LAZINESS OF A PLAYLIST

⌈ PLAYLIST: in radio, TV - the official list of songs broadcast by a specific radio station or music television channel during a given week; in computer - a file containing a list and the file paths of multimedia files that will be played automatically in sequence by a computer application. Wielki słownik języka polskiego, → WSJP.pl. ⌋

I MIGHT BE SCORING AN OWN GOAL with this editorial (I'm offering it to you partly as a test), but I'll take the risk: this is about playlists, both those we create ourselves and those generated by algorithms or “curated” by selected users on a given streaming platform. More specifically, it’s about what motivates us in these situations and what we gain and lose in the process.

‖ Playlists are the foundation of all streaming services

The direct inspiration for this article - and, before that, for my reflections on this topic - was an email from one of my readers. He writes about the “playlist trap”, that he once fell into and from which he is trying to escape. It supposedly works like this: we select songs for the playlist that we particularly like, rejecting all those that bother us, don’t resonate with us - in a word - are harder to listen to.

As he goes on to say, he wouldn’t have noticed this, accustomed as he was to the convenience of instant access and the certainty that the music would “meet” his needs. This would likely have continued for a long time - perhaps even forever - had it not been for the impulse to buy a CD player and dust off his CD collection. And so it began… As he puts it, “it became inconvenient” because he ended up listening to entire albums, rather than a selection of tracks. It’s much the same, he says, as watching movies or reading books - which he describes as “easy.”

I think this is the key to the problem: laziness or convenience, taking the easy way out, pushing away everything that might be uncomfortable. There’s nothing wrong with that, and the modern market actually encourages us to behave this way: fast, easy, and pleasant. Even psychological counseling, which leans toward pop psychology, prioritizes “well-being” understood as the absence of pain. In the sense that anything that causes us “distress” is bad and must be gotten rid of.

‖ In theory, this is exactly what a thinking person’s “menu” should look like; in reality, we behave differently (we, not just you)

Do you remember a scene from the Pixar animated film titled WALL-E, in which WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load-Lifting Eliminator. E-Class) - who has spent seven hundred years alone cleaning Earth of the waste left behind by humans - and, along with him, we, the viewers, see the interior of the Axiom spaceship? It’s a paradise on... I wanted to say - Earth, but the point is that this is an artificial “paradise” designed with the people who fled Earth in mind.

The Axiom, created by the Buy-n-Large (BnL) corporation, was supposed to be a home for humans for only five years, during which time robots were to clean up Earth. In reality, humans spent as many as seven centuries on the ship. Everything on board was automated, and the passengers were treated “like royalty.” Robots performed all their daily tasks for them. It was quietly assumed that this arrangement was fine and there was no need to change it. What was the result? The passengers became obese and lazy. They spent their days sitting in floating chairs, staring at screens and sipping drinks from cups.

It seems that our predatory and amoral modern world expects something similar from us - perhaps without any comforts for us, without caring for us, but rather with the aim of so that we don’t have to think. Which, let’s admit it, suits us just fine. After all, we get only what’s pleasant and… nice. I’m not saying it’s wrong to strive for what we like, what “suits” us - I do it myself. But when it becomes an end in itself, rather than a temporary convenience, it starts to resemble - and here I’ll refer to one more movie - The Matrix. One such “Matrix-style” trick is playlists.

Playlists are nothing new. They first appeared on the radio in the 1930s, when stations began compiling music charts. The turning point came in 1935, when NBC radio in the U.S. aired the first such chart. In Poland, the first chart was created in 1936. From the very beginning, they were tied to big money and power; they weren’t about choosing what was best:

‖ The first playlists were created for AM radio stations, and later for FM stations; pictured here is one of the last mass-produced radio receivers with a fully analog circuit (without frequency synthesis) - the Tivoli One

This original sin of the music industry evolved in the years that followed into pervasive corruption, bribery, and even more money. To such an extent that it undermined the very foundations of the entire industry and, over time, led to its marginalization. Are you familiar with the word “payola”? Wikipedia defines it as an illegal practice involving the offering of bribes or under-the-table payments to commercial radio stations or DJs in exchange for playing a specific song and promoting it as a natural hit. Its roots go back—ta-da!—to the early 1930s.

Steve Knopper, author of the book Apetite for Self-Destruction, subtitled The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age, counts payola among what he calls “Big Music’s Big Mistakes.” And not by accident. For when a scandal erupted in the United States in 1960 involving “independent radio promoters” - who, in most cases, turned out to be well-paid middlemen in the distribution of bribes to radio DJs (the majors were spending 30% of their revenue on this type of “promotion” at the time, and that was before taxes), it wasn’t the end of it - it was just the beginning.

Where there’s big money, there’s also dishonest behavior. Dishonesty, however, can be monitored, exposed, and corrected - that’s what journalists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and whistle-blowers do. In the case of playlists, however, it is embedded in their DNA. Although nearly a century has passed since their inception - which was intended from the very beginning to manipulate people - the playlists of songs aired during prime time on commercial radio stations are still compiled in collaboration with the largest record labels, based on precise, profit-driven market research. So-called “playlists” are merely an add-on, the icing on the cake. Not all charts were constructed this way - let’s recall, following Zakrzewski, the Program Three Hit Chart, as well as several others. But that is the past, and even the Hit Chart itself was subject to the rigors of the oppressive world of the late Polish People’s Republic.

