Latest news with #Napster
Telegraph
10 hours ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Google could steal the entire internet
Google has shown us what the end of the internet looks like. It calls it AI Mode. From Tuesday, instead of seeing ten blue links to third party websites when searching Google, users will see digests of information created by AI. Google says this 'lets you ask nuanced questions that would have previously required multiple searches.' Sometimes there is value in these digests – as demonstrated by AI startup Perplexity. However, the change has catastrophic economic consequences because of Google's dominant position over what we see on the web; AI mode removes the need to visit the site that created the original material. Google, it should be remembered, was found guilty of maintaining a monopoly by an American federal court last summer. An analytics study last week suggested that the top ranking site in blue link Google loses 79 per cent of its traffic after AI summaries are introduced. Other surveys suggest even more: as much as 96 per cent. This is not how the web was supposed to end. Sir Tim Berners Lee's original vision was of a rapid publishing technology, a two way conversation much like the telephone. When Google was young, it promised to get out of our way. 'We wanted people to spend a minimum amount of time on Google. The faster they got their results, the more they'd use it,' said founder Larry Page in 2004. But now Google has become like The Eagles' Hotel California – you can check in, but never leave. That's in keeping with an extractive industry which takes much from publishing but gives little back. AI makes this an order of magnitude worse. Generative AI breaks an informal social contract that has existed since the dawn of business: that a buyer should take a keen interest in the health of its suppliers. AI, though, is replacing suppliers entirely: an analogy is eating the seed corn. For having ingested everything from entire research libraries to newspapers, from YouTube to the works of every gallery, AI can create fine tuned pastiches and continue to produce them forever. Google can also punish sites that refuse to be scraped with a kind of corporate death sentence: making them disappear from Google. A former Facebook engineer, Georg Zoeller, who also advises Asian governments on AI, says generative AI is little more than piracy disguised by hype. 'Large language models are just storage, and all they are doing is compressing knowledge,' he says. 'The industry would have been murdered in its crypt if it had told the truth, and people realised that on the other side of the bot is a Napster'. The magic trick is how AI disguises the theft. Google says the old search results will still be available if you want – or can find them. Britain's Competition and Markets Authority has investigated the company's use of generative AI, but its remedies are so far very tentative, and it is soliciting views. The CMA also finds British business paying a very high toll to maintain Google's advertising dominance: UK publicly listed companies spend £10 billion with Google advertising, which the CMA suggests is far higher than it would be in a competitive digital ad market. The CMA can and should do much more to tame this predatory giant, so British internet businesses can survive.
Buzz Feed
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
21 Forgotten Websites From The Early 2000s
TikTok, Instagram, and social media as a whole have definitely taken a toll on today's youth. They'll never understand the struggles of the early internet, when nothing was at your fingertips, and high-speed connections were a luxury. The internet was a weird, clunky place. Not nearly as all-consuming as it is now, but those early browsing days laid the groundwork for the kinds of communities we now see on modern platforms. Back then, followers weren't the metric for anything, mostly because no one was being followed. Technically, you were making "friends," whether it was strangers you added to your Top 8 on MySpace or people with cool Neopets you kept tabs on. Those early internet days truly shaped our online lives. In a lot of ways, they made us more grateful for the instant access we have now. Napster and LimeWire basically walked so Spotify could run, if we're being honest. But there's something deeply nostalgic about that bare-bones version of the web — messy, slow, and full of personality. I recently stumbled across a post on r/AskReddit where someone asked, 'What's an early Internet site kids these days will never know?' From pre-Google search engines to flash game havens, here are 21 of the most beloved early internet websites people are reminiscing about: "Addicting Games." "Ask Jeeves." "I remember I held out on Google for a long time because I used a site called Dogpile. Edit: Just checked and it's still running. Very cool, maybe I will have to go back to my roots." "Homestar Runner." "Geocities." "The old Cartoon Network website. Treasure trove of games. I, for one, had a blast making my own Codename: Kids Next Door ID and printing it at my mom's office. Color and all." "I still have an