The Russian Cake Switcheroo

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2:24Check check check check check. All right. Are we doing an intro? I don't have an intro. No, I'm just, I can say, okay. Do you want me to do a whole thing or no? If you have somehow prepared a thing, you can always do a thing. Do you have a thing? You don't even know why you're here. How can you have a thing? Well, the thing about the podcast world, PJ, is it can be kind of competitive. It can be very competitive. And I don't know if you're aware of this, but that kind of competition can cause hurt feelings. Certainly. It can cause people to grow unhappy, resentful even. Are you feeling those feelings?

3:02No, but I appreciate the fact that although you have your own podcast that you're working on, you don't feel so competitive that you're not willing to invite the host of a competing podcast, Search Engine Engine. The show that has been launched within my show and apparently is now competing with my show. That's right.

3:24This podcast Califa hosts, a competitor to Search Engine called Search Engine Engine, does in fact exist. There's one episode so far. Published behind our paywall, which means it's only available to our incognito mode listeners. But that was not why Kay was here today. Kay knows more about music than anybody I know. He has a book called Major Labels that somehow covers the entire evolution of pop music in a fun and breezy way. If I have a question about music that I can't answer, he's the person I always go to. Okay, we got a listener question that I wanted to ask you about. I'm going to lead up to that question first to set a little bit of context.

4:03I think I know the answer to this question, but just in case there's a random lacuna in your musical knowledge. Are you familiar with the band Cake?

4:14Yes, I am. How would you describe their music? Uh, sprightly indie rock with kind of talky vocals over the top. How do you, do you like them or not like them? I like them a little bit. Sacramento, if I'm not mistaken. Is that where they're from? I think so, yeah. The big hit is Short Skirt Long Jacket. Yeah. Is that correct? Yeah.

4:37I remember in the early 2000s, I think there was crossover with this Brooklyn band called Chick Chick Chick. A guy who played in Chick Chick Chick, I think had played with cake. And then actually later ended up playing with LCD sound system. There's a saying before GBS was widespread where they used to study the brains of London cabbies. And there was like a part of their brain that either lit up more or maybe had grown more. I'm sure that's wrong. But it was just sort of a scientific marvel how the human mind could expand to contain knowledge. And when you talk about music in this way, I feel like I'm talking to a London cabbie in 1997.

5:13Isn't it possible that brains don't actually expand and that it's zero sum? That you're deleting a lot of stuff. Yeah, that you'd be horrified by all the stuff that's not in my brain. Your kid's birthday? Okay, are you familiar with the hip-hop artist, and I may mispronounce this, Pulyanevetru? No. Russian hip-hop. I don't know how well you know Russian hip-hop. No, you could be making this up just to trick me and get me to say like, oh yeah, first album's great, and then it turns out it's fake. No, no, no, real band, real band, real, not an entirely popular group, but a group that does perform music.

5:47I have a certain linguistic prejudice when it comes to hip-hop, so my knowledge of non-anglophone hip-hop is almost non-existent. Have you listened to any German hip-hop? Not voluntarily. Better than you'd think. Anyway, our listener is a Cake fan, and Cake, he knew, had not put out a new record in years. So he got excited when he saw this notification saying there's a new cake song out. And also that it's a collaboration with this little known Russian hip hop artist. I just want to play this song. It's called Bye Bye.

6:29What do you hear? I hear a flow that reminds me a little bit of Bone Thugs-In-Harmony. The 808 kicks and some production that, you know, sounds a little bit like chronic era, like West Coast hip-hop, right? It has those zap-derived synthesizers, maybe. What else do you hear? Like I said, I haven't really listened to much German hip-hop, so I don't know. Russian hip-hop. Oh, Russian hip-hop, excuse me. So I don't know how it fits into the Russian hip-hop landscape. You have not pointed out that you hear a lot of Keg's influence in this collaboration. No, no. If you had not mentioned Cake and you had asked me to list 500 groups that might have influenced this, Cake would not be among them.

7:11So our listener had been curious about why Cake was releasing such an un-Cake-like song. And our listener was not the only person wondering about this. Cake, there's this website called Reddit where fans of something, whether it's a band or a podcast, can gather to talk about how that thing used to be better in the past. Reddit, you say? I try not to go. And on the Cake subreddit, people are losing their minds about this new song. Somebody says, I'm just going to read this, quote, Hi, fellow fans. Does anyone know the story of this song? Just released on Spotify, but definitely doesn't sound like the cake I know.

7:43Does anybody have any information about it for me or about the other band, Puglia Net Vetru? I can't find anything with my meager Google skills, if only there was a podcast for this. He didn't say that. Someone else chimes in, just like to say one thing. What the actual fuck is this song? It's in a different language. And then the third person says, I'm so confused. Is this a hack? Is this a hack? Which basically, it seems like there's three possible theories for what has happened here. One, which I would like to be true, but I'm pretty sure is not true, is just that Cake was like, we're pivoting.

