News of the mass of layoffs by Condé Nast, as well as discourse on the decline of music journalism and questions of its purpose in general have many fat-cat apologists agreeing that the industry’s downfall is a long time coming. Streaming giants like Spotify, meanwhile, are celebrating as one of the last points of friction between music and consumer wears away. Today we’re told we have access to the entire library of recorded music in the palm of our hand—a strong case for more music journalism, not less.
Modern history has a funny way of offering each generation a parallel, if unique, set of challenges. Like the 2020s, the 1930s were a curious time for American corporate overlords. The Great Depression, militant coalition unions, and new advances in technology lead to the radical idea that there might be a link between a worker’s wellbeing and their productivity. But this was a trickle down revelation—the first ergonomic boom—which produced a series of bizarre experiments designed to give employers more bang for their buck.
Clerks chairs were tilted at bold new angles to promote blood flow, heady perfumes stuck to the air throughout offices and shop floors, and a new type of music was recorded in studios across Manhattan. Not music for radio broadcast or general consumption, this was Muzak; the free market’s first attempt at a broadly generic yet expertly crafted music to promote productivity.
Early Muzak albums were sold to businesses with waiting rooms and common areas as “public enhancements”. By the early 1950’s, the growing Muzak corporation fine-tweaked its formula and began pumping out albums of “Stimulus Progression”. Each album would start slow and easy with basic Latin rhythms and arousing chord progressions before gradually getting faster, anywhere from 8–20 bpm a tune, frantically climaxing before a 15 minute period of planned silence to avoid fatigue. These progressions theoretically encouraged anxiety and motion, toward an ever elusive harmonic resolution and rhythmic settling, the backbone of most Western music.
On the conceptual shop floor, this would result in a quicker pace of work as the frenetic energy manifested itself physically through the listener. Crucial, though, was the use of Latin jazz as a medium—samba and bossa nova, sounded by a soothing combination of clavichord, steel guitar and hammond organ which filled the worker’s subconscious. Even if the stimulus progression failed to dupe the workplace drones, the invocation of fun, upbeat, danceable sounds from Latin and South America should at least keep their minds focused and help avoid distractions and midday fatigue.
Boris and Natasha scheme though it may be, Muzak’s legacy offers us one vantage point into the opaque coterie of music executives who now shovel music down the feed chute and into our pens. It exposes in no uncertain terms the cynical nature of the culture industry which profited off of the production of psychological manipulation through something as innocuous as Latin jazz—through the supposedly universal appeal of music. Today’s commercial producers don’t need to compose and record algebraically precise jazz albums—they have an algorithm. And unlike Muzak, the worker drones subscribe to it willingly.
Those lauding the steady downfall of music outlets like Pitchfork almost do so admirably. They share a worldview with the 21 year old whose first legal purchase is a bottle of Baileys which they intend to chug. Gone for them are the gatekeepers, the question of whether to defer to savants whose experience might help find what they’ll like. To them, the bubble of a bloated and self-important arm of the music industry has burst. Now is my time they tell themselves, filling their bellies with thick syrupy goo. Their hyper-imagination is fueled by an underdeveloped palate, so they fall short of connecting the dots which expose the logic of the world—that Baileys will feel like a rock in your stomach; that you alone are no match for the algorithm. The free market is at its most coherent when it can influence each consumer directly, streamlining fueled by the local independence of the neoliberal ego.
That efficiency is directly tied to the commercial function of proprietary listening algorithms. These ever-smarter bits of code pump music onto our feeds that’ll keep us listening—squeezing us like lemons for maximum ear-time. But the algorithm has a social function as well, and it ultimately serves the commercial one. Without need for any human interference from radio broadcasters, conductors, journalists, producers, DJs, the algorithm curates something specifically for each one of us—and, occasionally, helps us find new songs. But unlike those humans, the algorithm can never demonstrate its own logic.
The algorithm can’t help explain why we like a particular combination of sounds, what qualities make a song’s chord progressions novel or genious, or how we might discover more music like it. Those answers are up to you, the now completely liberated consumer-listener. You are both special as a consumer, and completely homogenized along with every other consumer who is simultaneously as special as you. This presupposition that our earpods are the ultimate terminus of art is an attitude engineered by those at the top. As Theodore Adorno noted in the 1930’s, “a nation that allows itself to be addressed as special is already doomed.”
We are, at this point, a nation that allows our consumption to make us special—not just the music we consume, but the very way we consume it. As this goes on, the listener is further and further alienated from reason, from why. I listen to this song because I like it, and I like it because Spotify cleverly sprinkled it into my 80 hour playlist of “songs I like this year”. We are already so far removed that most of us who consume music probably couldn’t describe what makes a song good to us outside of manufactured industry tropes. “I listen to pretty much everything except country and rap” has become a tired farce, but also the prime condition of our manufactured listening.
Yet asking why a song is good to you assumes you want reason in the first place. This is a further roadmark of aesthetic alienation; the domain of an aesthetic practice separated from its logic. And on the surface, logic can be difficult to ascribe to music. It means reading about music and its makers, consciously following trends and the way they’re expressed aurally, engaging with art in a time consuming way in order that one might be able to take in the work as a whole. As it stands, the algorithm has cleaved the logic—a work’s reason and place—from the bone, leaving only the sensory to the contemporary listener. Stripped of logic, we have no choice but to leave shuffle on. We will feel our way through the curated playlists until sensuality, too, is ripped from us in the hunt for profit.
