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Notes -
Quick question: WHY?
Like many, I have Spotify, and pay for it to avoid the constant ads and improve the sound quality. Like many, I have it on my television because the March of Time has somehow created a situation where I have no stereo player in my home. I still have CDs that sit on a shelf unused and probably need to be sent to a recycle shop or sold or thrown in a landfill. I also have some (gulp) LPs but they adorn my office shelves like tchotchkes of a bygone area--even the millennial guy I know who collected vinyl has stopped doing so because it's "too expensive." I threw out my last turntable about 15 years ago but I keep the records. Sentimental, probably
Back to Spotify. I was making a holiday playlist for putting up our tree this year. I prefer the oldies to the newies, and the medium oldies like Driving Home for Christmas. Anyway as I was browsing I decided to look (and this is on my TV app) at the various genres thinking maybe there would be one called holiday.
There wasn't. What there was, well. That's why I decided to post this.
What there was were the expected playlists like Made for You (which had songs that are algorithmically linked to the account meaning songs my wife and sons click on). Also the expected K-Pop, Top Hits, Jazz, Hip Hop, In the Car, Chill, Punk, Party, Blues and even Educational, Kids & Family, Latin, and Ambient. All this is fine.
Then I saw a Playlist called Glow. Hm. Glow? Turns out this is subtitled "Songs from the Community." The community being the ineffable LGBTQ+ community. There is also a Spotify-produced playlist called EQUAL. This one? You guessed it. Songs exclusively made by women. Then there was FREQUENCY which, no, wasn't the top requested songs, but was a playlist of music made exclusively by black folks. The subtitle: "All Black like the Cover of Essence."
Question is Why? Why is this needed? Audiophiles want genres that have something to do with the music, no? Who decides to listen to music just because it was produced/written/performed by a gay group? Is this just Spotify pandering? And if so, who signed off thinking this was a swell idea? What does the performer being gay have to do with the sound? Do people actually care about this?
My best steelman is that they are trying to signal boost "underrepresented groups" but of the three groups mentioned arguably only women are underrepresented in music.
Theories appreciated.
I think it's simpler. We might ask "is there a perceptible statistical relation between an artist's identity and the music they make?" I think the answer to this is clearly yes. This is probably most obviously true with with black people but it's not hard to suppose a case for others. Think about how much music is about love and relationships, for example. Might gay people enjoy a song more if the lyrical content was aligned with their own attraction? How many straight guys are singing songs pining for their lost love (another man)?
This isn't to say that only people of a particular identity can make a particular sound or that people of a particular identity must have a particular sound. Just that there is a perceptible relation such that consumers can use artist identity as a kind of crude filter for sound.
Obviously there's a strong correlation between one or more of an artist's various identity markers and the style of music they perform or its lyrical themes, but I don't think that implies that audiences are more likely to enjoy music created by people with whom they share identity markers. Jazz is a niche genre, but probably more popular among white audiences than black despite being a historically black genre; hip hop has been more popular among white urban audiences than country music for as long as hip hop has existed, and this was true even when hip hop was pretty much exclusively a black genre; K-pop is enormously popular among white girls and women; numerous gay musicians have found large followings among straight people and in some cases are even more popular among straight men than straight women (e.g. Elton John, Freddie Mercury of Queen, George Michael, Morrissey of The Smiths, Rob Halford of Judas Priest, Sam Smith, Boy George, Ricky Martin).
You're close to it - it isn't (necessarily) that the listener shares an identity marker with the artist. It's that the artist shares an identity marker with other artists the listener has previously enjoyed and they're taking that as a meaningful signal.
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