🤖 Rage Against The Machine: AI vs Human Curation
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Happy Monday everyone!
Last week, Apple Music announced that they finally crossed the elusive mark of 100 Million songs available for streaming on their platform.
Their official statement reflected upon how far the streaming service has come 👇🏻
“ Back in the 1960s, only 5,000 new albums were released each year. Today, anywhere in the world, in 167 countries and regions on Apple Music, any artist of any description can write and record a song and release it globally 🌎
Every day, over 20,000 singers & songwriters are delivering new songs to Apple Music — songs that make our catalog even better than it was the day before 🎶
100 million songs is evidence of a more democratic space, where anyone, even a new artist making music out of their bedroom, can have the next big hit 📈”
21 years ago, when Steve Jobs introduced the original iPod, it was famously marketed as ‘ 1000 Songs In Your Pocket’, something which seemed unimaginable at the time.
However, when Apple celebrated the 100 Million songs figure last week, apart from a few music industry & technology nerds, no one seemed to bat an eyelid 🤷♂️
Why so?
Because in 2022, with over 100,000 new songs added to streaming platforms on a daily basis, users have been spoilt with too much music available for too little, or in some cases nothing 💰
And while that has problems associated around it of its own- with artists feeling that their songs are being devalued with more music now available than anyone can listen to in multiple lifetimes- for practically nothing, the interesting bit is how the top 2 streaming platforms- Spotify & Apple Music are planning to tackle the problem of ‘ Curation ‘
Human Curation vs Machine Learning
When Apple Music announced the 100 Million figure last week, a key point they added in their release note was the increased emphasis on ‘Human Curation’ as a means for users to discover great music
At Apple Music, human curation has always been the core to everything we do, both in ways you can see, like our editorial playlists; and ways you can’t, like the human touch that drives our recommendation algorithms.
Now more than ever, we know that investment in human curation will be key in making us the very best at connecting artists and audiences.
And that’s a different approach than say Spotify, which is well-known for being ahead of the curve in investing on Machine-Learning based algorithms for playlist curation.
Spotify has hundreds of data scientists on its payroll, working hard towards building models that recommend music & curate playlists for users, the most famous one being their ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist- which uses Machine Learning to curate a 30-song personalised playlist for each user every Monday.
In one of my earlier pieces, as an excerpt from Will Page’s book- ‘ Tarzan Economics’, I broke down how ‘Discover Weekly’ was an accidental success for Spotify
So which one of the approaches is actually working better?
The short answer is- no one really knows.
Well I mean, of course Spotify is the clear leader of music streaming with over 400 Million subscribers, however there’s popular discourse online that their curation sucks.
While this opinion can well be categorised as subjective, it points towards a larger trend of how the debate over AI/ML vs Human Capital is becoming all the more relevant in 2022.
Projects such as DALL-E & Stable Diffusion, which let users generate cool artistic images by just giving a few cue words, have gone viral & finally given a consumer use-cases for AI.
If you’ve been living under a rock, this video is a good primer into how these generative image tools actually work 👇🏻
With more than 2 Million images being created on a daily basis by hundreds of thousands of users, coupled with the Crypto markets tanking in 2022, it seems like every Tech enthusiast and Venture Capitalist seems to have found a new hobby.
So Is AI Taking Over The World?
One of my favourite science-fiction novels- ‘Dune’ has the theme of Humanity vs AI all over it, and in-fact even predicts a battle between humans & machines called the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ that outlaws all AI from the world.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”- Frank Herbert, Dune
While we might me quite some time away from this dystopian reality, the pace of innovation in this space is truly mind-boggling, with a new cool project cropping up every single day.
The other day I came across a podcast conversation between Steve Jobs & Joe Rogan that never actually happened 🤷♂️
What do I mean?
Jobs has never been on the Joe Rogan podcast, or never even spoken to him AFAIK, but an AI tool scraped data from thousands of hours of them talking on the Internet, & turned that into a podcast.
And the result is eerily good 🤯
Check it out here 👇🏻
Rage Against The Machine 🤖
As the story goes, Los Angeles based American rock band ‘Rage Against The Machine’ might have picked their band name as a symbolic gesture for raging against political machines & oppressive structures of capitalism, it seems like a good metaphor for what a large portion of AI skeptics seem to be arguing against.
As far the debate around AI vs Human Curation in sorting through millions of songs on streaming platforms is concerned, we at Incentify are throwing our hat in the ring at trying to solve this problem.
Our Social Network For Music enables users to start & join communities called ‘ Clubs ‘ for sharing & discovering music curated by users sharing your taste, as an alternative to listening to soulless playlists curated by AI on Spotify.
If you’re an iOS user interested to be an early user of the app, DM us on Instagram or Twitter or simply drop a comment here!
Keep Raging Against The Machine, and have a sick week folks 🤘🏻
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Originally published at https://incentify.substack.com on October 17, 2022.
