My eldest daughter dropped a musical bombshell: she wanted to see a band called Cigarettes After Sex in concert. For a girl who prefers staying in her room, proactively wanting to venture out into a sea of people is like a siput babi willingly leaving its shell.
My own musical taste today is basically musical whiplash – one minute I’m bobbing to slick K-pop music, the next I’m headbanging to rock until my neck questions my life choices, before finally collapsing into a classical music-induced meditation. So when my daughter mentioned this band that I’d never heard of, it got me thinking about how music algorithms know us better than we know ourselves.
Speaking of algorithms, they’ve been trying to crack the music code since before my daughter was born. Pandora’s Music Genome Project launched in 1999 – practically the Jurassic era in internet years – and was one of the first times a computer could actually suggest music that people wanted to hear.
These days, tech companies know us so intimately through our digital breadcrumbs that they’re basically our nosy aunties (yes, you’re reading this thanks to LinkedIn playing matchmaker). Peeking at my daughter’s Spotify recommendations tells me more about her inner world than years of attempted dinner table conversations.
I worked on recommendation algorithms to encourage phone top-ups, new contracts, and customer retention by analyzing user behavior. While the telecommunications data was insightful for improving experiences and generating revenue, it wasn’t deeply personal like musical tastes. Now, if I had access to Spotify’s treasure trove of data though, I’d be the ultimate fortune teller, reading people’s souls through their guilty pleasure playlists.
The concert adventure began with a parking situation that felt like a post-apocalyptic traffic jam. I dropped my wife and kids at the entrance while I try to find a place to park. After I abandoned my car somewhere in the next postal code, I waded through an ocean of black-clad teens who clearly got the all-black dress code memo that my wife and I missed.
The show itself was wonderfully on-brand – think anti-Red Bull but in musical form. Greg Gonzalez, the lead singer, was glued to his microphone stand like a long-lost love while barely moving enough to prove he wasn’t a hologram. The artsy black-and-white video screens perfectly matched the band’s aesthetic of “feelings but make it noir.”
While my daughters vanished into the crowd (presumably to get close enough to verify the band wasn’t actually CGI), my wife and I found ourselves surrounded by a forest of iPhones capturing every moment. Pro tip: want to study phone brand demographics? Just count the glowing rectangles hovering above a concert crowd – it’s like a marketing survey set to music.
An hour and one supremely mellow encore later (because apparently, we weren’t quite mellowed enough), we faced our final boss battle: the parking lot exodus. During that glacial crawl home, I had to admit – the music wasn’t half bad, even if it did make a sloth look hyperactive in comparison.
Maybe I’m just showing my age here, but nothing beats the musical feast that was the 80s. Sure, we had questionable hair and even more questionable fashion choices, but we knew how to make music.