Angelfire site online from the mid-to-late '90s. Have no password for it, no idea how to access it. I think the page counter stopped counting." "Ebaum's World." "I really wish the old Candystand was still around. I want to play Lifesavers mini-golf again for the nostalgia. I still remember learning about it in study hall because a teacher let one of the football stars play Candystand mini-golf on the smart board. I went home and immediately pulled it up on the family PC to start my own addiction to Candystand. They had so many great games I could play that were way more fun than writing a 20-page Shakespearean tragedy." "MetaCrawler. My first was good ol' webcrawler in '96." "Napster. The original." "StumbleUpon was such a gem. I don't know if it was because the internet was smaller back then, but it was so much easier to find diverse, but quality content. These days it feels like we're stuck to platforms that provide specific types of content and little control over the algorithm." "Even after Google came out, I stuck it out with AltaVista for a long time; I was convinced it would make the long haul over Google, even though almost all my friends had been sold already. 😅" "I still remember the song, something like, 'TO STAY ALIVE I FIGHT FOR BREATH, THEN AGAIN I DIE IN STICK DEATH, I DIE IN STICK DEATH.'" " was not blocked when I worked at a call center, so that made the workdays possible." "Anyone remember JoeCartoon?" "Obvious pick: MySpace." "'You can do only limit is you. Welcome, you. YES zombocom.'" "Neopets." "Awwww I miss ThinkGeek so much, they had such cool shit" "Miniclip (still exists but looks nothing like what it used to look like back in 2008/2009). With smartphones and apps you can install directly, I somehow doubt kids are using Miniclip or websites like it. Not to mention flash games are sort of dead since the end of Adobe, from what I've understood." Do you remember any of these long-forgotten websites? Let's reminisce in the comments.
Fast Company
07-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Napster is back—and it's betting big on holographic avatars
Copyright lawsuits and ethical debates have led some to say the AI industry in its 'Napster era.' Now, Napster itself is now reentering the chat with its own AI bet. Last month, the former dot-com darling launched a conversational AI platform with dozens of 'AI companions' trained with topical expertise to help users learn, collaborate, create, and problem-solve. Napster also unveiled the View, a 2.1-inch display that attaches to a laptop as a 'second screen' for two-way 3D holographic video chats. Unlike in the '90s, the file-sharing pioneer is no longer a first mover. The nostalgia-laden brand joins an already crowded field of AI agents and competing devices from both giants and startups. Napster's platform used frontier AI models from OpenAI and Gemini to develop a new 'large persona model' (LPM) trained on 30 psychometric characteristics mined from organizational psychology, says Napster chief technology officer Edo Segal. Each companion embodies some sort of profession as a topical expert, along with therapists, doctors, nutritionists are chefs, architects, engineers, and educators. Business-minded offerings help with everything from financial planning and tax strategy to legal issues and public policy. The goal is to allow users to explore endless customizable personalities, each with distinct voices, Segal tells Fast Company: 'We've made it possible to effectively explore building these endless universes of these personas.' Napster's platform is based on tech developed by Touchcast, a startup founded by Segal that Infinite Reality acquired for $500 million this spring. AI comparisons to Napster's early woes aren't lost on Napster execs. Segal says it's an apt metaphor, adding that early clashes with the music industry echo more current debates about how tech giants control consumers' content, data, and audiences. Decades later, Napster wants to be seen as an ethical alternative to Big Tech. One way it's doing that: Promising users it won't share, well, or wall off their data or audiences. 'There was a lot of controversy around what Napster did, but you can't argue it wasn't user-focused,' Segal says. 'At a time like this, with AI's profound impact on society, it's useful to have a brand with a north star that puts the user first. . . . That's the important lesson to take. Obviously, we don't want the outcome to be similar to the last time around.' Gartner expects 80% of enterprise software to be multimodal by 2030, up from less than 10% last year. However, analysts predict a third of AI video generation providers could fail by 2028 because of reputational, ethical, and legal issues. Napster's plan involves letting people create and customize new avatars or even make one in their own likeness. It's already working with London's Imperial College, where professors can create avatars for students to talk with outside office hours that come with transcripts of interactions afterward. Another early adopter is the Portuguese soccer league Benfica, which created an immersive 3D version of its e-commerce site and a way for fans to chat with an AI Companion about the team, jerseys, and related topics. 