'If you want to know anything about how music surfaces today, how to find it, or how to create it, you will find what you need right here.' - Joseph Menn, Washington Post writer
'One of the best music books of the year' - Neil McCormick, Telegraph
For the first time in history, almost every song ever recorded is available instantly. Everywhere.
This book charts what music's dazzling digital revolution really means for fans and artists. As a former data guru at the world's biggest streaming service Spotify, Glenn McDonald reveals:
What the tech giants know about you
How they serve up your next song
Whether fans can cheat the algorithm
Whether jazz is dead and ASMR is the new punk
Your chances of becoming a rock star
Having analysed the streams of 500 million people, McDonald explores what the data tells us about music and about ourselves, from the secrets of russelåter in Norway to Christmas in the Philippines.
This book will take you on a voyage of discovery through music's fast-flowing new waters. Includes 10 bonus playlists.
About the Author
Glenn McDonald obsessively collected CDs as a teenager, but he soon realised the revolutionary power of digital media to make songs globally accessible. He started working at a US startup and soon became a data guru at Spotify. His website Every Noise at Once is a computational map of the world's music genres.
An ideal book for anyone who wants to know how Spotify, Amazon Music, Deezer, YouTube Music and other music platforms work, whether as a fan, musician or music business insider.
Buy the book and start reading
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Introduction 1
PART 1: THE DISCONNECTED AGE
1. Precious Jukeboxes. Music Consumption as a Shopping Experience 9
2. The Panic and the Crash. The Internet, Napster, iTunes, iPods and the Downloading Interregnum 13
PART 2: HOW STREAMING WORKS
3. Better Than Free. How Streaming Got People to Spend Money on Music Again 19
4. All the World’s Music (sort of). How Music Gets Online 25
5. A Zillion Ambiguous Clicks. What Streaming Services Know About You 29
6. The Robots Have No Plan. What Algorithms Do and Don’t Do 35
PART 3: NEW FEARS
7. The New Gatekeepers. Major Labels, Playlists, More Playlists, Algorithmic Playlists and the Playlists Your Friends Make 43
8. “Ed Sheeran Is Taking My Money”. How Streaming Pays Artists 51
9. Mercenaries and Fan Armies. Cheating and Devotion vs Math, and the Casual War Against Hilariously Implausible Fraud 67
10. Our Inertia Exposed. “Organic” Listening and Social Equity 79
11. Chill Is the New Muzak. The Borders Between Background and Foreground Sounds 87
12. Constant Engagement. The Death and Survival of The Album 95
13. Undemanded Music in an On-Demand World. The Uncertain Fate of Jazz, Classical, Experimental and Other Quiet, Noble Arts 107
14. Renting the Things You Love Most. Fluctuating Availability and the Impermanent Record of the Streaming Catalog 117
15. The Best Bad Answers. How Algorithms Fail 127
PART 4: NEW JOYS
16. All the World’s Listening (sort of). Streaming as a Global Collective-Wisdom Collector 145
17. No Walls Without Doors. What Music Tells Us About Each Other and the World 159
18. Cities In and Out of Hyperspace. Genres as Distributed Communities of Interest 175
19. Borrowed Nostalgia. Other People’s No-Longer-Secret Music 191
20. Text as Texture. Hip Hop Literally Everywhere, and How to Listen to Rap You Can’t Understand 199
21. New Punks. Weird and/or Scary Music that Sounds Normal to the Kids, or Vice Versa 209
22. Every Noise at Once. Music as an Infinite Resource 223
PART 5: NEW QUESTIONS
23. What Is Art Worth? How Should the New Economy Work? 243
24. What Is Your Love Worth? How Do You Listen Morally? 251
25. Algorithmic Responsibility. How Do You Encode Conscience? 259
26. What Now? We Have All the World’s Music. What Do We Do Next? 269
AFTERWORDS
Acknowledgements 275
10 Playlists of Somebody’s Favourite Songs 277
