In a conference room on the 11th floor of Google’s New York office, the Google Play Music editorial team ponders the future of YG , the gangsta rapper from Compton. The room is rather austerely furnished for Google standards – there is only a red sofa, chrome lamps and a large monitor on the far wall. The monitor displays the results of a new playlist titled “Blogged Pop Party” —the editors review them all together. The average age of the people in the room is about 30 years old, they are dressed in a casual style, and from the outside the discussion process resembles the intense analysis of the game by the coaches of a sports team.
All data is collected in a table using Google Docs. Each song is ranked according to the Song Score metric – it includes data on various indicators of listening (duration, frequency of skipping, quantity and ratio of “liked” / “disliked”). Editors have access to this data through a special content management system called Jamza. This system can recommend different tracks to add to playlists based on already added content or based on certain keywords.
Tens of thousands of Telugu Movie Songs lists are the work of 20 full-time Google Play Music editors. They are helped by a wide network of freelancers, choosing music for a specific taste, mood, time of day or for the listener’s occupation. This referral concierge service has been a well-known feature of startup Songza. This app was acquired by Google in 2014 for $ 39 million.
discussion revolves around the name of the new list and proposals to change the name from “Blogged Pop Party” to simply “Blog Beats”. Each of the curators has his own opinion regarding potential changes and the further fate of both the list of musical works itself and the compositions that make up it.
The job of curators and their value to innovative companies like Google – the corporation that invented page ranking in search, street view street view, and self-driving cars – is to recognize trends and drive consumer tastes and identities. However, this work cannot be called easy and pleasant: quite often people try to pass off wishful thinking and lie when they say that they “listen to everything”.
Organizing musical tastes and works is not an easy task, where simple categorization by genre does not always yield the best results. Lists tailored to what a person is doing at the moment or to his mood are becoming more and more popular. This is already understood not only in Spotify, but also in Apple Music. The categorization of music on a utilitarian basis has one more reason, a purely economic one. Making your way through the “forest” of 30 million tracks is a task similar to finding your way along a crowded highway, where without the ability to quickly navigate in road signs and signs, you will definitely “turn the wrong way”.
The same thing happens to the listener. It is much easier to choose a ready-made list of “songs that will calm you down” than to make a list of such songs from tens of millions of tracks yourself. There are listeners looking for playlists with overtly exotic genres or themes. Curators have to balance between supply and demand, each time inventing and proposing something new.
Bosses in the Sound World: “People don’t know what they want until you tell them.”
The most influential figure with extraordinary audiophile intuition is Jimmy Iovine, co-founder of Interscope Records and Beats Music. It was he who collaborated with Bruce Springsteen as sound engineer on his Born to Run album, produced Patti Smith’s Easter album, Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes record and U2’s Rattle and Hum.
But in our time everything happens a little differently than we are used to – now the curator does not keep his finger on the pulse and indicates what to listen to, but rather he himself follows certain trends and simply “lifts up” this or that track or genre. Curators do not just react to what is happening, they themselves put their hands to the formation of new discoveries and names in the musical world. It seems that both the curators themselves and the music lovers who listen to them like it.