'What makes people feel heard and seen?' Napster's AI pivot is the latest in a series of attempts by various owners to ride its brand cachet during emerging tech waves. In March, it sold for $207 million to Infinite Reality, an immersive digital media and e-commerce company, which also rebranded as Napster last month. Since 2020, other owners have included a British VR music startup (to create VR concerts) and two crypto-focused companies that bought it to anchor a Web3 music platform. Napster's launch follows a growing number of attempts to drive AI adoption beyond smartphones and laptops. Startups like Humane, Rabbit, and Bee have either flopped or at least failed to gain much traction. Giants like Meta and Google are moving forward with their AI-enabled smart glasses. (And then there are other still secret projects like whatever OpenAI's making with former iPhone designer Jony Ive.) What makes Napster think it can succeed where others haven't? Part of the strategy is charging people a low subscription fee starting at $19 per month or to bundle it with the Napster View for $199. The trick is moving Napster beyond its music legacy. Some experts are skeptical if holographic avatars are even needed. Voice and text will see adoption much faster unless there's a specific need for video, says Gabo Arora, founder and CEO of the immersive tech startup Lightshed. 'That's the crucial thing,' says Arora. 'You know it's fake, but you don't want to feel too self-aware of this. The broader thing with all this is that we are now in the intimacy economy. What makes people feel heard and seen and connected?' Despite its controversial origin story, Napster still was a 'really good brand' known for being disruptive and innovative, says Napster president and chief marketing officer Karina Kogan. Infinite Reality had spent years buying companies related to AI, virtual reality, and other metaverse-related industries. After buying Napster, it seemed like a way to unite them all under a recognizable name. '[Napster's brand] feels like an accelerant to getting us into the market versus trying to build a lot of equity into Infinite Reality,' Kogan says. 'As a marketer, the challenge is which challenge would I rather take on: Is it harder to drive awareness or change perception? . . . How do we make people experience Napster as more than a music service or more than what it was like 20 years ago?' 'We have a massive product road map' While Napster is selling the idea of customizable AI avatars as helpful, the reality is more nuanced. While some researchers have found people resist the AI broader companion category for its lack of inauthenticity, other recent findings suggest AI companions can reduce loneliness. There's still growing concern that constant AI conversation could dull critical thinking, foster dependency, provide inaccuracies, and even lead to disturbing psychological effects. When asked about its plans for adding safeguards to protect users, execs say they have bans in place against certain types of harmful answers. Chats also come with a disclaimer that says 'AI can make mistakes. Check important info.' Whether people even want an infinite array of options to choose from is a question. Companies tend to drive adoption of new tech by copying platforms that have worked in the past, says Samantha Wolfe, a professor at New York University who teaches a class on AI avatars. She thinks Napster's platform seems almost like an app store—instead of merely creating AI avatars to chat with based on celebrities or other parasocial relationships. 'It feels like they're skinning AI applications,' says Wolfe. 'It's nice having apps on your iPhone in a way that each has its own expertise. [Napster's AI Companions] are like they're all individual people-apps.' Voice capabilities could strengthen interactions with AI companions, says marketing professor Stefano Puntoni, codirector of the Wharton Human-AI Research at the University of Pennsylvania. He also notes research suggests anthropomorphic cues can influence customer responses. 'People often avoid adopting AI companions because they don't believe that these are 'true' relationships,' says Puntoni, who studies the ways AI chatbots impact on areas like loneliness and consumer habits. 'The interesting thing is that at the same time, people do acknowledge that AI can fulfill many of the concrete aspects of relationships.' Knowing if people want holographic AI experts could determine Napster's ability to find a niche through its new metaverse-minded home. It's also just one of Infinite Reality's many bets: In the past year, it's spent at least $1 billion buying companies specializing in generative AI (Touchcast), avatars (Action Face), game development (LandVault) and spatial web experiences (Ethereal Engine). The challenge will be tying it all together. 'We're putting products into the market and looking for feedback and signals,' Kogan says. 'Sometimes the thing you think is going to hit isn't the thing that hits . . . There's obviously more strategy behind our decisions. We have a massive product road map.'
