As this year’s festival season slowly draws to a close, one particular memory remains in my mind. At the Glastonbury Festival, I was standing by the garbage bins at the back of the West Holts field, behind thousands and thousands of people, trying to see and hear three tiny Sugababes on the distant stage. After a while I asked my partner if we should leave. “Let’s wait until they Overload play,” she said, even though they were playing it. We held on for a little while longer, then gave up.
Overcrowding was a recurring problem. While Avril Lavigne was playing, access to the huge area of Other Stage And if you didn’t have the foresight to be there early, you had no chance of Barry Can’t Swim Bicep had to stop their performance due to safety concerns. In a thoughtful post for the dance music website Resident Advisor Editor Gabriel Szatan wrote that audience control problems suggested the festival had lost sense of “how dominant electronic music has become among its current clientele,” and suggested that the wrong acts were on the wrong stages at the wrong time.
That may be true, but what if we looked at it from a different perspective? Think of the aerial photographs of the festival site that attempt to capture the sheer scale of 200,000 people gathering on 600 hectares of land this weekend. Then interpret them as a kind of Heatmap of taste new. There are more than 100 stages at Glastonbury, but certain areas were overcrowded while others were noticeably sparsely populated. Even more than in previous years, there was a sense that everyone wanted to see the same thing. What if we all had the same likes and dislikes, guided by an invisible hand? What if taste was no longer about ever finer distinctions, but about being driven towards uniformity?
More and more of the same
Another example of large numbers of people rallying around a single musical reference point is Taylor Swift. Her worldwide “Eras” tour, now wrapping up in London, is already the highest-grossing of all time: it is expected to make a total of $2 billion. Her concerts regularly break attendance records and have even been known to trigger measurable seismic activity. Audiences in Seattle and Edinburgh literally made the earth shake. It’s not as if everyone in the world listens to Taylor Swift, but these huge profits and the earth-shattering impact of her concerts suggest that there are an awful lot of us who do.
Her latest album, The Tortured Poets Departmentwas streamed a billion times on Spotify in its first week, adding another record to the teetering pile. Swift’s megastar status means she is one of the few artists who doesn’t rely on playlists to direct passive listeners to her work. Still, these often machine-generated selections have a magnifying effect. There’s no denying that the algorithms that underpin streaming and social media have dramatically changed the way we listen to music. 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 latecomers, the music establishment was forced to adapt to its rhythm. In 2014, the Official Charts Company have finally started to take streams into account when compiling their greatest hits list. But this has painted a strange picture of contemporary taste. The top 20 best-selling albums of 2023 include five Taylor Swift tracks, as well as the biggest hits of Fleetwood Mac, Eminem, Abba and Oasis. This is the taste of our parents or grandparents reflected in us. Streaming was supposed to make traditional gatekeepers like music journalists and radio DJs obsolete, and many speculated that the genre would collapse entirely. And it’s true that pop, rap and country have become astonishingly fluid and interchangeable. Yet, strangely, we are witnessing an increasingly uniform music landscape, with taste trapped in a feedback loop of the algorithm itself. “Spotify tells you what to listen to,” says Milo, the ambitious student in Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel Caledonian Road. His advice? “Say no to algorithmically generated playlists.”
Time for a rebellion against uniformity
The platforms we use to get our entertainment today are basically designed to provide more of the same. If a streaming service finds out that you like sad songs about rivers, it will feed you more sad songs about rivers. Television falls victim to this sameness too. I’m a little bit into sports documentaries on Netflix, and now I’m presented with one every time I go there: we think you’ll like this intense series about tennis, about cycling, about sprinting. In a roundabout way, that could lead to us all ending up on the side of a field in Somerset, desperately trying to catch Mutya, Keisha and Siobhán singing Push the Button to see.
After Glastonbury, the Sugababes released a limited edition T-shirt printed with the message that flashed on signs near their stage: “West Holts full. Seek alternatives.” It was clever marketing, but there is a deeper, unintended message: actively seeking alternatives is the first step towards a less homogenised culture. so-called dumbphone movement has shown that people who feel trapped by their own screen time are wresting control of their lives from increasingly sophisticated devices, and may be the first sign of rebellion.
Putting away our smartphones not only frees us from the hours of distraction of apps, but also undermines the algorithms that police our collective tastes. Realizing how much we’re being told what to like might lead us to decide what we like and expand our tastes in less prescribed directions. When the field is crowded, look for alternatives.
Rebecca Nicholson is a columnist for the Guardian
