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Have you been listening to more music and enjoying it less? David Macias thinks he knows what might ail you: an over-reliance on the algorithm in the modern music industry. It’s a system that the Thirty Tigers president
believes keeps feeding music fans more of what they want, or are presumed to want, until they get burned out on the safe and overly familiar. This problem is something Macias diagnoses — along with some ideas for creative fixes — in his first book, “Circulation: How Culture Moves in the Age of Algorithm,” which comes out Jan. 14 from Whitefox Publishing.
Macias brings some visionary credentials to the project, having been lauded for how his company Thirty Tigers, which he co-founded in 2001, has thrived in the world of independent music. It operates under a unique model, being a music distribution, label services and management company that lets artists maintain ownership over the records that are released under its umbrella. So he had a good track record of observation and innovation when he started having thoughts about how algorithm-based music consumption, which theoretically should help listeners discover new music, might actually be walling them off from discovering scenes beyond the ones they already know.
“Circulation” can be pre-ordered here, and previews of passages from its pages will soon be going up on Macias’ Substack, here. In the meantime, in a recent sit-down in Nashville during AmericanaFest, he talked with Variety about some of the key ideas in the book.
“Around two years ago, the business just started feeling worse, and I couldn’t quite figure out why it felt harder,” Macias says. “People felt more adrift. And I think that it’s because the things that we know to do were mattering less and less, and because the logic of the algorithm has just sort of taken hold. I mean, I’ve seen estimates of anywhere from 70-80% of all the media that we consume is now recommended to us by an algorithm, which includes social media and things like that…
“Honestly, I was kind of at a… I don’t want to say crisis point. It wasn’t like I had to drop employees or thought, ‘This isn’t fun anymore. I’m leaving.’ But also, you know, I’m now in my sixties, and I was kind of like, if this is what it’s going to be, then maybe there’s better people than me to do that.” He thinks he’s far from alone in that. “What’s happening is fueling an engine of cultural alienation, I think. How many people do you know that feel fantastic about their relationship with culture these days? How many people in the music industry do you know that are like, ‘I don’t know why, but I don’t feel great. This doesn’t feel as fun as it used to feel’?” But rather than give in to that, Macias says he “wanted to really figure out what was going on first — like, what is really happening, down to the cellular level.”
Macias emphasizes that this is not an old-man-yells-at-cloud book… or, specifically, an old-man-yells-at-Spotify book. “If you call somebody the devil, it makes it really hard to go in and figure out a common solution,” he says. “And if I felt like somebody was the devil, I’d call them the devil. But I don’t know — every person I’ve ever met at Spotify is pretty nice, and they just seem interested in getting people a good tune to listen to. I don’t think that there’s this evil intent out there. But the end result is that how things are going creates a sclerotic music ecosystem. And down the road of a sclerotic ecosystem is cultural tune-out, because we’re gonna just keep getting fed the same tunes again and again. But down this other road is a chance for vibrancy and creating more touchpoints for community.”
Macias says he’s “read a lot about business theories and all that kind of stuff, but it was like, OK, but why does Spotify make the choices that they make in terms of how they orient the algorithm? Businesses are oriented around customer retention, and a 5% increase in customer retention can have exponential values in terms of long-tail capital. So Spotify’s not trying to fuck us. They’re just trying to please us, right? But if you look at what is it that we as people want, then, what are we asking for? And you explore the psychological terrain about our relationship with comfort and reassurance. … There’s been a massive spike in nostalgia — music that was from our childhood. In the Luminate studies, in 2024, I think 49% of all streams came from music released in the last five years. Last year, that dropped to 43.6%. So people are comforting themselves with music that comes from a time when they felt like they had it figured out a little bit more than they do now. The algorithm reads it like, ‘Oh, you want more of that? Y I’ll give you more.’ That can only be regressive, and what is happening is that with the industry being so algorithmically addicted, we just keep feeding the same emotional cues back into the system again and again and again. … We can only be fed the same emotional cues before we become desensitized to it over time.”
He has his own nostalgia for a youthful time, but a youthful time when musical revolutions were being fostered by cross-breeding. “I start out the book talking about Fab 5 Freddy and how he was friends with Blondie, Grandmaster Flash, Andy Warhol and all these people… this agent to bring all kinds of things together. The song ‘Rapture’ happened because he had a cassette of Grandmaster Flash’s music when he went to dinner at Debbie Harry and Chris Stein’s house. He played it, they thought it was cool; next time they were recording, they remembered that, and ‘Rapture’ was the first No. 1 pop hit to ever have rapping in it. II’m 14 years old and sitting in Lakeland, Florida, watching ‘Friday Night Videos’ and I’m seeing shit that I’ve never seen before that’s cool, different and exciting…
“And we’re losing that kind of vibrancy because we’re not prioritizing it at all as an industry. So ultimately, what the book is doing is laying out, how do we add the vibrancy and the friction back into the mix? I’m not saying ‘Don’t do the algorithmic thing,’ because I’m gonna do the algorithmic thing, and there’s times when it really makes sense. But we also have to do this thing too, which is to invest in nascent and emerging music cultures that we have every reason to think might grow.”