8:17Musical makeover. Musical makeover. The other possibility is that Spotify had been hacked. The third is just that Spotify had made some very strange filing error, which you would think they would be set up to not do. but we wanted to investigate so we wanted to know if you could look into this. That sounds like exactly something I can do. It involves messing around on Spotify you say? Yes. I think I was built for this. Okay great.

8:46After the break Kay gets some answers.

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11:12Welcome back to the show. So a few months after that first conversation with Kay, he texted me and told me he thought he had an answer. We went back to the studio to discuss. Okay, let's go to our story. Where are we? Where are we, PJ? What I recall is that a listener had sent in a question. They went to Cake's Spotify page. They hit play on what seemed like surprising. Surprising because Cake is a relatively quiet band. But there's a new Cake song. They hit play. It doesn't really sound like a Cake song. sounds like Russian rap music by this artist named Pulya Nevetru. Pulya Nevetru. And the question was kind of like, obviously something is wrong here.

11:54Is it that Pulya Nevetru has gamed the system and hijacked Cake's page? Is it an error? Is it some third stranger option? Is it a very unlikely collaboration? You never know. Maybe a member of Cake is playing almost inaudible guitar on this track. That is the outcome I would most hope for. Secret Cake. Secret Cake. So you looked into this. Yes. What did you find? Okay, so the first thing we did, we wrote to the American band Cake. We emailed their manager, who confirmed that, yeah, he had received some questions and complaints from American Cake fans. He said this was not a real collaboration.

12:33Which we expected. So instead, we decided to look at the Spotify side of this. we talked to a guy who actually used to work at Spotify. Hi, Glenn. Hello. How are you? Can I start by just having you say your name and to level set, what's the last song you listened to on purpose? My name is Glenn McDonald, and the last song I listened to is a fantastic cover of the new model army song Vengeance by the gothic metal band Crippled Black Phoenix. It's really good.

13:18This is one of many things I learned from your book is that you love goth metal covers of popular songs. I do indeed. Okay. And so Glenn, like me, is like a real music nerd. I would argue he's more of a music nerd than I am, and I don't say that lightly. I've never heard you say that about anybody. So, like, literally when you were, like, sort of the handshake that people that don't do sports do, which is, like, what do you listen to? Where do you find that? Oh, I like this. Like, when you were doing that with him, he knew bands you didn't know? He knew, like, genres I didn't know. Really? Glenn tried to build a map of all the music genres in the world, which involved coming up with new names for new genres based on clusters of listeners that he was finding.

14:03and he's analyzing the waveform of the song, but he's also building like a multidimensional social map to see like, oh, people who like this thing also like this thing. Here's how far this genre is from that genre. Glenn doesn't work at Spotify anymore, but he used to be one of the lead engineers there. And when he was there, he had access to all kinds of data and information. And he also had his hands on all the different levers trying to make Spotify better at recommending new music for its users? You know, most people, most of the time, want to hear the stuff they like. I think of listening in these three concentric circles.

14:45And the middle circle is my stuff. Most of the time I listen to my stuff. And then the second circle is I've become slightly bored with what I know of my stuff, and I want more of my stuff. Not radically different stuff, just like new albums by the same bands, new bands in the same genres, just like some new songs, but they're the kind of songs that I already like. And then the third circle is I want to discover something new. I want to see what else there is in the world. The problem is if you encounter unexpected things when you think you're being given things that you already like, they sound like errors.

15:25Right. Right. And so part of what Spotify does is it tries to show people new music that they might like that's different from music they're listening to, but not too different. Otherwise, they're going to be unhappy and maybe turn off the app. And so the search engine listener who wanted to hear cake and ended up hearing Russian rap had like the bad version of the Spotify experience. This is what's not supposed to happen on Spotify, as you hear something that sounds like it has no relationship to the thing you actually wanted to hear. So, I thought Glenn might be able to explain how this could possibly happen.

15:59So, I actually read him the question from our listener. So, we here at Search Engine International Corporate Headquarters got an email from a listener who understands that when we say no question too small, we really mean it. Can I read it to you? Yeah. All right. So, here's the email. I went to listen to the band Cake, and they had a new song on Spotify. Their first release in like 20 years or so. I think it was actually maybe 13 years or something. And it was the least Cake-sounding song ever. It sounds like Russian rap and bad Russian rap. You know what they say, everyone's a critic, right?

16:39Yeah. The band they apparently collaborated with is Pulya Navetru. I think they, Cake, may have been hacked. But how can that happen? Wouldn't this be an easy fix? so confused? Ah, this is a great question. And so here's what cake sounds like. Reluctantly crouched at the starting line. Engines pumping and thumping in time. The green light flashes, the flags go up. Churning and burning, they yearn for the cup. They deftly maneuver and muscle for rank. Fuel burning fast on an empty tank. Reckless and wild. And then here is Puglia Navetru featuring cake.

