Describing itself as a “people-powered radio” that is completely “robot-free,” Fuzz bucks the trend toward ever greater reliance on algorithms in discovering new music......slate.
Fuzz celebrates the role played by human DJs—regular users who are invited to upload their own music to the site in order to create and share their own “radio stations.”
The idea—or, perhaps, hope—behind Fuzz is that human curators can still deliver something that algorithms cannot; it aspires to be the opposite of Pandora, in which the algorithms do all the heavy lifting.
As its founder, Jeff Yasuda, told Bloomberg News last September, “there’s a big need for a curated type of experience and just getting back to the belief that the most compelling recommendations come from a human being.”
But while Fuzz's launch attracted little attention, the growing role of algorithms in all stages of artistic production is becoming impossible to ignore. Most recently, this role was highlighted by Andrew Leonard, the technology critic for Salon, in an intriguing article about House of Cards, Netflix's first foray into original programming.
The series' origin myth is by now well-known: Having studied its user logs, Netflix discovered that a remake of the British series of the same name could be a huge hit, especially if it also featured Kevin Spacey and was directed by David Fincher.
“Can the auteur survive in an age when computer algorithms are the ultimate focus group?” asked Leonard. He wondered how the massive amounts of data that Netflix has gathered while users were streaming the first season of the series—how many times did they click the pause button?—would affect future episodes.
Many other industries are facing similar questions. For example, Amazon, through its Kindle e-reader, collects vast troves of information about reading habits of its users: what books they finish and what books they don't; what sections they tend to skip and which they read most diligently; how often they look up certain words in the dictionary and underline passages. (Amazon is hardly alone here: Other e-book players are as guilty.)
Based on all these data, Amazon can predict the ingredients that will make you keep clicking to the very end of the book. Perhaps Amazon could even give you alternate endings—just to make you happier. As a recent paper on the future of entertainment puts it, ours is a world where “stories can become adaptive algorithms, creating a more engaging and interactive future.”
Just as Netflix has figured out that, given all their data, it would be stupid not to enter the filmmaking business, so has Amazon discovered that it would be stupid not to enter the publishing business. Amazon's knowledge, however, goes deeper than Netflix's: Since it also runs a site where we buy books, it knows everything that there's to know about our buying behavior and the prices that we are willing to pay. Today Amazon runs half a dozen publishing imprints and plans to add more.
The music industry embraced similar methods several years ago, drawing on vast databases of previous hits and misses to predict whether any new music sent their way is likely to hit it big. The advantage here is obvious: One doesn't need to have connections—once a prerequisite to success—to get a contract. Instead, you just need a song that, based on past trends, is likely to be a hit.
But the disadvantage is also obvious: We might end up with very bland songs that all sound alike. As Christopher Steiner wrote in his 2012 book, Automate This, such techniques “may bring us new artists, but because they build their judgment on what was popular in the past, we will likely end up with some of the same kind of forgettable pop we already have. It's a clear foible of the technology that all these years of so-so music are included in its analysis.”
