For most of the 20th century, listeners had two avenues through which to discover new music: the radio and their friends’ record collections. The Internet, of course, multiplied those options, opening up a vast frontier of new music that started with the Wild West days of Napster and expanded to today’s range of streaming tracks on MySpace, blogs, and Internet radio. The route by which we discover new music ends up shaping our tastes, and these newish ways of listening are already having a great impact on what becomes popular and profitable.
A favorite topic of Internet observers is the medium’s tendency to reinforce niches. A political conservative can get his news by reading conservative blogs that link almost exclusively to other conservative blogs. In other words, he can accumulate a worldview absent of dissent. If you're looking for similar opinions, clicking from link to link can feel like the experience of staring into facing mirrors, an infinite reflection of sameness.
The music Internet also risks reinforcing narrow-mindedness, giving listeners plenty of ways to indulge their already extant tastes without forcing them to discover new works. During the years when radio dominated the music industry, people would tune in to hear songs they knew they liked, songs they didn’t like, and new songs that intrigued them. The Internet now enables a casual listener to dispense with the unpleasantness and challenge of the latter two possibilities.
But even the most unadventurous listener is bound to tire of the same old songs and seek out, however cautiously, something new. With the radio increasingly obsolete, more and more listeners are using two technologies to do this: Pandora and iTunes’ Genius. The two have clear differences—Pandora is a personalizable internet radio service with a library of 750,000 songs; Genius is a “smart” playlist function that is limited to a person’s iTunes library—but they approach the listening experience in the same way: creating hours of recommended programming based on a listener’s selection of just one song.
This approach to “radio” programming has fascinating potential. It could, in theory, lead listeners on a journey from the familiar to the surprisingly related fringes, allowing them to make connections between seemingly disparate songs and artists. This kind of “radio” station could foster a new, deeper understanding of what’s actually going on in music, expanding tastes across genres, eras, and continents. Of course, Pandora and Genius could just as easily follow the Internet’s infinite mirrors, giving listeners more of the same under the fraudulent guise of exploration.
Last week, WBGO’s Josh Jackson (who hosts the radio show The Checkout) interviewed Sameer Gupta, a percussionist and Pandora “song decoder,” about how Pandora’s Music Genome Project creates personalized stations. Gupta described the way in which he and 40 other musicians analyze a song based on its structure, instrumentation, and subjective qualities (the emotional intensity of a solo, for instance) and then feed the information into a radio-station-creating algorithm. Jackson, a genial and rarely confrontational interviewer, allowed Gupta to explain the process, but made one barbed comment that he unfortunately didn’t pursue fully
Jackson’s comment came when he and Gupta were discussing the Pandora algorithm’s orientation toward style rather than artist. Selecting Wayne Shorter’s “Speak No Evil," for instance, will give a listener a station based on modal post-bop quintets and won’t explore any aspects of Shorter’s fusion career with Weather Report.
“Here’s where you lose the scope,” Jackson said, “let’s take that premise that I love Bill Evans and I click ‘I like Bill Evans’ and Herbie Hancock pops up—very similar in nature in terms of instrumentation and the way that they’re improvising to some degree. So, okay, I love Herbie Hancock too, [it doesn’t give] me another Herbie Hancock which could potentially be like Headhunters. I don’t get to explore the range of Herbie Hancock so much as get to explore the range of the acoustic piano.”
Gupta gives a long response to the comment that doesn’t really address its underlying concern: Pandora can’t make the surprising choices, inspired leaps, and productive dissonances that are the hallmark of good human DJs and adventurous human artists. Listening to a random sampling of the work of a curious, prolific musician like Hancock would introduce a listener to smoldering 60s jazz like Maiden Voyage, fusion like Headhunters, electronic hip-hop like Future Shock, and neo-traditionalism like Directions in Music. Listening to a Pandora station based on Herbie Hancock’s "Dolphin Dance" would keep a listener in the realm of "instrumental post-bop jazz with long piano solos."
Pandora claims that it builds its stations around the properties of the music alone—ignoring the sociocultural baggage that often dictates taste to the detriment of true art—but some evidence suggests otherwise. As Rob Walker noted in the New York Times Magazine, “the [Pandora] genome, quietly, doesn’t really screen out sociocultural information. For instance, its algorithms are tweaked by genre, and the inclusion of genes for ‘influence’ (‘swing’ or ‘gospel,’ for example) brings in factors that aren’t strictly about sound.” In other words, Pandora’s cultural assumptions about music can inform its programming as much as, say, the repeated use of minor 7 chords.
I first became aware of the sometimes extra-musical way in which Pandora programs while listening to a station I’d created around the pianist and composer Guillermo Klein. Klein, an Argentine who has lived for long stints in New York and Barcelona (and whom I interviewed last year for All About Jazz), plays music that’s very difficult to pigeonhole. Klein’s music is ostensibly large ensemble jazz but has several features that set it apart from the tradition: composition trumps improvisation (some pieces have no improvised sections at all), South American rhythms drive the music instead of swing, and Klein sings with a rough, untrained voice that has no well-known equivalent. Given the genre-defying nature of Klein’s music, I’d love to listen to a Guillermo Klein station that would include everything from modern small group jazz (The Bad Plus), to untraditional big bands (Pedro Giraudo Jazz Orchestra), to historical influences (Olivier Messiaen, Duke Ellington, Astor Piazzolla), to—if the station were really good—music from very different genres that had a deep affinity with Klein’s work. (Darcy James Argue suggests that indie darlings Dirty Projectors share a deep affinity with Klein’s band, Los Guachos).
