#5: Confessions of a Playlister
Episode Description
We’re consuming music in a personalised, multi platform, curated context like never before. Online music streaming services are the go to source for the music hungry masses, worldwide. Jump online and you can find a curated playlist to match any occasion, mood or moment. But who creates these, and how do they do it? In this episode we look at the human touch behind a massive online industry and hear insights from a “Professional Playlister”.
In this episode
Guest: Anthony Carew
Intro Theme: First Kiss Goodnight - “Story One”
Music Credits: Davey Lane - “I Saw The Light”, “Barney Piano”, “Jay Jays”, Anna-Lee & The Double Lovers - “Hello Stranger”, Philanthrope - “Dromeda”
All Ears is produced and presented by Annaliese Redlich, with mentorship and editorial support from the Broadwave team.
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Annaliese Redlich [00:00:05] Hi, you're with Annaliese on All Ears.
[00:00:17] I've had so many moments lately of being aware of music in public spaces. Mostly when it's insanely inappropriate and ill thought out. Like, trap music blaring in a cab, or intensely loud commercial pop in a waiting room. And I feel like saying to the elderly receptionist or conservative looking driver, you cannot possibly be enjoying this! And if it's meant for me, I am not either. But anyway, as someone who deejays and essentially soundtracks spaces pretty regularly, I think about this stuff a lot. Maybe more than most people, I don't know? And it's hard to put together a good setlist. Your own taste and knowledge of music certainly come into it but you've got to read the space and the crowd and the occasion. Music is everywhere. And nowadays, the good news is, is that if your time poor or less musically inclined, well at the touch of a button and a low cost subscription, or not, you can access the biggest collections of music in human history. Companies like Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube Music are generating big audiences and big dollars. And within many of these you can find a curated playlist to match any occasion, mood or moment. But who makes these playlists? Is it an algorithm or celebrities? Well, sometimes. Or is it someone else?
[00:01:40] Well, let's find out on this episode of All Ears, ‘Confessions of a Playlister’.
Anthony Carew [00:01:58] When I hear kind of playlists, I guess I'm aware of a human element, but oftentimes people are just using the algorithms. They're just like, oh, this is Yo La Tengo radio or something, and I know that a person didn't assemble that. I feel like I had already had enough music biz experience to know the dark secrets of payola that say, exists, say, behind a commercial radio playlist where it's like...once you kind of know how things work, you don't ever just accept something at face value.
[00:02:27] Hello, my name is Anthony Carew, do you want more? More introduction?
Annaliese [00:02:33] Well, Anthony Carew is, in fact a music and film critic, a radio broadcaster, a music curator, and for a period of time, he was a professional online playlist creator. You know, the type: best break-up songs, work out songs, songs to watch, paint dry to... He says he got into it through a music writing job when a certain unnamed company was launching its service in Australia, and the job didn't last that long. Now, Anthony is a friend of mine. We nerd out about music, culture, politics all the time. And let's just say that he didn't really strike me as the kind of person who would particularly enjoy music programming for mass consumption or even be down for the whole anonymity thing. He's a rather romantic and nostalgic soul, so I wanted to find out about his time as a professional playlister.
Anthony [00:03:19] Well, I did do that for a stint. ‘Professionally’ seems a little bit overstating it. I guess I did it and I got paid for it. And yes, seeing the I guess the inside of the streaming service sausage factory.
[00:03:36] Music to study to, that was always a strange one. I think that I read something recently where one of the biggest YouTube streaming sites is called ‘Lo fi, hip hop beats to study to’, and it's just this endless, kind of, 24-hour stream of essentially just Muzak to put on in the background, you know?
Oh, yeah workouts were a really big one, and just meditation or relaxation. There is definitely this curatorial idea of, that people want music for different times of day and to do different things. So it can be like, getting ready to go out at night, or, I don’t know, like a dinner party or, like, washing the dishes or something, or housework, like any of these functional tasks. You have to strike an interesting balance when you're approaching a playlist. I guess like going for some kind of universality in this idea and then then also having your own ideas and taste and sensibilities and your own knowledge of, I don’t know, sometimes much more obscure or arcane music that you kind of want to throw in there.
[00:04:41] I mean, it was just oftentimes for me, it would be like, well, what's a little corner of music that I love, that I could just sort of build a playlist around. So people who are interested in discovering that or who already love that can just kind of revel in. So I would just think of something like 60s girl groups or, you know, Brazillian Tropicalia that would be a really kind of closed world and that you could just make the definitive playlist of that. So those were pretty easy ideas to pitch. You were aware that the numbers and the clicks, like this is all pretty public, tend to favour functional kinds of playlists or just just pop music. You know, I think, like the biggest playlist in the world is something like ‘rap caviar’?
