I’m going to link a Variety article and not make fun of it. I’m as shocked as you are.

Have you been listening to more music and enjoying it less? David Macias thinks he knows what might ail you: an over-reliance on the algorithm in the modern music industry. It’s a system that the Thirty Tigers president believes keeps feeding music fans more of what they want, or are presumed to want, until they get burned out on the safe and overly familiar. This problem is something Macias diagnoses — along with some ideas for creative fixes — in his first book, “Circulation: How Culture Moves in the Age of Algorithm,” which comes out Jan. 14 from Whitefox Publishing.

-Chris Williams, “Thirty Tigers President David Macias Previews His First Book, ‘Circulation,’” Variety.com

As an unreconstructed late-issue Gen-Xer, my standard format for music consumption remains the CD. I still have the first CD I bought, in 1997, and it still plays. I listen to this almost exclusively in my car, as my continuous posts on the topic indicate. Everything everyone has said about the ephemerality of digital music is true: one builds a collection, one gives it space in your life, one appreciates what you have. I have a lot of vinyl as well, but that’s less stuff I have to hear now and more I will put this on for the current activity and let it fill the room. CD’s for Car, Vinyl for Home.

I do have a Spotify account, but I don’t typically just let the algorithm feed me. Spotify is a handy way to listen to stuff you haven’t had a chance to buy, to see if you like it. It’s for exploration. The algorithm, I have noticed, is okay at this: sometimes it serves up something you’d have never encountered on your own (70’s space jazz, how have I gone this long without hearing it?), but a lot of the time it feeds you your favorites, over and over again.

So one must approach things deliberately. If I catch a track you haven’t heard before, and I like it, I go straight to the album, to the artist, to see what’s going on there. One must seek out new things. Sometimes you’re in the mood for a Bloodhound Gang playlist? Make one. Sometimes you want to hear some stoner metal? Find a playlist someone has made. What are the good tracks? Who are the artists? Check them out. Otherwise…

He thinks he’s far from alone in that. “What’s happening is fueling an engine of cultural alienation, I think. How many people do you know that feel fantastic about their relationship with culture these days? How many people in the music industry do you know that are like, ‘I don’t know why, but I don’t feel great. This doesn’t feel as fun as it used to feel’?” But rather than give in to that, Macias says he “wanted to really figure out what was going on first — like, what is really happening, down to the cellular level.”

-ibid.

The book is being released January 14th. I will be reading it.