Macias lays out in the book three sort of niche music communities that he feels have considerable potential but are not getting enough music biz attention because the algorithm is not rewarding them. One is queer music. Another is the Big Ears community, based around an eclectic festival that takes place in Knoxville every year. And the third is music that appeals to progressive Christians. “I don’t know if any of those are necessarily gonna wind up in the mainstream, but I think that they could all go from here to here,” he says, raising his hand, “if the proper investments were made, with people coming together to build more architecture around them.”
“I was talking to somebody higher up in the Christian business and I was like, ‘Do you guys just not platform kind of more liberal things because there’s this patina of fear out there?’ And he just laughed at me, and he was like, ‘No, if we thought we’d make money doing that, we’d do it.’ But praise music became the thing. More and more artists said, ‘If we don’t do praise music, we’re not gonna be able to get on the radio or tour,’ and then pretty soon that’s all there was. You know, we signed Amy Grant, and she doesn’t really match up with that… she’s not doing praise music, either.”
Macias keeps coming back to Texas senatorial candidate James Talarico as a marker of the hunger he believes exists for a different kind of faith-informed music. “You know, before he even was running for Senate, he took off like a rocket. He was in seven figures on TikTok and Instagram because there were people that were hungry for expressions of their faith that led to the idea of service. He is definitely more in the school of the Jesus that they recognize as the one who washed the feet of the disciples prior to the Last Supper, rather than this muscular Jesus who’s got a six-pack and is guarding the border. There’s no architecture to get songs to them, though. It can’t happen through the Christian business. Again, nobody’s trying to be an asshole; they just perceive there’s no money in it…
“I’ve gone to talk to Live Nation, and I talked to the managers of a couple bands that are not considered Christian bands, but they’re very faith informed in their music. I asked Live Nation, ‘Hey, if we bring all of these people together, do you think we could sell out a minor league stadium?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, we do.’ So we’re talking about maybe doing something. But it takes somebody like me who knows those people and has the motivation to go build these structures. And if all of a sudden we have a festival and come up with some media properties that are sustainable, then all of a sudden we have enough points of contact for those 2 million people that are following James Talarico and want to hear songs and develop relationships with personalities that share their value system.”
And this isn’t just a new thing he’s seeing with Talarico. “Do you know the writer Rachel Held Evans?” he says, mentioning a late author who was a heroine to many feminist or progressive-leaning Christians. “Basically my premise there is, what if Rachel Held Evans were a music genre?”
Picking a different area of opportunity, he talks about wanting “to go build a queer version of AfroPunk,” and says he has talked to a major promoter and even city officials about a vision of setting up a festival to showcase it on the west coast. “I want to operationalize what I’m talking about in the book and not just be like, ‘Somebody should do this.'”
If any of that sounds like pie in the sky for admittedly niche genres or audiences, it’s worth noting how much Thirty Tigers has been aligned with the growth industry that is Americana music, a loose genre that now claims some of the biggest acts in music.
With Americana, “I and many, many other people showed up, and there was no data to tell us that we should, because we loved the music and understood its emotional value. We built festivals and conferences and radio stations and all that kind of stuff, and because I think we were good at that, it built and built and built and then it got to the point where a Zach Bryan happens. And then major labels come along and sign a bunch of stuff and just kind of feed those same things back into the system with an incredible velocity until it just chokes the system… But I’ve seen what happens, building architecture around a community where the data doesn’t necessarily suggest that ‘Here’s how we’re all gonna get rich,’ and we just have to apply that to other music scenes that we believe in.”
With all this talk of festivals, what about confronting the dominance of the algorithm on its home turf —streaming? Macias has ideas for that as well.
“One suggestion I make in the book has to do with the heart of the Big Ears fan, who is a person who cares deeply about being a seeker. They want to find things that are new and novel, and the importance they place on that is outsized compared to most people. So, just as a suggestion off the top of my head, I (wrote about how) I’d like to go to Spotify and say: Let’s build a room that’s like a museum. Let’s take 200 classic albums of experimental music from the past, like Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’ and Terry Riley’s ‘Shri Camel,’ and put them in with new things, and have artists from that community that are making things on the cutting edge that have broken through tell us their 20 favorite records at the moment. Put them all in a room and tell the people that are there, ‘We’re gonna invite you here, and in this room you won’t be tracked. The algorithm will be turned off. It will be pure discovery.'” If you hit the the scan button, things are gonna pop up, and it’s just gonna be random out of those thousand albums. Now, if you want to go outside of the room and listen to it and be recommended some more, that we will do, but here we’re gonna honor your ethic of discovery.”
Convincing a DSP to have a room where users could be promised they won’t be tracked might come the closest Macias comes to having an impossible dream. But his ideas for how to zap music lovers into going beyond their self-proscribed tastes are boundless, and he feels rejuvenated after working on “Circulation” over the past two years.
“I’ve gone from being where I felt like I don’t know what the fuck is going on, and it feels bad — that’s all I know, and other people in the industry feel bad, and they feel adrift — to being more excited about what I’m doing than maybe ever. Because there’s a problem, and maybe we can solve this problem. It’s a really important problem to solve, people’s relationship with art. They use it to process. They use it to learn about their neighbors. And the world is safer and less scary if you know the stories of other people that aren’t quite like you. But that is not what’s happening as we build this infrastructure around things that are comfortable to us where nothing else really gets in.
“But for those people who think that AI is gonna kill us, I’m like, ‘Well, right before they end us, I’m just gonna go over and unplug the machine,’ you know? We still have choices about how we interact with technology. The agency is with us.”
