Nabeel Zuberi

Book Review: Mixed blessings: globalization and culture as hybrid discourses

Back in the 1990s, much of the globalization literature in media and cultural studies spoke in portentous and universal terms, with gravitas but little sense of gravity. Globalization seemed weightless, giving Marx and Engels’ famous diagnosis that ‘all that is solid melts into air’ a new prophetic spin as capitalism and (Western) modernity re-ordered a globe now variously conceived as an array of flows, enhanced mobilities and reconstituted spaces. Many of the academic and popular keynotes seemed to ignore inertia and the adhesive qualities of structures and forms. They forgot the brakes on processes involved in economic, political and REVIEW ESSAY

Music and discovery

Today, more recorded music is released each year than there is time in that same year to listen to it. Music is ubiquitous and ambient in everyday life and seems to have taken on a more fluid and less tangible materiality. Yet the desire to sample, collect, exchange, and share music remains strong. Recordings are endlessly recycled and reconfigured, evoking nostalgia and influencing emergent forms of musical communication. The term “discovery” is central to many of today’s digital platforms, apps, and streaming services for music. Users can access new and unfamiliar sounds from vast and deep archives. On the surface, the industry’s dream of a “celestial jukebox” (Burkart & McCourt, 2006) seems to have come to fruition. The staggering quantity of music available online provides greater opportunities for industrial gatekeeping and technological intervention. Online platforms do much of the work of discovering music, navigating listeners through databases, and delivering sounds calibrated from richer and more nuanced user profiles. For example, in May 2016, Spotify had 40 million users that subscribed to Discover Weekly, a service that offers an algorithm-made playlist of 30 songs each Monday based on each individual user’s listening habits and similarities with the tastes of others. Streaming services also organize discovery through the pathways of genre and mood (Garcia, 2016). For example, the site Musicovery features a dotted rectangular interface with the words “dark,” “calm,” “energetic,” and “positive” on each of its sides (Musicovery, 2016). The cursor can be moved in any direction across this space of song titles until a click triggers it and a sequence of similar tunes. The user can transform this automated mood playlist by moving a button along a scale with the words “Hit” at one end and “Discovery” at the other. The site also offers more specific moods, such as “studying with no vocals,” again requiring no specific music knowledge. However, streaming services are also eager to demonstrate that listeners are not slaves to the algorithm. Apple Music states that its “dedicated team of experts is here to help you find new music to love. Enjoy recommendations hand-picked just for you or explore everything they find that’s new or noteworthy in the world of music. It’s all yours” (Apple Music, 2016). The curating skills of DJs and music producers humanize the opacity of software. More broadly, as Jeremy Wade Morris puts it, “The algorithms and databases that underpin today’s digital music services (Last.fm, iTunes Genius, Pandora, Spotify, etc.) are unspecified blends of machine technology and human practice, and each proposes novel techniques for personalizing audio experiences” (2015, p. 203). Nonetheless, even the best efforts of algorithms and experts fall short at predicting consumer behavior, which remains just as difficult online as it is through traditional channels. These technologies cannot tell why a customer decided to choose to listen to a song; they can only make correlations that result in tautologies. Comprehensive definitions and maps for musical genres cannot be created, as they are continuously proliferating, evolving, and fusing with other genres (Burkart & McCourt, 2006, p. 99). The architectures and processes behind these interfaces and their modes of discovery are mostly invisible, although they occasionally show themselves. For example, in 2015, Billboard reported that the big music labels made payments, or “playola,” to Spotify for placement on influential playlists, echoing the payola made to radio DJs in the past (Peoples, 2015).