‖ The music charts from the era of the People's Republic of Poland may seem free of corruption; however, bribery does not necessarily have to involve money - it can also involve privileges, connections, power, and so on.

Payola was a scam from the analog era. In the world of digital streaming services it’s even simpler, carried out on an incomparably larger scale and in a way that is legally much harder to prove and condemn. Liz Pelly even writes that the history of Spotify (and streaming in general) contains “the story of a broken music industry desperately trying to stay afloat in an era when file sharing is permitted.” She continues:

You do understand this has happened to you, right? Playlists “curated” by streaming services are meant to generate as much profit as possible. That’s it. For this to work, listeners must be convinced that they themselves are co-creators of the playlists and that they are “tailored precisely to their needs” - to quote, from memory, one of the advertising slogans. And indeed, they are put together precisely and perfectly - but tailored to the needs of those who propose them, and it’s us who are being “tailored.” Now, even more so, because the algorithm also feeds us AI-generated content, which is much cheaper to produce.

So, are supposed not to use either the radio or streaming services? My own demon of integrity, breaking free from behind the bars, screams: “Yes! Obviously! What are you waiting for?” But this is, as I say, a demon, not the truth or “the good.” The issue of playlists isn’t that simple. We all use them, and we all will continue to use them. And if not everyone, then almost everyone.

‖ Let me encourage you to read Liz Pelly's book - it really opens your eyes to a lot of things

So what can we do to avoid getting “taken for a ride,” to avoid becoming drooling babies with credit cards in our hands? I think you already know this, or at least suspect it: you should listen to entire albums. Except that doesn’t apply all the time or everywhere. Radio and streaming are here to stay, and they’re often a valuable addition to a “playlist-free diet” - or one that we help create ourselves.

I’m surely not alone in this - I used to make mix-tapes, first on cassette tapes, and later, as soon as commercial CD-R burners were introduced, on that medium as well. Of course, when I was burning CDs onto the first Philips CD-R Audio discs, I skipped tracks that “didn’t sit right” with me. That, too, is a form of playlist. But - it was mine.

Engaging with art - even if it’s simply “consuming music” - is both a matter of revisiting what we know and love, and opening ourselves up to the new. It’s also about taking risks, allowing ourselves to experience even unpleasant feelings, because they are part of life. Otherwise, we risk stagnation, and stagnation - as is the message of Frank Herbert’s Dune - means death. Although it’s just a novel, and a science fiction one at that, it has proven - nomen omen - prophetic in many ways.

I wrote about this many times, most recently in articles devoted to AI, that ultimate DJ: On Perfection: How AI Makes Us Feel “Good”; more → HERE and On Fakes. So what would we say if tomorrow Ozzy Osbourne himself announced his new song, just recorded with the rest of the original Black Sabbath lineup; more → HERE. In the third part of the Dune series, which I’m currently devouring from my heavily used copy, bought back in 1992, we read:

It all comes down to how much control over our lives we want to retain, and how much we want to give up. I don’t need to repeat that the big tech companies would like us to surrender 100% of ourselves to them (or, more accurately, to submit to them). That’s why, for example, Google is preparing a revolution in search engine - instead of links, we’ll get a ready-made summary prepared by AI.

Playlists on streaming services are thus subject to external forces, but they are also fleeting, ephemeral. You don’t have to be particularly perceptive to imagine a scenario in which they suddenly disappear, replaced by newer “suggestions.” What will we be left with then? The importance of this issue is illustrated by the article Temporariness: We Apologize for the Inconvenience, published a short while ago in Dwutygodnik.

Marcin Wilkowski, a historian and programmer at the University of Warsaw’s Center for Digital Competence, whose doctoral dissertation focused on methods for researching the early Internet in Poland, writes about a website dedicated to computer games that are no longer supported by their developers:

The reader mentioned at the beginning summed it all up well by writing that it’s fun to watch the new Mandalorian, but over time taking the easy way out becomes the norm. For him, this norm is the easier and far more enjoyable option, yet it’s detrimental in so many ways… That’s why, as he says, he’s gone back to listening to “challenging albums, reading difficult books, and watching movies that aren’t funny.”

I assume he doesn’t do it all the time - that’s not the point. So let’s try to forget that a music playlist is a “given,” even an axiom (once again, I’ll remind you of the name of the ship from Wally: Axiom). When it’s just a convenience for us - a hint, and the main burden of searching still falls on us, when we overcome our laziness, everything will be OK.

‖ Holidays is the perfect time to dust off - often literally - your record collection. Just check out all these forgotten gems!

And that brings me to a dilemma. I’d like to wish all readers a wonderful summer vacation, during which you’ll be able to laze around to your heart’s content. As psychology tells us, lazing around is good for us; it also has a beneficial effect on the brain. Provided, it immediately adds that it is constructive. In other words, it’s the exact opposite of what the music industry is trying to get us into.

So listen to whatever you want, whenever you want, as long as it’s your choice. And please remember to visit “High Fidelity,” even in your free time. The HF team wishes you a great vacation! ‖ WP

WOJCIECH PACUŁA
Chief editor