Human vs. Machine: Balancing the Mechanization of the Music Industry

by Ruben Lone

Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera is one of the first instances of modern media commentary on humans’ relationship with technology. The film employed a variety of new film techniques to arouse interest and fascination with modernism, bringing people closer to the technology that would rapidly integrate into daily life. Part propaganda for Marxist ideals of society and part experimentation in futuristic art, Vertov’s film predicted only the slightest elements of how deeply integral technology would become to human life.

Now, culture and technology are inseparable—any artistic commentary on the matter is redundant at best. We’ve seen and read the dystopic fictions by Rand, Orwell, and more recently Ishiguro, that as high-schoolers and college students, seem only like grim, exaggerated harbingers of an eerie, homogeneous future.

Alas, we’ve arrived; and it’s just as grim as it is joyous. We need not pick our own music, books, or movies with best friend computers and phones making spot-on recommendations, removing ourselves from the curatorial process, paradoxically reminding us that we have a right to choose. For every bit of mechanical recommendation, there is a purported human hand gently pushing us in a direction in which we are more or less likely to wander.  We blindly trust the ingenuity of companies that sell headphones, ad space, and cell phones, because by adding one layer of technology to our lives, we can ignore a multitude of others.

We’re in an era of access, which opens up the market for both limitless discovery and blatant corruption. Spotify is one of the most brilliant platforms of the decade, but also leaves artists pennies as payment for thousands of plays of a song—precisely why you won’t be listening to Four Tet, Thom Yorke, or Colplay on Spotify. As these issues are analyzed, tried, and reconsidered, we risk upsetting the delicate balance of a system that offers us an opportunity to consume more music than ever in the past while slighting the people that make it. It might not be so bad to shake things up.

Image via Mashable

That being said, we owe ourselves a good look in the mirror to reflect on our habits as consumers and arbiters of taste. Music is human, because art is a natural human expression with or without a robotized industry, and we still have the grace of intellect and emotion guiding our interests. It’s great that our eagerness to share music at unthinkable rates enables programs to do the heavy lifting, sifting through 1s and 0s of data that link one song to another. Still, Spotify, Pandora, and iTunes lack the focused and personal recommendation of an experienced musician who’s been gigging for 20 years, a music writer now paring down a title for best search engine optimization, or a record shop owner struggling to keep the lights on.

Technology is the transparent connector that keeps the music industry afloat, but the next seminal hit won’t be picked by record executive using Twitter to find a needle in a stack of wires—it’s the fans and their passions that are responsible for the technology affording any function at all. Despite the algorithms, music genomes, and metadata, a good piece of music isn’t interlaced with a bunch of hashtags.

One day, Artificial Intelligence may drop its first name, much like an artist’s eponymous reintroduction to the world. But the question that remains is whether hit scoring, Twitter A&R’s, and child-like supercomputers will replace the gratifying, empowering process of discovering new art on your own. For now, we’re in the clear. The numbers show that vinyl records are still popular amongst music lovers, and there seems to be no shortage of record stores in metropolitan areas these days. Tactful curation is still king, and it’s part of the reason why the culture of DJ’ing is currently at large. Computers can’t match the speed of our attentions and our emotions, nor can they predict and decode our network of  relationships. Maybe they will catch up, but we owe it to ourselves to trust our 200,000 years of musical instinct.

Brooklyn’s Northside Festival will feature a panel this week titled “Human v. Machine: Music Curation in the Next Century,” including Nue Agency’s Jesse Kirshbaum, producer Just Blaze, Syd Cohen of Next Big Sound, and Erika Elliott of Summerstage. 

Comments

comments