I asked the doctor when, if ever, I would start feeling better again. He gave a well-meaning shrug and said there was no way of knowing. I left the consultation room, put on my headphones, and opened Spotify. Prompted, as always, to listen to an album I had heard a thousand times before, I put on the Cocteau Twins record that sounds like a warm bath. The album ended, and Spotify automatically transitioned into the band’s “radio”, an algorithmically generated sprawl of other Cocteau Twins tracks and bands that sound similar. The familiarity made me feel a little bit less terrified.
It wasn’t always like this. When I worked on the culture desk of a newspaper, I spent hours each week eagerly seeking out the best new music – going to gigs, scouring forums and trawling record-label rosters. Finding something exciting felt like opening a portal to a new world. Spotify’s algorithmic model, an arcane data-tangle that churns out recommendations based on previously listened-to tracks, felt bleak and synthetic by comparison. At least, that was my haughty argument. Really, I feared the algorithms would render me obsolete.
