Are artists making music just for the algorithm?

Alex Burnett is the Australian songwriter behind music with 1.4 billion streams on platforms like Apple Music and Spotify. He has worked on no less than 30 songs that have made it into Triple J’s Hottest 100, collaborating with artists like Thelma Plum, Hockey Dad, Alison Wonderland, Dan Sultan, Hayden James, Bliss n Eso and Flight Facilities.

On this episode of The Briefing, Bension Siebert speaks to Alex about what it takes to make a song into a viral hit, and how streaming algorithms change the kind of music that gets made in the first place - and what that means for the “authenticity” of songs that make it onto the playlists on our phones.

Listen to The Algorithm, Part 1: How to stop Spotify killing your music taste here.

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