Your music taste is being manipulated: A history

17:44Emilie Friedlander:Yes, the idea of a tranche party is a really compelling concept to me. So I'm genuinely like, I want to keep doing it. And I am very curious about how this will be received. Like it's a guess that people will like this kind of thing, right? So in a perfect world, I want people to listen to it. I'm also really curious if people want to make one. Like that, I think if I had somebody hit me up and be like, yo, I have an idea for a one-off episode that I haven't been able to figure out where to put. But that would be, I think, the more success to me because I think if you make good stuff, people will find it.

18:22Emilie Friedlander:But I'm more interested in, is this a model that can unlock a new way of putting your thoughts into a fully formed thing?

18:29Andrea Domanick:Yeah, I love that.

18:31Emilie Friedlander:Yeah. Hopefully, Tranche 2 comes. Tranche Party will come. And then, yeah, who knows after that.

18:37Andrea Domanick:Yeah. Maybe we do one in LA. I actually noticed a lot of the contributors are here. So happy to assist.

18:43Emilie Friedlander:We could do a bi-coastal tronch party. Tronchchella. I mean, there's a, you know. Tronchmarland, maybe.

18:49Andrea Domanick:Tronchfall.

18:50Emilie Friedlander:Yeah, Tronchfall.

18:52Andrea Domanick:How can people support the project? Get their hands on it?

18:55Emilie Friedlander:We're releasing it through Metalabel, which is a platform that is, I would say, broadly aligned with this kind of, how do we come up with new models for creating and distributing stuff? You can go to my Instagram, which is LexaproTools. The link will be there. I'm going to be like going crazy sharing it. And I think the number one way, I was obviously paying for it and whatever. Five bucks for these great episodes, I think is an amazing deal. But also if you know of people who might be interested in this kind of thing, I send it their way, you know, email it to them, print it out and, you know, send a postcard to them.

19:26Andrea Domanick:Antimimetic. You're interested in like antimimetic distribution.

19:29Emilie Friedlander:Yeah. And, you know, there's going to be, it's also going on the internet as well, like internet 2.0, whatever it's going to be out. You can reshare, do all that, of course. But I find the most meaningful stuff that I encounter on the internet in general is being sent to me directly, like person to person, even if it's a DM or whatever. So it imbues it with a special thing when that happens. So, yeah.

19:51Andrea Domanick:And of course, you'll find it on our sub stack, the link and all that in the episode description. We'll make sure you can find it easily. And without further ado, here is an excerpt from our episode for The Tranche. It's called Free Clout for Sale.

20:06Emilie Friedlander:I've just been thinking, why do we just assume that all of this infrastructure and entertainment and open information that is beaming all over the place, all the time, into every single home on the planet is exactly what we're told it is. Maybe there are people out there who are more important than us, more powerful and wealthier than us that are communicating things and seeing things in the world that are meant for only them and not for us. I think it's fucking ridiculous to assume that media has just one purpose, right? Yeah. Oh, you think that's weird? A little. You don't ever think that maybe rich people know something that you and I don't?

20:57Andrea Domanick:Like good restaurants, maybe.

21:07Andrea Domanick:Hello, this is Andrea Dominic here with my illustrious co-host, Emily Friedlander. What's up, Emily? Chilling. And we are the co-hosts of The Culture Journalist, also known as Cujo, a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. But actually, today we are part of the tranche. The tranche. Yes, we're here. We're participating in the tranche. Good to be here. Thanks for grabbing a slice. So you've probably heard the term psyop thrown around a lot lately. That probably began in late March when writer and musician Eliza McLam published a story on Substack called Fake Fans. Her piece detailed the practices of a digital marketing agency called Chaotic Good that promised its clients virality through, among other tactics, creating networks of burner accounts and fake fan accounts to drum up perceived hype and perceived virality across the internet for the artists at hand.

22:01Andrea Domanick:Emily, who are some of those artists? So Geese was the artist that people seem to single out the most, though it was not the only band that she mentioned. She also mentioned Somber, Teddy Swims, Dijon, McGee, Wet Leg as all artists that when at the time of writing appeared on the website of Chaotic Good, it is unclear to what extent all of these people used their services. I saw one artist actually say that their name got cut off in the whole thing, but they actually never did. So take it with a grain of salt. But most people only heard geese and kind of discounted everybody else, which is something we're going to talk about.

22:43Andrea Domanick:So many people got really upset by this. The Wired article had some kind of hyperbolic headline calling geese a psyop, while others refuted that this is just digital marketing. Wasn't there a paste article about this, Andrea? Yeah, there was a Pace article that had a very sharp headline in relation to this cultural conversation. The headline was, Congratulations, you discovered digital marketing. So this is think pieces responding to think pieces responding to think pieces drum up a ton of conversation about how taste is generated, perceived, disseminated, and people had opinions on it. And so wherever you stand on the matter, one thing that was very clear is that a lot of people were just very upset by the idea that their taste might be being manipulated.

