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Discrimation in Music Industry Text
Discrimation in Music Industry Text
2 Take people’s listening patterns on it already offers more music by men, that has
startling consequences — which most of us
streaming services. If you look at Spotify’s top
listeners are unaware of.
10 most streamed artists of 2020, for example,
only two are women — and Billie Eilish is the
highest in seventh place. This might not seem a
case of discrimination, but the way we got 5 Is there any solution? The researchers
here raises some important questions.
offered one: they did a simulation of the
algorithm and tweaked it a few times to raise
the rankings of female artists 1 2 3 4 5 (ie they
6 Bauer tells me it was “a positive surprise” media, I also realise the power of the
“demonstration effect”: if a society only ever
to change the streaming service’s apparent
sees white men in positions of power (or on
bias so much with a few tweaks to the
the pages of newspapers), it creates a cultural
algorithm. “Of course, it’s always easier to fix
feedback loop, not unlike those streaming
something in theory rather than in practice,”
services.
she says, “but if this effect was similar in the
real world, that would be great.” She adds that
the group is now exploring how to use the
same approach to address ethnic and other 9 This affects many corners of business.
forms of discrimination in media platforms.
Consider venture capital: research from a
multitude of groups shows that diverse teams
outperform homogeneous ones. Yet according
7 The team stress that this work is still at an to Deloitte, 77 per cent of venture capitalists
are male and 72 per cent white, while black
early stage, but the study is thought-provoking
and Latino investors received just 2.4 per cent
for two reasons. First, and most obviously, it
of funding between 2015 and 2020, according
shows why it pays to have a wider debate on
to Crunchbase.
how now-pervasive AI programs work and,
above all, whether we want them to
extrapolate from our collective pasts into our
futures. “We are at a critical juncture, one that 10 This pattern has not arisen primarily
requires us to ask hard questions about the
because powerful people are overtly sexist or
way AI is produced and adopted,” writes Kate
racist; the subtler issue is that financiers prefer
Crawford, who co-founded an AI centre at New
to work with colleagues who are a good
York University, in a powerful new book, Atlas
“cultural fit” (ie are like them) and to back
of AI.
entrepreneurs with a proven track record —
except most of those entrepreneurs happen to
look like them.