Listening, like watching or reading, is an artistic skill; both part of the musical craft, and part of the act of receiving art. Even the educated listener needs constant refinement, lest their contentment fall away as sharpened aural skills naturally dull to time. For all their faults, critics are the torchbearers of the art we imbibe—reminding us that those skills are still important to each of us, that there is hope to liberate ourselves from the commodification of art. But as the algorithm answers more challenging questions for us, we become less skilled listeners and more rabid consumers. The need to engage with music as art falls away. In its place, the freedom to engage with art as subconscious emotional content, as soothing Muzak.
Yet as some have wisely noted, each of us now has access to the largest catalog of music recorded by humankind. No one would deny that we live in the most abundant time in the history of recorded music. But the Apple Music library is a far cry away from the entire catalog of recorded music. It is curated and tightly controlled by lawyers and Spotify executives, presented in carefully planned playlists that pop up as soon as we open the app, with push notifications to announce a new collection—a farmer filling the trough. To read this as a monumental achievement of humankind is to obediently fellate the boardroom executives who’ve made our cultural subjugation their bread and butter. The hog farmer doesn’t feed his piggies because it’s the right thing to do. The great effort to collect music into one all-encompassing source with easy-access modules wasn’t motivated by art, scholarship, or altruism, but by the exploitative nature of the market. Its upkeep and evolution are likewise the continued exploitation of both artist and consumer.
The comprehensive collection of a vast library of media grants tech moguls the power to sell us temporary licenses to consume said media, which comes through our headphones and onto our eardrums as music. The conceptual piece of art is now applied like paint to dress up a purpose built commodity which makes someone—many someones—a little bit of money per listen. The commodification of music unfolds before us, and as more hogs fill the pen, the culture industry’s potential profit skyrockets. There is now a vested interest in our continued listening, just as TikTok works to keep us scrolling. The algorithm accepts our input, learning from us what would further keep us invested. What is offered to the listener—who is now fully commodified just like the music they consume—is a product designed, with ever evolving efficiency, to keep them engaged in its consumption.
The hog farmer isn’t burdened if his slop tastes like shit, so long as it makes us ripe and plump. Likewise, the most successful producers have no reason to put out work which dabbles cleverly in form, statement, rhythm, harmony, color, texture, or purpose. They are motivated by profit, which is generated most effectively by the selection of disparate songs and trendy progressions into one unending stream, handled by the algorithm. 10 seconds of a song loop heard by millions on one TikTok is gold compared to 50 minutes of a thoughtfully crafted album heard by thousands. The logic of music, as with every other culture commodity, has shifted, and with it our relationship to the underlying artform. Baring the burden of these social and cultural implications is one of the unique challenges of our generation, our Muzak. But it is impossible to confront without skilled ears.
Reconciling the impact of this shift might seem trivial—it’s Spotify and Pandora, not Blackrock and Boeing afterall. But they are all arms of the same mechanized process. There’s a reason Adorno wrote as anxiously about the culture industry as he did; he survived the domination of Goebel’s industrial culture over nazi Germany, and as a Marxist was compelled to follow its rationale. To Adorno, the industrialization of culture is a violent and domineering process which follows the logic of work. To be a consumer necessitates that you are also a worker. A good worker’s leisure time isn’t taxing or dominated by complex thought, but by rejuvenation and simplicity. Your free will belongs to the industrial process, in Adorno’s case to the Reichstag, in our case to the hog farmers holding stock in Spotify. It’s all the better if we take those rejuvenating products into the office willingly—our floor managers no longer have to pay for a Muzak subscription. What we regard now as the freedom to choose a song on Spotify is really the subjugation of aesthetic choice into the logic of work, the oppressive logic of capital.
In Adorno’s time, it was the radio broadcast which he saw as emblematic of this domination, the loss of input into the cultural product, or the death of engagement. A banjo player couldn’t hope to walk into the radio studio and secure air time anymore than a dissident political party into a mainstream broadcasting center. The cultural product—what came out of the radio—was predetermined by capital, and its dialogue only went one way.
In our time, we face the co-option of that very anxiety, the falsification of input which allows us to listen to the banjo player or the dissident and still regard ourselves as the master over the control panel. To celebrate this final victory of capital at the expense of a few snooty writers is to clap as a toddler when the round peg goes through the round hole.
The final capitulation to capitalism is the loss of art, and the commodification of the listener into the logic of work which they can never hope to escape. As Adorno wrote, “he has no choice but to conform, whether as buyer, singer, lover or as a simple member of what is gradually turning into an organization of cosmic proportions… He belongs to the product and not the product to him.”
So enjoy our world without dorky gatekeepers and uptight indie journalists, without History of Rock and Roll electives or skull-capped punk scholars. We’ll soon be totally free to experience the euphoria of 6-hour playlists with no discernable purpose except to keep us distracted until the next work day. Ours will be the freedom to choose from the artists with whom Apple sees fit to do business—they should know, after all. We can listen to the same 10 songs on a loop for months without ever feeling pressured to explore the great library of recorded music, the fruits of centuries of creation which could only be offered to us by Spotify. We are finally free to experience the liberation of artistic meaning, autonomy from musical history, and soon, the death of listening.
Blue Labyrinths 