Your music taste is being manipulated: A history
About this episode
The episode explores the manipulation of music taste throughout history and its implications in the modern music industry.
CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms, from Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick. You can learn more about it here . For fans of independent music, the Geese psyop allegations earlier this year raised an anxiety-provoking question: How much of our taste is our own, and how much of it is just a function of the music industry using a range of tactics (from the mundane, to the shadowy, to the straight-up fraudulent) to manufacture consent? We held back from commenting on the story at the time because we were cooking up a longer response that we finally unveiled this week: a deeply researched, centuries-spanning history of the art and science of musical taste manipulation, spanning Tin Pan Alley sheet music scams, chart manipulation, streaming farms, the modern clipping economy, viral “trend simulation,” and more. Our hope was that shedding light on these historical persuasion tactics — and the psychological mechanisms that underpin them, from the mere-exposure effect to René Girard’s mimetic theory of desire — would help our listeners make sense of a present where it can feel like everything on the internet is fake. The episode, titled “Free Clout for Sale,” is…
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