Zawya
30-06-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Napster launches Napster Companion and Napster View
Napster Companions engage in video chat that feels natural and intuitive, and have memory so they don't just understand your tasks—they understand you Dubai, UAE — Following the announcement of its rebrand from Infinite Reality to Napster Corporation and acquisition of Touchcast for $500 million, Napster —the innovation company powering the next generation of digital media and ecommerce—today introduced two products: Napster Companion (NC), a conversational AI platform offering natural video interactions with a vast ecosystem of intelligent agents, and Napster View, a 3D second-screen device designed to bring these dynamic, two-way conversations to life in immersive, spatial form. Together, these tools seek to evolve how consumers engage with AI everyday by offering lifelike personas built to help you learn new skills, solve problems, create, and grow - all over video. Whether you're looking for personalized meal plans or tackling complex equations on a spreadsheet, Napster Companions offer expertise and empathy, and are designed to feel like a trusted partner, not a chatbot. No written prompts. Just natural video conversations. Napster Companion: An Ecosystem of Multi-Modal Personified Agents Napster Companion is a scalable assistant platform that connects individuals to a suite of domain-specific intelligent and personality-driven AI agents. Each Napster Companion is designed leveraging Napster Corp's proprietary pipeline that incorporates thirty psychometric parameters that make each agent distinct with its own character, domain expertise, communication style, and task fluency. Unlike traditional chatbots or generic assistants, Napster Companions are embodied mentors—available 24/7 through live video—offering dynamic, human-like interaction tailored to each user's needs. Rather than relying solely on text or voice commands, these persistent, context-aware agents remember past interactions, adapt over time with endlessly optimized personalization, and support both reactive and proactive workflows, including document collaboration and task-based guidance in real time. The Napster Companion library covers a nearly infinite number of categories of knowledge such as cooking, health, finance, education, fitness, design, software development, and much more. If an agent does not already exist, the Napster Companion platform auto-generates a new one on the fly, in real-time, so no user query is left unanswered. Key Differentiators: No Text Prompts, Just Talk – Start a conversation like you would with a friend. Your Napster Companion understands and responds via live video. An Endless Universe of Experts – Covering everything from tax prep to travel planning, cooking to coding, fitness to finance. Don't see an agent that fits your needs? Just type in your query and a new agent and video is generated. Empathic, Engaging Personas – Built using over 30 personality traits, agents are designed to be relatable and helpful, and have memory and empathy. Live Document Collaboration – Collaborate on documents via uploads like slides, contracts, or spreadsheets. Your Conversations, Your Data – Conversations are secure, and can be exported by you anytime. Napster Companion is available for $19 per month, or users can opt for an annual subscription at $219, which includes a complimentary Napster View device, a $199 value. For those who prefer a usage-based option, 100 hours of Companion access is available for $95, while the 200-hour pack—priced at $189—also includes a complimentary Napster View. Before choosing a plan, visitors can try the experience for free with 15-minutes of complimentary chat provided. Napster View: A 3D Holographic Display for Streaming Chat with Napster Companions Napster View is a high-resolution 2.1" 3D holographic display designed to keep your Napster Companion in sight without cluttering your primary screen. Engineered for seamless integration into any workspace, it connects via USB-C with simple plug-and-play setup—no installation required. Crafted from sub-65g anodized aluminum, Napster View combines portability with a premium aesthetic that pairs effortlessly with modern macOS silicon computers, offering a dedicated, always-on viewport for immersive, 3D AI interaction. Napster View is included with select Napster Companion plans and will also be available for standalone purchase for $199 later this summer. 'Napster Companion and Napster View aren't traditional AI productivity tools,' said John Acunto, CEO of Napster Corp. 