The Algorithm That Actually Serves Artists

Written By Harry Deluxe

On who discovery actually serves, why Perth artists can't rely on Spotify to find Perth listeners, and what geofencing is for

Picture this: you open a streaming app in Perth and the first recommendations are artists from Perth. Not because an AI has determined that local music will maximise your engagement time, but because the platform was designed by people who live here to connect listeners with the musicians they share a city with.

The recommendation is optimised for community, not session length. This is not how current streaming works. It is what The Pack is designed to do. The gap between those two things is the argument.

The streaming recommendation algorithms of the major players are engagement optimisation systems, not personalisation systems. Personalisation would mean the platform tries to show you what you genuinely want to hear. Engagement optimisation means the platform tries to show you what keeps you listening longest and returning most frequently, which has less to do with your musical taste than with what has the highest completion rates, the strongest replay frequency, and the most powerful playlist placement deals.

Playlist placement deals require a marketing budget. Most independent artists do not have one. This is not a coincidence the platforms are in a hurry to correct.

The Pack's geofenced discovery operates on a different logic. Streaming in Perth, the first layer of recommendations is Perth-based unsigned artists across the genres you already listen to. The second layer is Western Australian artists more broadly. The third is Australian artists who match your listening patterns. Genre and mood filtering operates within geographic prioritisation rather than against it: want indie rock, find Perth indie rock first. This changes who gets discovered. It also changes who bothers to make music for a local audience, which is a larger shift than it sounds.

Regional Australia is the context that makes this clearest. Forty-five percent of Australia's population lives outside major cities, and fourteen percent of recorded music industry activity is regional. A musician from Geraldton making music about their specific experience of being in Geraldton — the quality of the light, the texture of the social world, the particular isolation that is not loneliness but something else — is competing for algorithmic visibility against every other musician on the platform with a stronger global stream count. They will lose this competition. Not because their music is worse. Because the competition was never about the music.

For First Nations artists, geofenced discovery has an additional dimension beyond discoverability. The Pack's model enables cultural mapping: tying discovery to Country and community rather than the 'world music' genre category that current platforms use to aggregate culturally specific music from vastly different traditions into a single undifferentiated bucket.(3) 'World music' is a category invented by a record store in London in 1987 and enthusiastically retained by streaming platforms ever since. It contains Mongolian throat singing, West African kora, and Aboriginal ceremonial recordings, grouped together on the grounds that none of them are American. The Pack's cultural mapping is a different proposition: discovery tied to Country, to language, to community protocols, to the actual cultural context the music comes from.

Major streaming platforms are not building these features, because they don't serve the engagement optimisation objective. They serve communities. That is the distinction, and it is why cooperative governance of the platform matters: the people who determine what the platform optimises for are the people the platform is supposed to serve.

Australia's 100,000 OneMusic-licensed businesses (cafés, bars, gyms, retail shops, hairdressers) present a scale opportunity the geofenced model is specifically designed to capture. A business subscription to The Pack includes a geo-prioritised playlist surfacing local artists. Walk into a café in Broome and hear musicians from Broome. Walk into a gym in Bunbury and hear musicians from Bunbury. The music in the background is the sound of the community the business is part of, which is the sound that used to come from the radio before commercial radio decided that community was not a scalable product.

When local artists are consistently heard in local venues, they build the familiar recognition that translates into live show attendance, merchandise, and the sustained community support that makes careers rather than just releases. The streaming platform becomes part of the local music ecosystem rather than an extraction mechanism. This is how music infrastructure used to work before it was globalised into abstraction.

A discovery algorithm designed for engagement and one designed for community are both buildable. The question is what the platform is for, and who gets to answer that question. On major streaming platforms, the answer was determined in 2006 by people in Stockholm and has been refined by engineering teams optimising for user retention metrics ever since. The artists whose work constitutes the platform's content were not consulted. They are not consulted now. On a cooperative platform owned by its artist members, the answer is a governance decision made by the people whose music is being recommended, and whose economic sustainability depends on whether the recommendation algorithm serves their community or someone else's quarterly earnings report. These are different platforms. The technology is not the difference. The ownership is.

If you've made it this far, you probably care about where music is headed.

So do we — that's why we built something different. The Pack Music Co-operative is Australia's first musician-owned streaming platform: cooperative-governed, human-curated, and built on the radical premise that the people who make the music should own the infrastructure that distributes it.

Harry Deluxe https://harrydeluxe.com.au
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