spinofflive
Getty Images
Getty Images

PartnersDecember 4, 2019

How music algorithms know your taste better than you do

Getty Images
Getty Images

In the fifth episode of Actually Interesting, The Spinoff’s monthly podcast exploring the effect Artificial Intelligence has on our lives, Russell Brown discovers that maybe AI has better musical taste than humans. 

Subscribe to Actually Interesting via iTunes or listen on the player below. To download this episode right click and save. 

I am a middle-aged man and suddenly my music streaming service works a whole lot better than it used to.

There’s a reason for that, and it’s the decisive tilt that Apple made a few months ago towards algorithmic playlists on Apple Music. Having branded itself on the virtues of human curation – it’s only a year ago that Apple CEO Tim Cook lamented the dehumanising effect of Spotify’s data-driven approach to curation – Apple seems to be acknowledging that maybe Spotify has it right.

New Music recommendations have improved markedly under this personal robot curation – like I’m getting what an algorithm thinks I’d like, rather than what someone thinks I should like. But the playlist that’s really working for me is Favourites Mix, a rolling weekly selection of things that I have loved (and sometimes forgotten) at some point in the past decade or more. Apple knows what I have loved because for all that time I’ve been telling it, by uploading Genius data from iTunes to the mothership. Apple had a lot of data to push my buttons with – it just finally got around to using it. It’s great.

It’s an example of the power of the aspect of AI we see most in popular culture – the recommendation algorithm. That science is getting serious in 2019 – and its new face is TikTok, the micro-video platform that helped brew ‘Old Town Road’ into a global mega-hit. It’s one of a dozen products made by the Chinese company ByteDance that are basically branded AI recommendation engines. And it’s really, really effective.

As Jia Tolentino put it in a fascinating recent New Yorker feature headed How TikTok Holds Our Attention: “Some social algorithms are like bossy waiters: they solicit your preferences and then recommend a menu. TikTok orders you dinner by watching you look at food.”

So what’s actually going on here, on a technical level? And what else might ByteDance be cooking up in its AI Lab? According to Juan Swartz of the Christchurch-based tech company 4th, it’s a mixture of established machine learning practice and some special sauce.

“When I’ve got a huge amount of data – and you need a huge amount of data to apply machine learning effectively – you can actually look at different instances of a specific model and look at the accuracy of their predictions,” says Swartz.

“You use an evolutionary process by which you select the bots that have the most predictive validity. You then introduce random mutations into the algorithm, and you don’t know and the bot doesn’t know the outcome of that. You run it in millions of iterations and you end up with an algorithmic model that you don’t know exactly how it works, you just know how it works.”

Being able to amass that “huge amount of data” is a matter of having a lot of humans to watch – TikTok has 600 million users watching more than a billion videos a day – and logging everything you possibly can about what they do: taps, swipes, comments and the musical and visual events associated with them.

“They analyse everything about it,” says Swartz. “They analyse tone, they analyse colour, they analyse beat. How long is spent on it, the audience demographics, and what content and what colours, etc, appeal to different groups. And that analysis is massively valuable for anyone that wants to market anything.”

TikTok’s content, of course, is partly created by its users, in the form of derivative works: super-short videos set to snatches of music. AI is at work on that side of the operation too: the app will learn how users like to work and present creation and editing tools accordingly.

DRM New Zealand, the country’s largest digital distributor, is in the business of feeding some of the 50,000 songs it represents into the back end of a variety of digital service providers that now includes TikTok. Does that mean not only thinking about what the audience likes, but what the algorithm likes?

“It depends on the platform,” says DRM’s general manager Andy Low. “Because every platform out there has different types of algorithms in how they serve content to their users. What’s happening in the streaming music platforms with their playlisting real estate is likely fairly different to what’s happening on YouTube in an audio-visual space.

“We are doing our best to understand how these types of algorithms work in order to get a better gauge of what’s likely to be effective in these spaces. But having watched these platforms grow and develop and studied these things over years now, you get a gauge of how it works, but then it all changes so rapidly that you’re trying to read this endless book that never stops.

“The algorithm isn’t just one thing, its many different types of things combined. Feeding the algorithm is something we do, but it isn’t the primary motive for releasing or pushing music.”

It’s no great leap of logic to guess where this is all headed. If you need a hint, bear in mind that this year ByteDance acquired the British company Jukebox, which makes AI technology that creates music itself.

“At some point in time the machine will become better at entertaining people than other people are,” says Swartz.

DJ spin that shit! (Getty Images).

That may have been foreshadowed by what Spotify got caught doing in 2016: seeding its playlists with tunes it commissioned (from a couple of humans) and owned. And it may already be happening now.

“I would imagine that’s the logical extension of where this technology will all lead to if it hasn’t already,” says Low. “There’s certain patterns and structural formulas that we see in certain genres of music that would be programmable, for artificial intelligence to learn how to make. With studying what’s been effective in the last 12-18 months, pulling all these different metrics and data points together and reconstructing tings that should be pleasing.

“I would say though that if you’re just going to be constructing music from an automatic method, it’s likely to lose that creative flair that really can make music so special and exciting. So even if there’s just AI making music that ticks certain boxes for certain types of listening experiences, to me I don’t think that’s a threat of taking over music as a whole.”

Yet right now, ByteDance’s rival Tencent (also Chinese, also deeply invested in AI, already owns the majority of China’s digital music services) is negotiating to acquire a 10% stake in Universal Music, the world’s largest record company. It’s hard not to see this as the beginning of a potential new paradigm in a media sector that typically sees change first.

Music was disrupted by the internet before most global businesses and continues to experience change in its fundamental structures and assumptions in a way that you pretty much have to be inside to fully grasp. But bear in mind that ByteDance launched with and still operates a news aggregator and it’s pretty clear that other sectors would be well-advised to watch what happens in music.