'We're focused on delivering a modality that's approachable and intuitive for anyone. But most important is ensuring your conversations are your business and all that data is securely stored, never sold, and can be exported by you at any time. Ultimately, as AI becomes a fixture in our daily routines, we want to ensure it serves users—whether individuals or enterprises—in ways that are useful, respectful, empowering, and secure.' Building on the Momentum of Napster Spaces Napster Companion and Napster View follow the successful release of Napster Spaces, an immersive AI-powered platform that allows users to easily create web pages powered by embodied AI agents. Built with enterprise and creative communities in mind, Napster Spaces turns static legacy websites into living, conversational experiences—in minutes, not sprints. 'With the formation of Napster AI, we're laying the groundwork for an integrated ecosystem that puts meaningful, human-centered technology in everyone's hands,' said Edo Segal, CTO of Napster Corp. 'Napster Spaces, Companion, and View represent the first steps in our long-term vision to build the tech stack for the future AI-powered internet.' -Ends- About Napster (formerly Infinite Reality) Napster is an innovation company powering the next generation of digital media and ecommerce through spatial computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and other immersive technologies. Napster's suite of cutting-edge software, production, marketing services, and other capabilities empower brands and creators to craft inventive digital experiences that uplevel audience engagement, data ownership, monetization, and brand health metrics. For more information, visit Napster owns a wide portfolio of companies and capabilities, having executed a number of acquisitions throughout its history, including but not limited to Thunder Studios, Napster/Rhapsody, Talent X, Obsess, Landvault, the Drone Racing League, and Touchcast. Media Contact: jana@
Mint
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
How music discovery became predictable
If I could, I'd pay serious money to travel 20-something years back in time to experience Nirvana's ground-breaking album, Nevermind, for the very first time again. Having borrowed a cassette from a schoolfriend, I found an opportune time to go to my parents' room and use the two-in-one music system—a 'deck". This wasn't a parent-friendly record; on Smells Like Teen Spirit, the main guy, Kurt Cobain, screams about his libido repeatedly. While I'd heard one Nirvana song—Come As You Are, via a stray MP3 on someone's CD—I had little idea what was coming next: a sonic thunderstorm that would blow my teenage brain right out of my ears. All of this today sounds like gibberish. 'Two-in-one"? 'Cassette"? 'MP3"? In the early-to-mid-2000s, these were essential terms in the cultural lexicon. Music consumption and discovery, as with every generation prior and since, was for millennials too dictated by the prevailing technology of the time, and indeed its limitations. Only, that particular period is the most tumultuous in recent music history. It was an era of upheaval, transformation, and chaos, as the world shifted from the physical to the digital: cassettes were commonplace and affordable (a standard ₹125), but they were being phased out. CDs were a popular if rather more expensive format. These were found, neatly arranged by name and genre, in brick-and-mortar shops, imagine. MP3s, available for download online, became a convenient and free alternative, existing in a lawless, peer-to-peer digital jungle via file-sharing software Napster and the clones that followed. While no longer a complete novelty, digital music wasn't yet pervasive either. But it was gaining traction, leaving the industry in turmoil as bands lost significant revenue and labels' bottomline got wrecked. Everything was illegal, pirated by amoral music nerds and spread widely by internet anarchists. Starved as we were of a lot of current music that just wouldn't release in India via conventional routes, we hit the download button. These trends defined how young people discovered their music. You could go to a Planet M to window-shop, and you'd end up finding a random band or artist that could ruin your week or change your life. Grey market spaces like Palika Bazaar—an underground and 100% illegal market in the heart of Delhi—became a source for complete (pirated) discographies, sorted into digestible MP3 folders. Cable TV, pre-streaming, was another place to find music. MTV and Channel V and, later, a channel called VH1, would play music videos all day long. NO MORE BARRIER TO ENTRY Musical tastes, for millennials and those