Recorded music stabilised readiness. It made particular temporal patterns repeatable, portable, and independent of local coordination. Algorithmic curation goes further. It does not merely replay readiness; it selects, sequences, and regulates it continuously.
With playlists, recommendation systems, and adaptive streams, music no longer arrives as an event, a work, or even a recording. It arrives as an ongoing modulation of readiness, tuned to context, habit, and optimisation criteria that remain largely invisible to those affected by them.
This is not simply a new way of listening to music. It is a new way of governing readiness.
From Repetition to Regulation
Recording enabled repetition without re-coordination. Algorithmic curation adds regulation without deliberation.
Playlists are not neutral containers. They specify tempo ranges, intensity curves, affective arcs, and transitions. Whether labelled as focus, workout, calm, or sleep, they organise readiness across time, smoothing peaks, delaying thresholds, and sustaining particular modes of engagement.
The listener does not choose each modulation. They enter a regulated stream.
The Disappearance of the Musical Occasion
In curated environments, music no longer marks an occasion. There is no beginning, no ending, and no requirement for attention. Tracks dissolve into one another, and the logic of sequencing replaces the integrity of the piece.
Music becomes a substrate rather than an object. It operates continuously in the background, shaping readiness while remaining largely unremarked.
What is lost is not musical quality, but eventhood.
Authority Without Author
Algorithmic curation introduces a peculiar form of power: authority without a visible author. No single composer, performer, or curator determines the readiness profile a listener inhabits. Selection emerges from feedback loops, engagement metrics, and optimisation functions.
This power is difficult to contest precisely because it does not speak. It does not persuade, instruct, or justify. It adjusts.
Readiness is governed without being named.
Personalisation and the Illusion of Choice
Curated streams often present themselves as personalised. But personalisation here does not mean expressive alignment or interpretive fit. It means statistical tuning: adjusting readiness patterns to maximise retention, productivity, or affective stability.
The system does not ask what music means to the listener. It learns how the listener responds.
Choice becomes a parameter, not a decision.
Continuous Readiness
Under algorithmic curation, readiness ceases to be episodic. There is no longer a transition into music or out of it. The modulation of potential becomes continuous, ambient, and adaptive.
This continuity matters. It allows readiness to be aligned with labour, consumption, and attention management in real time. Music no longer gathers bodies or marks time; it sustains dispositions.
Governance Without Semiosis
Crucially, none of this requires meaning. No message is conveyed. No proposition is asserted. The governance of readiness operates beneath language, beneath interpretation, and beneath belief.
This is why it is so effective.
Music, here, functions as an infrastructural layer of social coordination — one that prepares action without ever appearing to command it.
Clearing the Stage
Algorithmic curation already treats music as a manipulable readiness resource. Selection, sequencing, and optimisation are automated. Human authorship is secondary; origin is incidental.
At this point, the final step no longer requires conceptual innovation. If readiness can be selected without humans, it can also be generated without them.
The stage is now clear for music without origin — for readiness produced directly by machines.
That transformation is the subject of the next post.
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