But for people who make music, perhaps the rule is still going to be: just make the music that you want.

“From an independent distributor’s perspective, absolutely,” says Low. “We represent emerging artists, established artists, all the artists that are making this music, because they want to, they love to, they need to. Regardless of what AI may be doing in the music space, artists should just carry on making the music they want to make.”

This content was created in paid partnership with Microsoft. Learn more about our partnerships here.

Keep going!
(Image: Getty Images).
(Image: Getty Images).

BusinessDecember 2, 2019

The microfinance provider helping people avoid crippling debt and predatory lenders

(Image: Getty Images).
(Image: Getty Images).

At this time of year, small debts can put people living on low incomes into huge hardship. A microfinance provider is doing their bit to lift people back up again.

The financial pressures that come with the holiday period are difficult enough for any family to manage. They become a lot harder when there already isn’t enough money to go around. 

Christmas presents bought from shopping trucks, which drive around poorer neighbourhoods selling goods on credit and end up attracting vast interest payments. Family gatherings put pressure on food budgets. The next school year is just around the corner. It can be an extremely stressful time.  

That is the case across the country, but is particularly the case in hard up regions like Northland. Data from Infometrics shows rates of homeownership in the town of Kaitaia are way below national averages, at a time when rental costs are rising and supply is being squeezed. The Northland region has the highest proportion of working age people on Jobseeker support. Northland is also over-represented among people age over 65 compared to the rest of the country, a demographic who often rely on the fixed income of superannuation. 

The data is stark on the statistical level, and can have tragic consequences on a human level. Families routinely end up being pushed into crippling debt, with the small amount of money coming into their households rapidly leaving again in the form of interest payments. This cycle is only amplified at Christmas time. 

This data is the context under which budgeting services and microfinance organisations are working. Their role is twofold – to help families keep better track of the money they have, and to step in to make money available when it will make a difference.   

Natalie Vincent is the general manager of Ngā Tāngata Microfinance, one of the organisations doing this work nationwide. She’s very clear about where the problems begin. 

“There’s a whole lot of myths around about debt, stereotypes about people having the money, but just don’t spend it wisely or know how to budget. This is just not something we are seeing on a daily basis. Ultimately there’s a deficit of income to expenses – there’s just not enough money for basic living.”

“It can be just one small thing, like tyres on a car. They need their car, because they need to get to work. So what do you do when you have no access to safe credit?” 

Ngā Tāngata Microfinance provide loans, but they do it very differently to the predatory loan sharks who often take advantage of the circumstances people find themselves in. Vincent says the loans given out by NTM are interest-free and don’t come with fees attached, which can take a lot of pressure off those on low incomes.  

“Our loans are not about getting people more into debt. They’re wrapped around building financial capability and financial wellbeing.” 

Financial mentor Penina Fa’Apito-Nofoa, Julia Jackson Kiwibank’s sustainability lead, Daz Kershaw a Nga Tangata Micro Finance client, and Linda McCallum Nga Tangata loans coordinator. (image: supplied).

People who need such loans get referred by budgeting service organisations and the microfinance loans fall into two distinct categories. The first is ‘asset-building loans’, which relate to a wide variety of needs, like household appliances or furniture, health needs like dental care, or education services. 

The second category relates directly to the debt trap which affects so many in poverty. NTM’s ‘debt-relief loans’ are about helping people pay off high-interest loans of up to $3000. Those applying can have the slate wiped clean on financial burdens they might literally never be able to pay off, and instead, have a debt that will actually get smaller as they pay it off. 

Ngā Tāngata Microfinance is a charity. The capital to provide the loans is supplied by Kiwibank with no fees or interest. “It’s sort of like community funding,” says Vincent. “We loan that money out, people repay it, and then we’re able to re-loan that money out to other people, so it just keeps going out in a circle.” Currently, NTM has about $250,000 out on existing loans, but over the time they have been operating they’ve provided more than a million dollars in loans to applicants. 

“That’s a really lovely model for the people who take one of these loans. Many of them have never had a positive experience with loans, they’ve never repaid a loan before, it has always been a bad experience. And this is really empowering for them, because they realise it’s community money, so there’s a lot more incentive to repay it.”  

For Kiwibank, they see their role as helping to raise awareness of the issue around high-interest debt in New Zealand and supporting NTM to advocate for safe, fair and affordable access to credit for all New Zealanders. It’s about the long-term good of their customers, communities and the country. Kerry Rolleston sees the need up close, in her role as the manager of the joint Post Shop and Kiwibank branch in Kaitaia. 

“We’ve got a lot of vulnerable people up here, with the elderly and with people who aren’t working. It’s still really important for us to be spending the time – and not prejudging anybody of course – to help people along.” 

Their major focus this year has been about getting customers “digitally enabled”, as a way of helping them manage their money better. Rolleston says it can make a huge difference in people’s lives to simply be able to see what is going in, and what is coming out of an account. 

“It’s crucial that they’ve got a good handle on their finances. If you’re just going into the bank week in, week out, really do you know what’s going on in your account? But if you’ve got it on your phone, you can tap into it any time, have a quick run-through, and see what’s going on.” 

“It’s very important that we get people into that next step. But it’s a trust thing, and a lot of people are a bit reluctant because they’re not too sure about the internet. But that’s part of our education with them,” says Rolleston, who adds that the branch has three staff on hand who can help people learn over a cup of tea. 

Making ends meet is hard enough at the best of times, let alone when there are looming holiday season costs coming up. But by helping people take more control of their finances, Ngā Tāngata Microfinance and Kiwibank hope to help families have a much more merry Christmas.

This content was created in paid partnership with Kiwibank. Learn more about our partnerships here

But wait there's more!