You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song by Glenn McDonald

Author:Glenn McDonald
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781914487163
Publisher: Canbury
Published: 2024-06-20T07:00:00+00:00

17

NO WALLS WITHOUT DOORS

What Music Tells Us About Each Other and the World

The Echo Nest had been a small company that fit into a couple large rooms in a drafty old brick building behind a subway station in Somerville, Massachusetts. We collected music data from all over the world, but the way in which we did so was not so different from the way the New England cold came through the old leaded windows. I mean, it would have been much harder to keep data out. In general we mostly didn’t know where a particular bit of data was from geographically, and thus we couldn’t tell you much about places.

Getting acquired by Spotify had clear corporate and procedural merits, but for me as an obsessively curious music listener, the fireworks-level excitement was getting access to actual, unpre-processed, located listening data from all over the world. Finally I could find out, directly, what people were listening to in, say, the Philippines. I didn’t even have to do the work myself, Spotify already had country charts for all the countries where it was available. I swiped down the country list with a flourish, clicked into Top 50 – Philippines, and mashed Play.

And got Justin Bieber. Yes, OK, of course Justin Bieber is popular everywhere, and the Philippines are part of everywhere. Spotify is, in fact, a non-trivial part of how globally-popular music becomes global, and in many countries the people who sign up for Spotify are fairly likely to be doing so precisely because they’re interested in global music. Presumably a lot of ߙFilipino Beliebers were very proud to see their boy at #1 on their country’s chart, too. It just wasn’t what I was after at that particular moment. I hit Next.

And got Drake. Actually, scanning down the list, I recognized almost everything on it. I think it turned out that there were exactly two Filipino artists in the Spotify Philippines Top 50 that day.

What I wanted to know, I realized, was not just what was popular in the Philippines, but what was differently popular. What do people love in the Philippines that the rest of the world doesn’t know about? The very simplest way of finding out what’s popular in the Philippines but not in the whole world is to just filter the global top 50 out of the Philippines results and see what’s left.

That got rid of ߙBieber and Drake, and surfaced a few more local artists that had been just outside the original top 50, but the results were still mostly global: Passenger, Disclosure, Demi Lovato, Ariana Grande. Dropping the global top 100 or 200 could get us to Little Mix and Sam Smith, or Maroon 5 and Bastille. This is what it looks like when a simple clever idea is turning out to be too simple and insufficiently clever.

But even if this had worked, it only takes a minute or two of reflection to realize that it is yet another technique inevitably doomed to produce a notion of ‘global’ dominated by American listening.

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