International Sad Hits

The previous post about Galaxie 500 streaming song plays attracted the interest of Glenn McDonald, Spotify’s “Data Alchemist,” who looked at internal numbers and generously shared more info with me.

It seems the increase in streaming of “Strange” above all other Galaxie 500 songs started in January 2017 - the same time Spotify switched the “Autoplay” preset in every listener’s preference panel from off, to on (you can still turn it off but of course fewer people do). Autoplay selects “similar songs” when anything you have chosen to play - a playlist, an album, a song - finishes. At that point, Spotify’s recommendation algorithms take over and the system continues to provide music based on its resemblance to whatever you have been hearing. (Glenn explained that there are many, many acoustic categories involved in that calculation.)

In other words, it would seem that “Strange” started to be picked out by Spotify’s algorithms because they found it most similar to other bands’ songs than any other Galaxie 500 track.

Being more of a scientist than I am (though I would happily claim kinship with the alchemy bit), Glenn cautioned that this analysis was not conclusively causal - he would need to do more examination of data before going so far. But it makes intuitive sense to me. “Strange” is a touch faster, louder, with a more regular backbeat and a more predictable song structure than most Galaxie 500 songs. Compared to the singles from each of our three albums, for example - the songs that always had the most radio play - there’s no extended instrumental section like on “Tugboat” or “Fourth of July,” and no unusually slow tempo or quiet dynamics like on “Blue Thunder.”

Glenn confirmed that once “Strange” started to be played more than our other tracks, it became more likely that it would be recommended more frequently across the platform - the snowball effect I described in the previous post.

Might an unintended result of Autoplay, then, be the separating out and rewarding of the most “normal” songs in each band’s catalogue…? Smart speakers will I imagine exaggerate this effect. As albums are increasingly supplanted by playlists, and intentional listening of all kinds is increasingly replaced by algorithmic recommendations, “Play Galaxie 500″ may really come to mean, “Play the song by Galaxie 500 that most resembles songs by others.”