You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song

'One of the best music books of the year' - Neil McCormick, Daily TelegraphWhat if the song that would change your life is already out there - buried somewhere in 100 million tracks, one skipped click away?In You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song, former Spotify "Data Alchemist" Glenn McDonald opens the black box of music streaming and shows how it is quietly transforming what we hear, how artists earn a living and what music means in a digital age. Drawing on years spent inside the algorithmic engine of Spotify, McDonald reveals how playlists, recommendation algorithms, listening data and streaming royalties really work - and what they're doing to artists, fans and culture itself. Moving from the age of record shops and radio to Napster, iTunes, the iPod and the rise of Spotify, this book is a sharp, witty and surprisingly hopeful tour of the streaming era - from the economics of a fraction-of-a-cent stream to the strange new power of fan armies, bots and "chill" playlists that never end.Inside this book you'll discover:How music streaming services turned buying records into exploring infinite catalogues - and why that changes what we value and how we listenWhat Spotify algorithms actually do (and don't do), why they're less like evil robots and more like very simple math, and how they can still go badly wrongWhy royalty systems such as pro-rata vs user-centric payments matter for fairness, independence and the future of the music industryThe hidden world of playlist culture - editorial playlists, algorithmic playlists and the lists your friends make - and how they've become the new gatekeepersHow streaming exposes inequalities in genre, gender and geography - from Nashville country radio to global diasporas - and what more equitable, datädriven music discovery could look likeThe new joys of a connected world: global micro-genres, borrowed nostalgia, weird subcultures and the statistical certainty that you truly haven't yet heard your favourite song
Written in clear, elegant prose by someone who has handled the listening data of hundreds of millions of people, You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song is part music history, part technology explainer and part cultural manifesto. It will change how you think about Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, algorithmic recommendations, AI in music, streaming royalties and the future of recorded music.
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Glenn McDonald is a software engineer, algorithm designer, music evangelist and long-time Data Alchemist at Spotify, the world's biggest music streaming service. From the 1990s, he was one of the earliest and most prolific explorers of how to use data to understand and amplify our collective and individual experiences of music.His work at the US music-intelligence startup The Echo Nest helped bring about its 2014 acquisition by Spotify, which put him at the algorithmic heart of streaming music and the listening habits of 500 million people.His website Every Noise at Once (everynoise.com) has an unprecedented computational map of the world's music genres, and a large and growing variety of other tools for exploring music and joy. His personal blog (furia.com) offers occasional commentary on this, and various other digressions. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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