As this year’s festival season begins to wind down, I find myself stuck on one particular memory. At Glastonbury, I stood by the bins at the back of the West Holts field, behind thousands and thousands of people, straining to see and hear three tiny Sugababes on the distant stage. After a while, I asked my partner if we should leave. “Wait until they play Overload?” she said, while they were playing Overload. We stuck it out for a bit longer, then gave up.
Overcrowding was a bit of a theme. Access to the enormous Other Stage area was restricted while Avril Lavigne played. And unless you had the foresight to get there early, you had no chance of seeing Barry Can’t Swim. Bicep had to pause their set due to safety concerns. In a thoughtful piece for the dance music site Resident Advisor, editor Gabriel Szatan wrote that crowd-control issues indicated that the festival had lost touch with “how dominant electronic music has become among its current clientele”, suggesting that the wrong acts were on the wrong stages at the wrong times.
That may be true, but what if we looked at it from a different perspective? Think of those aerial shots of the festival site, which attempt to capture the sheer scale of 200,000 people descending on 600 hectares of land for the weekend. Then reinterpret them as a kind of heatmap of taste. There are more than 100 stages at Glastonbury, but certain areas heaved with bodies while others were notably sparse. More palpably than in previous years, there was a sense that everyone wanted to see the same thing. What if, guided by some invisible hand, we were all converging on the same likes and dislikes? What if taste was no longer a question of making finer and finer distinctions, but of being nudged towards uniformity?
Another example of vast numbers of people coalescing around a single musical point of reference comes in the form of Taylor Swift. Her global Eras tour, now completing its European leg in London, is already the highest-grossing of all time: she is expected to make $2bn from it, all told. Her concerts regularly break attendance records and have even been known to cause measurable seismic activity. For audiences in Seattle and in Edinburgh, the earth literally moved. It’s not like everyone on the planet listens to Taylor Swift, but those massive profits and the ground-shaking impact of her gigs suggest that there are an awful lot of us who do.
Her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department, was streamed 1bn times on Spotify in its first week, adding yet another record to the teetering pile. Swift’s megastar status means she’s one of the few artists not reliant on playlists to direct passive listeners to her work, but these often machine-made selections still have a reinforcing effect. There’s no denying that the algorithms streaming and social media are built on have dramatically altered how we listen. Spotify launched 16 years ago and now claims to have 615 million users worldwide: in less than two decades, it has fundamentally changed the way we consume music.
Despite some heel-dragging, the musical establishment has been forced to adapt to its rhythms. In 2014, the Official Charts Company finally started taking account of streams in compiling its rundown of the biggest hits. But this has painted a strange portrait of contemporary taste. As well as five separate Taylor Swift entries, the top 20 bestselling albums of 2023 included the greatest hits of Fleetwood Mac, Eminem, Abba and Oasis. This is the taste of our parents or grandparents, reflected back at us. Streaming was supposed to do away with traditional gatekeepers, such as music journalists and radio DJs, and many speculated that genre would collapse completely. And it’s true that pop, rap and country have become surprisingly fluid and interchangeable. Yet, oddly enough, we’re seeing an increasingly samey musical landscape, in which taste has become trapped in a feedback loop of the algorithm’s making. “Spotify tells you what to listen to,” says Milo, the sharply ambitious student in Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel, Caledonian Road. His advice? “Say no to algorithmically generated playlists.”
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Fundamentally, the platforms that now deliver our entertainment are geared towards providing more of the same. If a streaming service learns that you like sad songs about rivers, it will feed you more sad songs about rivers. TV is falling victim to this saminess too. I expressed a mild interest in sport documentaries on Netflix, and now it presents me with one every time I arrive there: we think you’ll love this intense series about tennis, about cycling, about sprinting. In a roundabout way, this could be how we all end up on the perimeters of a field in Somerset, desperately trying to see Mutya, Keisha and Siobhán singing Push the Button.
After Glastonbury, the Sugababes released a limited edition T-shirt, printed with the message that flashed up on signs near their stage: “West Holts full. Seek alternatives.” It was canny marketing but there’s a deeper, unintended message: actively seeking alternatives is the first step towards a less homogenised culture. The so-called dumbphone movement has seen people who feel trapped by their own screentime wresting control of their lives from ever more sophisticated devices, and might represent the first glimmerings of rebellion. As well as relieving us of the hours spent distracted by apps, putting our smartphones away undermines the algorithms that oversee our collective taste. Noticing just how much we are told what we ought to like could prod us into deciding what we do like, expanding our taste in less prescribed directions. When the field is full, seek alternatives.
Further reading
Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow (Beacon, £21.95)
Immediacy, or the Style of Too-Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh (Verso, £17.99)
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell (Melville House, £14.99)