23:31Andrea Domanick:Then again, if you think that the supposed geese psyop is the first time that your taste has potentially been manipulated, we have bad news for you. The practice of taste manipulation is as old as the music industry itself. So on today's episode, we are using the past to understand what is actually going on with the geese situation, how we got here, what the ethical lines are, and whether this is a novel kind of grift or just a continuation of what has always been business as usual in the music industry. Our hunch is that it's a bit of both and that the geese situation is less a weird aberration than a microcosm of where culture and the internet are headed in general.

24:11Andrea Domanick:So here, listeners, is a little potted history of music industry grifting or the art of manipulating our music taste. While doing our research, we noticed a few recurring themes popping up. Some of them were psychological and some of them were systemic. You know, like having to do with sort of the infrastructure of the music industry. So Emily, one that you highlighted is the mimetic theory of desire. Yeah, I just I noticed kind of two psychological principles that come up repeatedly when researching the history of payola in music or payola like practices. One is the mimetic theory of desire, which comes from French philosopher René Girard.

24:54Andrea Domanick:It basically is the idea that we want what we want because somebody else wants it. And I think a lot of paola and even just marketing schemes kind of operate on that principle. A quote from his essay, Generative Scapegoating, man is the creature who does not know what to desire and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires. So, you know, seeing something like a YouTube video, like a music video that has a million views on it is going to draw you in psychologically more than a video that has six views on it because you're going to be like, oh, if so many people are into this, then it must be something worth paying attention to.

25:36Andrea Domanick:The other one is just the mere exposure effect, which is the more times that you are exposed to something, the more likely you are going to like it. So, you know, people often talk about this in terms of personal interactions. Like if you see someone over and over again every day, you are more likely to like them than if you have met them only once. Kind of the same logic behind like all press is good press, right? Yeah. Like in the media sense, it's like if you see many, many different people posting about something and you keep getting exposed to it, you're going to become more familiar with it.

26:12Andrea Domanick:And there's this theory in marketing that the user needs this many touch points with your brand before they will convert to becoming a paying customer. And so part of the art and science of marketing is making sure that they collide with your product X number of times because it's proven that that needs to happen before they purchase whatever you're selling. So these principles, think about them as we go through this history. There were also some other themes that stood out to us a lot to listen for. Andrea, what was top of mind for you? I know you did most of the deep dive on like the long history of even going back to before the internet.

26:52Andrea Domanick:Yes. One recurring theme I picked up on is the fact that this isn't just like a best of list of simple instances of corruption or fraud over and over again in the music industry, but altogether it kind of points to systems that are covertly shaping taste while presenting as neutral discovery, you know, or promotion that's kind of disguised as organic popularity. And one thing I noticed is that these systems tend to crystallize at moments when new technology disrupts how music is distributed, measured, or monetized. And so the result is kind of a genealogy or timeline of these mechanisms as they reflect a series of recurring patterns that evolve alongside media infrastructure.

27:32Andrea Domanick:Can you just give a quick example? Yeah. So basically, one thing I noticed is anytime there were kind of big paradigm shifts in media and or technology, whether that is the advent of Napster and file sharing, the rise of new broadcast systems, whether that is radio, whether that is increased access to cable television, is generally when you'll see these kinds of shifts. So these aren't just instances of fraud or deception that kind of exists in a vacuum, but it's kind of a pattern that we're seeing over and over again in conjunction with other changes. In other words, the media ecosystem keeps changing and then people keep adapting to figure out what works and what works in one era is going to look different in another era.

28:16Andrea Domanick:Exactly. Another way of looking at it that Andrea and I discussed a lot while preparing for this episode was that basically everything in the music industry is on some level pay to play. The question of whether something is payola-like or just marketing tends to hinge on whether a given practice is actively crossing a line into deception or fakery. And also probably whether the law determines it to be fair game or not at a given period. Regulation is also part of this history as well. And we definitely see that like once a given practice gets regulated, the marketers, industry people are adapting their strategies alongside that.

28:59Andrea Domanick:And finally, another theme that really stood out to us from this research is a general shift from the music industry paying human gatekeepers to then instead influencing algorithmic environments. Or to put it another way, a shift from top down to bottom up forms of manipulation. All right. Let's talk about music industry grifts in the pre-internet era. A lot of people, when they think about this in terms of the music industry, they think about radio payola. But the history of manipulation goes back a lot farther than that, actually. Andrea, you took a deep dive. Where did all this start? Yeah, that's right.

29:35Andrea Domanick:It actually dates back to even before recorded music, all the way back to the industry's OG economic center of sheet music that was clustered around the historic Manhattan block known in the late 19th, early 20th centuries as Tin Pan Alley. You may have heard of it. That was the hub of publishers and composers of vaudeville, ragtime, early Broadway. It's widely considered the birthplace of pop music as a concept, the commercialization of music, and what would go on to become the recording industry, and some of the earliest attempts at mass marketing. Something to keep in mind for back then is that when publishers were hiring songwriters to crank out hits, these hits were basically being measured by how many copies of a piece of sheet music were sold.