[00:05:33] Um, the weirdest playlists that you encounter, I guess, ones where it's there's some element of humour to it, I suppose, like most of them, they are trying to fulfil a sincere, functional purpose. Or there's lots of really popular playlists, which is things like ‘songs to cry to’, or, some variation on that idea right? So if you're, like, heartbroken, these are the songs that will speak to you. But I guess when the idea can be like more abstract or ridiculous, that's when things can feel a little bit weird? Like, I remember pitching this one idea that was initially accepted along the lines of my pitch was like ‘the world's worst playlist’, and this was it was just kind of like an exercise in trolling in some kind of ways, picking the most hateful and hated songs and putting them together, because often that's the opposite of what you're doing, like especially on the radio. Like, that's my own sincere forum where I'm like, I just want to play music that I really love. And this is the opposite of being like, let’s playlist "Shaddpa Ya Face" and "Who Let The Dogs Out?". And I think I initially pitched it and I had some kind of pithy line of like, ‘if you want to annoy your neighbours or torture a prisoner’, I was thinking of that idea of like the US military playing horrible and hated music as a form of torture to make prisoners suffer.
Annaliese [00:06:51] Just to interject here, in case you think Antony's being dramatic. The CIA, in fact, have commonly used music torture since the 2000s with artists like the Bee Gees, Christina Aguilera, Eminem and even Barney The Dinosaur played to prisoners in an endless loop in order to create fear, disorient and prolong capture shock.
Anthony [00:07:12] I think in the end, it came out maybe, maybe that seems too antagonistic. In the end it came out as like basically a playlist of novelty songs.
[00:07:41] Having experienced this very tangible response to doing something kind of similar, presenting a radio show, just working in the anonymous coal mines of the streaming service monolith felt very abstracted to me, and you could see the numbers of people who were listening to things and like a real thing that you did have to care about was the the skip rate of certain songs. So if lots of people were skipping it, that's sure that that song wasn't working because either people didn't like it or that it wasn't giving them what was expected. What was promised on the label of this playlist.
[00:08:21] I think that you can definitely tell the difference between something that is just an algorithm and something that a human has assembled. There's just something about the algorithm that kind of spits out these really obvious returns that can sometimes not make any sense. There's this really famous example of the illogicality of algorithms where if you buy a couch from an online retailer, say, from Amazon, it will be like, oh, this person has bought a couch. Let's show them other couches. But if you've just bought a couch, you're not really in the market to buy more couches! So sometimes I feel like there's the musical equivalent of that. If you're just going by the algorithm playlist where it can be like they generate this song, and then there's just another one. It seems to, it seems, it can seem too redundant at times, where it's like you're just getting lots of songs by the same artist or that are theoretically kind of the same, but it's from a very shallow pool.
[00:09:21] What's interesting is when music that I don't think of as being bland background music is turned into that. Like when you'll be in some public space and you will hear a song that you love and think is amazing, just very quietly, sort of like playing in the background.
I've had a few weird moments in the supermarket over the past year of hearing people who I really love in that totally unexpected situation. Like most of the time when you're at the supermarket, I feel like you get hits from the 80s or something. But I remember hearing like Julia Jacklin and Hatchie, those were the two big ones where I heard them in the supermarket. I was like, what the fuck? What's going on? It was...It seemed somehow thrilling and exciting to hear this music that you love in a very personal way in the most impersonal setting.
[00:10:19] This is probably just going to sound like an old person's lament, but going into certain public spaces like just, say, a store or a cafe or something, and there'll be this song on that. You love this really weird, obscure song and you'll say to the human working there, ‘Oh my God, I can't believe you're playing this’, and they just look at you with glazed eyes because they don't know what this song is. They've just put on a playlist or they've just, you know, hit the algorithm, and this is just music that's being generated, and I don't know, that's felt a little bit sad to me. I guess, as a young person, I experienced so much bonding over music. Whereas you would make new pals via just meeting a human who loved the same things as you, which in a pre-digital era was...carried so much meaning. I'm not sure if it still does carry as much meaning for young people now? I'm sure it must. It's like you still feel this need to identify with things and then, um, you know, bond and gather with the other people who identify with the same things. But, that felt a little bit sad to me where, you know, where I wanted to bond about someone playing the Memory Tapes remix of ‘Tanlines’ from 2009 or whatever it is, and they just looked at me like I have no idea what this is and you should maybe go away! (laughs) You know!
There's this film that is just about to open here called ‘Hearts Beat Loud’. It's about a dad and daughter making a band. In this film, which is so indicative of the way things are, the main guy in the film hears his song in a cafe and is like, "what the fuck?" to the worker there like "are you playing this?" And they're just like "oh no, this is just some indie music, hot indie music playlist", and I feel like that's, that's possibly the way things work now. That that's the making it moment, you know, like not getting played on the radio as such, but getting on some big playlist that will bring with it, like, lots of exposure and lots of revenue.
Annaliese [00:12:22] Thank you to Anthony Carew for ‘Confessions from an Online Playlister’. Be sure to check out his exquisite musical taste on his radio show on Three Triple R FM in Melbourne called the ‘International Pop Underground’. Thanks also to Beth Atkinson-Quinton, for editorial support; Davey Lane for the music for this episode; and First Kiss Goodnight as ever for our intro theme. And next time you select that workout or party playlist, spare a thought for the human that made it!
[00:12:49] We'll see you next time on All Ears.
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