For VICE/Motherboard, here’s an obsessive deep dive into the minute details of music metadata, and how information about the songs we love is being co-opted for questionable ends by streaming services like Spotify and Google Play.
Hacker NewsFormat shifts have already altered the mechanics of music simultaneously several times over the past few decades, and the recent rush toward streaming services like Spotify and Google Play now positions a technology company between the listener and the material. Surely remote cloud storage is a new audio format at least as much as the Walkman?
This is a new kind of consumer relationship, and the play button has a different meaning for each side; to the business, it does more than just switch on entertainment. As a result, there’s now a sort of subtle power play occurring over control of the metadata which surrounds the music and connects it to search fields, filters, and playlists. This is unfortunate, because our ability to meaningfully engage with something depends first and foremost on whether we can find it at all.