30:19Andrea Domanick:So the more that you heard a piece of sheet music out in a public place, this goes back to what Emily was talking earlier about exposure, the better it would sell. So essential to Tin Pan Alley and also one of the earliest tastemaking systems in music was a guy called the Song Plugger. Now the Song Plugger were musicians that were hired by publishers to perform their songs or their roster of songs in public places, stores, saloons, theaters, like sports stadiums, to effectively simulate popularity. And then this kind of created a feedback loop on the vaudeville circuit where songs that seemed popular got more stage time and then in turn actually became popular.

30:59Andrea Domanick:And the most successful or coveted song pluggers were the ones that actually had connections or a performance history with some of the day's biggest stars, you know, the likes of Al Jolson. And so if they could get those big stars to sing it, then it was pretty much guaranteed to be a hit.

31:19Andrea Domanick:Who was hiring the pluggers? Was it like the sheet music publishers? Yes, it was the publishers, the publishing houses that basically populated Tin Pan Alley. And kind of a fun fact, the pluggers were so core to Tin Pan Alley that the sound of the pluggers clattering pianos is actually what gave Tin Pan Alley its name. So, you know, this is all kind of proto-algorithmic, if you think about it. Visibility creates demand, therefore justifies more visibility. And this, of course, all comes along thanks to an increase in urbanization and mass print culture. So what happens when we shift from sheet music to recorded music?

31:55Andrea Domanick:How did the grift evolve? So then radio came along, and with the advent of radio came the centralization of taste. And so you had this whole new batch of gatekeepers who are, of course, DJs and radio programmers. And with that came the rise of our word of the day, which is payola. If you're unfamiliar, payola is the practice of paying the aforementioned gatekeepers to play specific songs without disclosing that they had been paid, therefore making it seem like that the airplay that a song got was an independent editorial choice rather than, you know, what basically amounts to advertising. So in the early days of radio, this just sort of started as sort of a, you know, under the radar, informal process where labels and promoters were giving DJs, you know, gifts or payments to favor certain records.

32:42Andrea Domanick:It became deeply, deeply entrenched and so widespread that by radio's 1950s heyday, it was enough of a thing to trigger investigations that led to the congressional hearings of 1960. It was a big, big scandal. It exposed figures like Alan Freed, the DJ who was dubbed the godfather of rock and roll, obviously had a fall from grace after that, and cast light on how deeply the practice of payola really shaped the rise of early rock hits. So all this then led to a U.S. law requiring the disclosure of sponsored airplay and effectively making payola illegal. How did that pan out? Did the practice of payola actually end after it became illegal?

33:24Andrea Domanick:Spoiler alert, it did not. It may not have ever ended actually, right? Right. I mean, there's life signs away and so does Paola in many different forms, you know, and so Paola being an early instance of how hits were actually engineered, it didn't just become something that became distasteful in the eyes of the law, but also, you know, in the eyes of the public, of music fans. So sneakier ways to work around that were generated And this led to basically the rise of the third party promoter who effectively was someone acting as a middleman between labels and gatekeepers like radio programmers and DJs who was someone sort of working behind the scenes, you know, getting paid by labels to promote their music without money actually being exchanged between the label and the radio DJ.

34:10Andrea Domanick:So how did I get? But how does the I have never understood this? How what's the difference between a promoter and just like a publicist? Like, is any money being exchanged at all? Are there favors being exchanged? Like, what is being exchanged? It's not clear because it's not necessarily all in the books. But, you know, these are folks that are, these are third-party folks being paid by the label to basically work the system and help give their artists a leg up to the folks making the choices of what goes on the airwaves. How the promoters did that is, you know, there's a wide range. And this is where we get a little bit of a gray area.

34:43Andrea Domanick:I think it depends on, you know, what time period it was. I think it depends on how deeply entrenched the promoters relationships were. Maybe they were taking folks out to big dinners. Maybe they were sliding them gifts. Maybe they were sliding them more than gifts. But the important takeaway here is that this is how labels like legally protected themselves from something being labeled as payola, even though they were seeking to influence what was getting paid on the radio. I've also heard of schemes were like even moving further towards the 21st century where there isn't actually payola anymore, but you might have a situation where an artist plays a radio station's event, perhaps at like a lower fee in exchange for getting on the radio more or being boosted on the radio, things like that.

35:32Andrea Domanick:Like there's ways that money finds its way, but it's never direct. Yeah. Or there's ways that sort of an exchange happens, which is sort of one of the larger points, you know, of everything that we're talking about today is like, it's less about whether something occurs via blatant bribery, but more that Paola, the original radio instance of Paola was the first big moment when airplay or mass exposure became synonymous with legitimacy, right? So it's not just like functioning as a reflection of popularity, but became a means for creating it. And as a result, that was kind of an early instance of audiences mistaking exposure for consensus of whether something's popular or whether it's something that people like.

36:10Andrea Domanick:So how did this evolve into the chart era? That's all you get. But there's so much more. We get into Napster, fake MySpace fans, Spotify paola scandals, the rise of social video clipping armies, and maybe most crucially, whether or not Emily and I think Geese is a psyop. Go get the full episode plus the four other killer contributions to the Tranche over at tranche.metalabel.com. That's T-R-A-N-C-H-E dot metalabel.com. Five books. Guaranteed not a PSYOP.