From DJs to Data Points: How We Traded Musical Expertise for Engagement Metrics

Recently over the holidays, I took advantage of a Spotify deal, 2 months free back on an account I stopped paying for a year earlier, I had no need for it over the last year, but ease of use, no ads whilst kicking back with mates with my phone connected to bluetooth, it was super easy, what’s not to like? I get sent hundreds of new tracks a week to listen to as the Editor of Decoded (please don’t stop sending), I can’t keep up with the overwhelming amount of music there is, I can only try and showcase what I think our readers might like, I wish I just had a mag that only did new music……. as I was listening to what the algorythm was pushing me, I started wincing, the side eyes, the wtf is this? it really started to make me think….. shit! The gatekeepers are dying. Not the ones you think, though. Not the crusty old heads clutching their vinyl and muttering about kids these days. This is not a sulk about the old days of vinyl digging on a Saturday at your local record store. We are talking about the real gatekeepers, the ones who actually mattered, the ones that never kept you out at all. They were letting you in.

Think about it. The DJ who stayed up until 4am digging through crates (or just online nowadays), building a set that would take you somewhere. The radio presenter who interrupted their own life to share a track that moved them. The journalist who spent hours listening, contextualising, connecting dots between scenes and sounds and history. These weren’t barriers. They were bridges. Human beings who loved music so intensely that they needed to share it, needed to show you what they’d found, what they’d felt.

Now we’ve got algorithms doing the heavy lifting, and we’re calling it democratisation. Spotify’s Discover Weekly, YouTube’s recommendations, TikTok’s For You page. They’re efficient, sure. They’re personalised. They know your listening patterns better than you do, can predict what you’ll probably like based on millions of data points. But here’s what they can’t do: they can’t feel a damn thing.

“An algorithm doesn’t get goosebumps when the breakdown hits. It doesn’t understand why a particular bassline at 3am in a packed basement feels like a religious experience. It can’t tell you about the producer’s journey from bedroom to Berghain, or why this track matters in the context of everything that came before it. It doesn’t know what it’s like to lose yourself in music. It doesn’t know anything. It just calculates.”

And somewhere in this transition from human curation to computational recommendation, we’ve fundamentally misunderstood what gatekeeping was supposed to be about. The old guard, the ones we’re so eager to bypass, they weren’t hoarding music like dragons on gold. They were filters, yes, but filters driven by passion and knowledge and an actual emotional relationship with sound. When Pete Tong played your demo on Radio 1, it meant something because Pete had listened to about a million tracks and chose yours (hopefully signed it). When John Digweed drops your new tune on his Transitions Radio Show, heck, when a DJ just showed you appreciation for your work. When a DJ dropped your tune at Fabric, it mattered because they’d heard it, felt it, understood how it would work in that room at that moment with those people.

“That’s expertise. That’s curation. That’s the opposite of gatekeeping, really. It’s guidance from someone who knows the terrain because they’ve lived in it, breathed it, dedicated their life to it.”

But now we’re drowning in choice and starving for context. We’ve got infinite access and zero direction. The algorithm serves you tracks based on your previous behaviour, which means you’re essentially trapped in an echo chamber of your own taste, never challenged, never surprised by someone saying “I know this sounds mental but trust me, listen to this. Wait, Wait, Wait, it’s coming……Wait till the bassline kicks in!!” It’s a closed loop. Safe. Predictable. Soulless.

Here’s the thing that bugs me: we would never, ever accept a Spotify playlist on the mainstage at a festival. Can you imagine? “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the main stage… an algorithm!” We’d riot. We’d demand our money back. Because we understand, inherently, that music in a live setting needs a human being reading the room, feeling the energy, making split-second decisions based on thousands of intangible factors that no machine could ever process.

So why are we accepting it everywhere else?

Why have we allowed our musical discovery, our taste formation, our entire relationship with new music to be mediated by something that cannot comprehend what makes music matter? We follow artists because they move us. We follow labels because they consistently release music that speaks to something in us. We follow media outlets because we trust their perspective, their knowledge, their passion. There’s a psychological contract there: I respect your taste because you’ve earned it. Because you care. Because you’re human.

And that human element is everything. It’s the entire point. Music isn’t data. It’s not a series of characteristics to be matched and filed and served up based on listening patterns. It’s emotional information. It’s communication between humans. When someone recommends you a track, they’re not just suggesting sounds you might enjoy. They’re sharing a piece of themselves. They’re saying: this moved me, and I think it might move you too. That’s an act of connection, of generosity, of cultural transmission that goes back to our ancestors sitting around fires telling stories.

We’re social animals, we humans. We don’t just consume culture, we co-create it through the act of sharing it. The DJ who broke a record to their crowd wasn’t just playing music, they were participating in a communal experience. The journalist who championed a new sound wasn’t just reporting, they were shaping the conversation. The radio presenter who put together a two-hour set wasn’t just filling airtime, they were building a narrative, creating a journey.

“All of that required knowledge. Required context. Required feeling. You can’t fake it, can’t automate it, can’t reduce it to engagement metrics and click-through rates and whatever other soulless measurements we’ve decided constitute success in the digital age.“

There’s a reason we still seek out the human voice. Why podcasts thrive. Why people still read reviews even though they can just stream the music instantly. Why we watch DJs on Cercle even though we could just listen to the tracks in the background. We crave the human perspective. We want to know what someone who dedicates their life to music thinks about this particular moment, this particular sound, this particular feeling. The old gatekeepers weren’t keeping anyone out. They were keeping the standards up. They were maintaining quality control in a landscape that desperately needed it. Yes, they got it wrong sometimes. Yes, they missed things. Yes, they had blind spots and biases and all the messy imperfections that come with being human. But they also discovered things, championed artists, broke records, created scenes. They were part of the ecosystem.

“Now we’ve convinced ourselves that removing the human element equals progress. That anyone with a phone and a social media account can be a tastemaker. And maybe they can, but there’s a difference between having a platform and having knowledge. Between having followers and having credibility. Between generating content and contributing culture.”

We’ve replaced expertise with algorithms and called it liberation. We’ve traded curation for computation and told ourselves we’re better off. But we’re not better off. We’re just lost in an endless sea of content, guided by nothing more than our own past behaviour, trapped in feedback loops that grow narrower by the day. So maybe it’s time we stop thinking of gatekeepers as the enemy. Maybe it’s time we recognise that the human filter, imperfect as it was, at least had a soul. At least cared. At least understood that music is more than acoustic information to be processed and sorted and served.

Go to your local record store, go follow your favourite artist, read more magazines, go to Bandcamp, blogs, music groups, anything to break the cycle of just accepting what is fed to you……. and if you are one of those DJs who hides their playlist – fuck you!

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