You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music Highlight

If we had been measuring instrumentalness by how long people listen to an algorithmic playlist full of nominally-instrumental background music, the banjo/voice confusion probably wouldn’t have been detected. Nobody quits background-listening in anger at a lack of bluegrass. We easily might never have discovered the problem, and ended up institutionalizing an algorithmic disdain for banjos. And later, when some bluegrass artist noticed that they never got put on playlists any more, we would be puzzled, but we’d know our ML algorithms weren’t to blame, because we tested them. And this the worst possible outcome, because it gaslights culture to protect code.