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 part of an exciting collaborative podcast project called Tranche that came out this week on Metalabel. Tranche is the brainchild of friend of the pod and Nothing But Respect cohost Harry Krinsky, who you may remember from our episode on the psychology of the modern Knick fan a few weeks back. As Harry describes it, it’s basically a literary magazine, but instead of articles, you get podcast episodes.

Listen to today’s episode for an interview with Harry about the project and an excerpt from our contribution to it — and please consider supporting our work by purchasing Tranche 001, which gets you five episodes for just $5. Other entries include a history of the word “based” (from Naomi Zeichner and Eamon Whalen), a meditation on Eddington and the fate of the Western in the 2020s (with Nate Fisher and Eddie Averill), an aesthetic analysis of Praxis and the Palantir chore coat (featuring past CUJO guest Sam Venis), and a cross-generational analysis of major life milestones with CUJO regular Ben Dietz and friends. All proceeds will be split among contributors.

Something we loved this week: This fascinating episode by the excellent podcast No Such Thing on the history of different corporate management styles and the problem of micromanaging at work, featuring The Drift editor and Harvard historian Erik Baker, author of the book Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America.

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Your music taste is being manipulated: A history

The Culture Journalist

Your music taste is being manipulated: A history