preceding them, were shaped by a range of eclectic factors. The most exciting among these were the happy discoveries. The life-changing accidents. A random untitled mix-CD from a friend's friend's friend. A mislabelled song on the pirate software Limewire. Something you stumble upon on VH1 while channel-surfing. The songs you've never heard before, that catch you by surprise. It's this feeling where a greater force takes over your being, and compels you to dig deeper, and find out everything about that band. You have no choice but to start a new obsession immediately. Much of these tools of discovery have now, for reasons good and bad, been rendered obsolete. And while it's tempting to romanticise the past, it was also genuinely exhausting to hunt for music. Nothing ever released here on time; they played the same 50 songs on TV; MP3s were mislabelled and impossible to sift through; downloads took hours, days, weeks; tapes were dying, CDs were pricey. Today, for the price of a single cassette, a hundred-and-bit rupees, I have access to Spotify's entire library of over 100 million songs. (A relevant counterpoint here is that you're only renting this music; it could disappear tomorrow.) There was a prolonged battle for the soul of music but, by the mid-2010s, streaming had won out, becoming the preferred mode of listening globally. The barrier to entry was decimated. There are dozens of streaming platforms—the chief ones being Spotify, YouTube Music and Apple Music—each one offering (to Indians) affordable prices for their premium versions and free versions with ads. A quick sidenote: streaming platforms are a net evil to society; they've done untold damage to artists by offering them literal peanuts and devaluing art, while training listeners to never pay for what they consume. It's legalised theft. The P2P MP3 era that pioneered digitisation, while not without its problems, had a sense of reckless freedom and idealism to it. That chaos and anarchism has been replaced by a cold-blooded capitalism where the artist gets shafted while the guy above him lines his pockets. Indeed, Spotify—the loudest player in the market—faces regular criticism and has been the subject of high-profile boycotts and walkouts. (They've all returned, hat in hand, as bands are left in a no-win situation, having to pick between fans and principles.) And yet, at the same time the tech has liberated the listener by opening up access in this way. It's all very messy. NEEDLE DROPS We'll come back to streaming since it's such an omnipresent force in the world of discovery. But the olden methods—cable TV, physical stores, and such—have either withered away or been re-interpreted in modern settings. Instead of Channel V late-night broadcasts curated by Luke Kenny, people are discovering music accidentally through 'needle drops" on TV/web series they're watching on second screens. This is a curious inversion; previously, shows would use popular, recognisable songs as a cheat code to signal a pre-determined mood to the viewer. Like how no medical drama could resist throwing in the awful How to Save a Life by the Fray for a while. Now, that arrangement has flipped. Songs on shows—which are experienced differently as the viewer has an existing emotional relationship with the show's characters, as well as visual cues for context—take on new meaning and serve as introduction to an artist. Excited, the viewers rush to YouTube to comment in solidarity. They search online for more needle drops. SEO-driven aggregator websites and click-hungry publications rush to compile a list of all the songs featured on a show, which is duly converted into playlists by fans. There's also the rather more controversial method of discovery: Instagram Reels. There can be an inauthenticity and, if I may, a dishonesty about music written expressly for the purpose of going viral on social media in 30-second teasers. But it works because we all spend an inordinate amount of time on social media. Often, these songs have inescapable hooks. The format of social media short-form videos is such that the same template is reused, recycled, and rejigged during its window of relevance. Just by repeat exposure, these songs can get stuck in one's head and lead the listener on to a path of greater discovery. A lot of music listening, thus, seems to have shifted online. And to the ever-present cellphone. While previously there were different avenues—computers, music systems, Walkman or Discman, iPods—a streamlining of technology has meant that the phone is the primary device now. By way of outliers, we do have vinyl fetishists with record players; audiophiles; music nerds