Yet instead of exploring Klein’s unique synthesis of jazz and non-jazz idioms, Pandora created a Guillermo Klein station centered around the fact that Klein was born in Argentina. Both my Guillermo Klein station and my station based on “Yeso”—a song off Klein’s most recent album Filtros—play almost exclusively Latin American music. When my “Yeso” station played Monna Bell’s “Culpable”—a poppy swoon that sounds almost nothing like “Yeso”—Pandora said it selected the song because it “features female lead vocals, minor key tonality, acoustic instrumentation, bowed strings, and a string ensemble.” Not only is that justification a little baffling—“Yeso” features neither female lead vocals nor a string ensemble—it obscures the most obvious reason the song was picked: Klein, like Monna Bell, has clearly been tagged as a “Latin” artist. In analyzing Klein, Pandora’s sound decoders have privileged heritage over strictly musical markers, giving me a station in which Klein’s brooding compositions incongruously segue into the poppy Bell and the raucous Cuban drummer Horacio “El Negro” Hernandez.
To compare the way in which Pandora and Genius select music, I chose the same song, “Yeso,” as the starting point for a new iTunes playlist. Comparing the two programs in this way is wildly unscientific—Pandora’s library is 750,000 songs, Genius’ library consists of the 7,500 songs on my computer (many of which haven’t yet been incorporated into the Genius database)—but even with that significant caveat, Genius distinguishes itself as the superior analyzer. My Genius “Yeso” playlist includes Rudresh Mahanthappa’s "Introspection," John Scofield’s "Down D," and Charles Mingus’ “Prayer for Passive Resistance"—inspired choices that share deep sonic similarities with Klein’s “Yeso.” Genius doesn’t support most of the Argentine jazz on my computer (so this is a biased sample), but it's nonetheless significant that on my 25 track “Yeso” Genius playlist, Guillermo Klein is the only Latin American musician.
Genius is not without limitations. All its “Yeso” selections are clearly identified as jazz, suggesting a genre-based approach that is, nonetheless, far more appropriate for Klein than Pandora’s cultural stereotyping. Genius also can’t select anything that I don’t already own, which severely limits how much music it can really help me discover. But in the age of easy downloads, I don’t think I’m alone in having a lot of music on my computer that I’ve never listened to. As a tool for both introducing music and revealing connections between music, Genius seems to have a far more rigorous approach than its Internet radio cousin.
At the risk of sepia-toned sentimentality, as pleased as I am with Genius, I think it still lags well behind its low-tech forbearer: the radio disk jockey. When my good friend Gregory Kress DJ’ed jazz shows on the University of Michigan’s WCBN station, he’d frequently make the kind of bold programming leaps of which both Pandora and Genius seem incapable. At WCBN, free-form programming was encouraged, and free-form DJs often brought jazz into shows that were dominated by college rock. When WCBN listeners tuned into a good free-form show, they’d hear their Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, but they might also be forced to sit through some Albert Ayler.
The benefits of forced exposure go beyond radio. Darcy James Argue recently lamented the absence of opening acts in jazz, another part of our larger cultural trend toward offering listeners only what they already know they like.
When you go see a rock show—any rock show, doesn't matter whether it's a CMJ showcase, or a bloated stadium tour, or just your average night out—you're going to hear bands you probably haven't heard of before you get to hear the headliner. Often those bands will surprise you. Why doesn't this happen in our own little corner? We've talked before about the benefits of cross-pollinating across genres, but even within the jazz world, why don't we see Gretchen Parlato on the road opening for Esperanza Spalding, or Marcus Strickland out with Dave Douglas, or Andrew D'Angelo out with Tim Berne? Instead, this only seems to happen within the headliner's band (e.g., when Marcus plays in Dave's groups). But what about, say, Aaron Parks's own quartet opening for Kurt Rosenwinkel's, or Donny McCaslin's band opening for Maria Schneider's—not just as a one-off, but actually touring both groups together? You'd think the overlap in personnel would make those combinations irresistible.Some of my greatest experiences as a listener have come when I’ve happened upon an act I’ve never heard before. Hearing the Randy Weston Trio at the Caramoor Jazz Festival in 2001 and the David S. Ware Quartet at the Newport Jazz Festival in 2002 were epochal moments for me as a listener, moments that gave me the sensation not only of loving the music but of falling in love with the music—that dizzying head-rush of excitement and enchantment. I had this sensation more recently while listening to a free-form radio station in Maine during the summer of 2007. I was driving from Fayette to Portland when I heard “Señorita” off Béla Fleck and Chick Corea’s duo album The Enchantment. By the height of Corea’s solo, about two-thirds through the song, I shouted out a gleeful “gaaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!” to no one but the empty car. When I arrived in Portland, my first stop was a record store.
Pandora and Genius might be technically capable of giving listeners this heady rush of discovery—I can’t imagine figuring out the code would be that tall a hurdle—but both (especially Pandora) have decided to play to a narrow niche. That might be good business for now, but I think it’s ultimately limiting, tiring, and boring. I’m looking forward to the day when someone starts a personalizable music service that can give me a Guillermo Klein radio station with Olivier Messiaen, The Bad Plus, Dirty Projectors, and forty other musicians with connections to Klein I’ve never considered. The Internet has far too rich a collection of information not to force us to explore its unknown.
