Tynan's Anger

Last week there was excellent discussion on the increasingly essential On the Media last week about the Internet's tendency to promote homophily.

A lot of issues got swirled about (Moldova, Iran, swine flu, etc.), but the one that struck me most was about music:

People feel extremely tribal and passionate about their music. And once they've figured out what they like, they don't go very far outside it. The music industry is worried about this form of homophily because they'd sell more music if they can expose people to a slightly larger array of music than they would listen to. And so they've worked really hard on collaborative filtering technologies which basically look at bouquets of people and say, well, you know, Clive, you are like this and you listen to these 10 things.

This is the theory behind iTunes Genius, Pandora, and last.fm. The only problem? The lack of broad thinking:

They're all based around a model called collaborative filtering, and collaborative filtering essentially says if I enjoy listening to these five punk bands, it’s going to find 10 other people out there who like these five punk bands and it’s going to recommend some other musicians I've never heard of. So even though I say I really like the Ramones, someone in there likes John Coltrane, and I'm going to get a John Coltrane recommendation.
[...]
But we're not thinking nearly broad enough. When we think about this problem, we tend to think about, how do I bridge the huge gap between punk and jazz or the huge gap between left and right in U.S. politics? There’s much, much bigger gaps we need to be thinking about.

Say for instance, you're a big fan of the song "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" by X-Ray Spex.


Musically, you may like it because it's a great first wave British punk song, with sing-shouty vocals and a brilliant use of a saxophone and nontraditional punk instruments. In that case, recommendations like the Damned, Wire, and the Stranglers are excellent recommendations. Or you may like it because you're a radical militant feminist. In which case, you may not appreciate Genius picking out songs like "Peaches," "Orgasm Addict," or 25 other punk songs that probably don't feature another female vocalist.

If music is not the driving force in your life, your tastes will be dominated by what political, economic, and cultural pressures tell you to like. It also tells you what movies to buy tickets to, what TV shows to watch, and what politician to vote for.

That's not fun to think of as a fan of any art form, and especially for music, when today there's a virtually unlimited supply of choices on the internet. Still, you have to be really vigilant to avoid homophily on the internet for music; that means reading more than just one music website, looking beyond the ratings on metafilter, and finding entire universes of other types of music that are not as frequently found on the internet. Even Google doesn't work; better websites with more traffic and more resources are going to rank higher on most music searches, whether or not they actually have the most valuable input to the individual searcher. And that assumes that a searcher knows what he or she wants to search for.

There may be no other place on the internet where race, age, class, and politics have been so cleverly applied, intentionally or not, to aesthetic taste as the indie rock music blogosphere. I discovered Pitchfork in high school froma  Google search for The Darkness when I was in a serious Queen listening phase. I was interested in musically generally, and had enough of a bullshit detector to take what I was reading with a grain of salt. Other 17-year-olds may not be so lucky.

Labels: blogs, echo chamber, homphily, indie rock, internet comments, pitchfork media