better people than me to do that.” He thinks he’s far from alone in that. How many people do you know that feel fantastic about their relationship with culture these days?
How many people in the music industry do you know that are like, ‘I don’t know why, but I don’t feel great. This doesn’t feel as fun as it used to feel’?” But rather than give in to that, Macias says he “wanted to really figure out what was going on first — like, what is really happening, down to the cellular level.” Macias emphasizes that this is not an old-man-yells-at-cloud book… or, specifically, an old-man-yells-at-Spotify book. But I don’t know — every person I’ve ever met at Spotify is pretty nice, and they just seem interested in getting people a good tune to listen to.
I don’t think that there’s this evil intent out there. But the end result is that how things are going creates a sclerotic music ecosystem. And down the road of a sclerotic ecosystem is cultural tune-out, because we’re gonna just keep getting fed the same tunes again and again.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
