Glenn McDonald

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 onto cake number 93.

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.

I do indeed.

Most people, most of the time, want to hear the stuff they like. I think of listening in these three concentric circles. The middle circle is my stuff. Most of the time, I listen to my stuff. 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 that 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. Right.

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.

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 indie 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?

Got it. 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.