# Streaming and Auto Selection



## Triplets (Sep 4, 2014)

An increasing number of listeners use streaming services. Most of them will now decide what music to play when the choices in your queue are up. They also offer the radio function where you just tell the service to make choices for you based on algorithms it constructs based on previous listening activity.
My wife and I listen primarily to Classical but yesterday we wanted to hear the Beatles Here Comes The Sun. When the song was over our Apple Home Pad then played a bunch of other songs from c. 1970 by other bands that we hated back then and haven’t grown any fonder of since, as we were busy doing a chore. My wife asked why Siri didn’t at least play more Beatles. The answer was that I had no idea.
I was reading yesterday in Stereophile that the recording industry made about $20B profit last year. This restores them to the peak profitability they had achieved prior to being decimated by file sharing (of course very little of this goes to the actual artists). Most of this is driven by streaming. Since this auto selection is a big part of streaming presumably auto selection must be a very popular feature.
It has been noted that this is Orwellian. Big Tech records your preferences then presumably shapes your tastes going forward, manipulating your brain so they can enhance the bottom line. Of course this is the function of all advertising, manipulating our desires for to commodities. I guess I don’t mind so much when they are trying to sell me something like toilet paper. With music, it somehow seems more of a violation.
The Radio Function can actually be useful. What’s wrong with the streaming service playing some Telemann or Vivaldi while I pay bills? Unlike FM Radio there is no advertising.
I don’t know if this is a problem. Perhaps I just wasted my time and the time of anyone that may have slogged through my turgid prose. What do others think?


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