17:33So there we have it, Pulya Navetru featuring Cake. That track has about 76 ,000 listeners, which is less than anything from the last Cake album, but more than anything else from Pulya Navetru. Is this an honest mistake? So the way you probably imagine the streaming music business works, if you are not in the streaming music business, but you have done other things online, is that artists upload things to Spotify like you would upload your wedding video to YouTube. And thus, if something is on Cake's page that probably isn't Cake, they must have been hacked. And the amazing truth is the system that the whole music business runs on is like orders of magnitude less sophisticated than that.

18:30So Glenn explained that Spotify doesn't work the way YouTube works. YouTube, you can put whatever you want on there. But Spotify, you, PJ, can't just record a song, or in your case, a rap, and upload it to Spotify. Generally, you need a middleman. You need what's called a distributor. Everything gets to streaming services via distributors. And those distributors send giant bulk files, audio with XML metadata. And artists can be identified with unique IDs, but don't have to be. And thus, especially from Mendy distributors, are often just referred to by name. So Spotify probably gets a thousand files a day that have names that just say the artist's name is Cake, or just like a thousand short common word names, and then has to figure out, okay, of all the artists named Cake, of which there are probably a hundred, which one is this?

19:39But he said that even with this middleman system, which greatly limits the amount of content that's uploaded to Spotify, it still isn't feasible to review every song before it gets uploaded. There's still way too much stuff. Got it. And so there's a giant trust system that controls all of this and is trivially abused or accidentally abused. And so when I was still at Spotify, I spent quite a bit of energy that I honestly didn't want to spend trying to guard against this, making tools that would look at the week's upcoming releases and look at patterns of, oh, that's funny, Cake has never had a release from that distributor before.

20:27He even had some tools, including some algorithmic tools, that he could check and be like, Like, oh, the WAV file of this audio recording doesn't actually look like the way a WAV file of cake would usually look like. So it's almost algorithmically or through machine learning or whatever, doing something similar to how your credit card company is like, oh, it's weird that all of a sudden you're trying to use your Chase card in North Dakota. You've never been there. And you're buying 30 boxes of diapers. You've never bought any baby stuff. Like, we think something's going on. Like, they're doing a similar.

20:56Either you have a secret family or there's some sort of fraud. I love my family. But, like, they're doing this kind of, like, it's a combination of you're hoping that the distributors do some of the moderation work for you, and they're going to do a little bit of, like, this looks fishy checking. But it's not a wild west, but it's, like, an under-regulated west? A semi-wild west. Semi-wild west. So, okay, just to recap. Individuals are not uploading their own tracks. Tracks are uploaded by distributors. Spotify is doing some work to algorithmically prevent tracks from being attached to the wrong artist?

21:31Yeah, but there end up being mistakes inevitably. And when there are mistakes, Spotify has to go in manually and correct them. These things are easy to fix individually. So as soon as it happens, people will begin complaining. And those complaints will eventually irritate somebody enough to spend the 30 seconds it takes to move that supposed cake song on to cake number 93. So Glenn's saying that, yeah, inevitably there end up being mistakes. Smaller artists get labeled as if they were bigger artists, and it doesn't necessarily mean that the smaller artist is trying to do something sneaky. However, it's also possible that it could be strategic.

22:15PJ, do you know what Taylor Swift's first ever single was? No. It was a country song called Tim McGraw.

22:27Oh, really? Yes. And it was about people who fell in love, and she's saying, when you hear Tim McGraw, I hope you think of me.

22:42But also... But also... He's very popular at the time. He's very popular. She's a new artist. And so when people search Tim McGraw. Yeah, and even, not even just in certain searching, in terms of she's associating herself. Yes. With Tim McGraw. It goes back even before the digital era. In 1964, there was a group called the Carefreeze, who made it to number 39 on the pop chart with a song called We Love You, Beatles. We love you, Beatles. Oh, yes, we do. We love you, Beatles. And we be true When you're not me to us We're true Oh, Beatles, we love you Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Which was an attempt to cash in on Beatlemania.

23:30Yeah, and it's funny, when people do stuff like that, like when you say Taylor Swift's first single was a song called Tim McGraw, the phrase that sort of sings into my mind unbidden is, oh, Taylor Swift's good at the internet? And a lot of people who are cultural workers, cultural artists, who make stuff that goes online, which is many different types of people, one of the things that I find myself noticing, admiring, or critiquing is just, how good are they at the internet? But the point about the carefreeze is, no, it's really just being good about attention. It's understanding that there's something people are already paying attention to, and if you align with this, diss this, get near this, you may be able to refract some of that attention and use it yourself.

24:09Yes, exactly right. But I think you're right, PJ, in that the modern era where people are listening listening to music by, like, typing out the name online has actually led to more of this. There's a Dutch producer, Sam Felt, and he had a big hit in 2019 called Post Malone.