going deep on centralised forums like Reddit or Discord, using the Bandcamp/SoundCloud online catalogues, even buying CDs directly from young, independent bands. But mainstream habits revolve very much around streaming. In physical spaces, too, you may—at a restaurant or a bar—come across someone pointing their phone at the speaker playing music. They're 'Shazaming" a song so they can hear it again. Shazam, an app that processes a song being played and provides all details related to it, has been around forever. But it really caught fire over the past decade, and was acquired by Apple in 2018. Previously, you'd have to memorise the lyrics to look up later, or hope to hear the song again. It's a nice reminder, again, that technology can be such a valuable asset in the process of discovery. And just as often a hindrance. LIMITS OF THE ALGORITHM Which brings us to the elephant. The algorithm. Recently, I discovered something called Spotify Blend. Users can 'blend" your profile with that of a friend's, and Spotify will do its algorithm witchcraft to create a custom, shared playlist incorporating both people's musical preferences. It even offers a 'match score" to see if your music tastes align, a quick and foolproof way to tell if the relationship is going to last. You can add up to 10 friends in a Group Blend, each with their unique taste profile coming together to create one giant khichdi playlist for everyone to parse through. This is a modern retelling of community exchange; people have forever shared their music with friends in group settings. Except that we have an additional friend in the mix here: the algorithm. Streaming services offer a series of playlist options, from user playlists to 'algatorial" ones. The ones driven by the algorithm are of particular interest here. On Spotify, you get Time Capsules, Discover playlists, homepage recommendations, autoplay options—the algo never sleeps. Multiple AI and machine-learning processes work simultaneously to create this entity. Based on research, theories, and information available, the technology analyses songs via content filtering—looking at a song in isolation, studying its metadata and such—and collaborative filtering, where it's placed within a larger context. User behaviour, search history, lyrical themes, compositional structures—they're all factored in to craft personalised recommendations. I've even noticed the algorithm sometimes picking up the key in which a song is composed, and playing a series of songs that all start in that same key. Regardless of one's principled opposition to streaming, these features aid the process of discovery and make it so much easier. The algorithm is sharp, well-informed, intuitive, and will instantly gauge a listener's interest, guiding them to new places. But it raises a couple of semi-philosophical questions. For one, why should I allow the machine to tell me what to listen to? There's a volatility attached to discovery—repeat trial-and-errors driven by human emotions and external variance. Streaming, with its robotic efficiency, can flatten that unpredictability into a horizontal structure leaving little room for experiments. It knows what I like, and it'll keep feeding me. More importantly, what about the music that even I don't know I like? At a time when my music habits exclusively comprised alt-rocker misanthropes, I stumbled, on MTV, upon a song called Surfing on a Rocket by French electronica/dream pop duo Air. It led me down a circuitous path of cool electronic music I'd never have found otherwise. Algorithms—on Netflix, on social media, on music streaming—can create bubbles and echo chambers. They keep feeding you versions of things you already like and engage with. And they hide you from a world of discovery that you don't even realise exists. Those avenues for happy accidents, while very much still around, can get constricted by the self-limiting nature of algorithmic excellence. It's a complex subject, riddled with questions around access, ethics, tech manipulation, listener behaviour, maybe some moral panic—as such, all discussions around art and consumption do eventually circulate within these idealism labyrinths. And conversations around the algorithm deserve critical examination without being tainted by generational bias. But what remains steady is that new generations find novel ways to access and consume music; it can feel alienating—even existentially distressing—to those on the outside. Maybe we're losing some recipes. But the music landscape is forever fluid and evolving. And people within it will always find systems that work for them. Akhil Sood is a Delhi-based writer.
