When I read the news that Spotify was linking with Tinder to help people find dates based on their musical taste, I'd finished listening to Flash & The Pan's Hey St Peter and had just moved on to Girl Talk's Night Ripper.
This, in the words of Tinder CEO Sean Rad, "says a lot about your personality, what your interests are". Deep, man, cue the "think" emoji.
In an attempt to inject "personality" into a dating app most people treat as a mindless game of solitaire (a deux), Spotify will now let you add an "anthem" to your Tinder profile, so that people can decide whether to left or right swipe you based on your taste in music.
"With Spotify, we're fully integrating music into the swiping experience in a brand new way – at a massive, global scale," Rad says. "With or without a Spotify account, you can choose to add an anthem to your profile and start swiping to see who shares your favourite songs and artists. With the addition of music powered by Spotify, we're introducing an even more personalised experience on the platform."
I'll give Rad props for recognising that the "personalised experience" is often lacking on Tinder, where people frequently post one five-year-old photo and no "about me" paragraph, but I can't help but see this brave new era in music-based dating as little more than a passing amusement.
Putting aside the fact that very few people will likely choose their "anthem" sincerely (that's coming from someone whose MySpace profile song was Nikki Webster's Strawberry Kisses for a long time), a Spotify-Tinder alliance can only ever hope to lead people up the garden path.
Algorithmically assisted dating typically focuses on matching you with people based on what you like: the 'questions' you've answered similarly or identically, the interests you share, the films you like. After a good fifteen years of dating, much of it online, I am of the firm belief that we would be better served by algorithms that focus on what you don't like. (The first person to launch a "what don't you like" dating platform will get my life's savings.)
Think about it: if I say I like Ghostbusters, and "rascal_flats1978" says he likes Ghostbusters, the computer will automatically think we're a match, even if he thinks abortion is immoral and I think assault rifles should be banned.
And while Tinder's sole "algorithm" is "whether or not you swipe right", adding music to the mix nudges the app ever closer to its more in-depth cousins such as OkCupid and Match.
Let's look at my music tastes as a case study. I'm a huge metal fan; my Spotify "recently played" list is regularly peppered with Witchfynde, Slayer, Judas Priest and Darkthrone. When I searched those band names as keywords on OkCupid, it didn't take long to get to the dark edges of online dating where dudes have SS symbols on their vests and framed daggers hanging behind them in selfies that appear to have been taken in dungeons or prison cells.
Similarly, say I put Kanye West's Hell Of A Life (one of my favourite songs) as my Tinder "anthem", and a fellow Yeezus believer right-swipes me: are they going to be disappointed when they hear me singing Stephen Sondheim torch songs in the shower?
More than once I've gone on dates with people who I have a high match percentage with only to find that things would quickly end in disaster because we didn't "match" in other departments. One ex and I, now good friends, often laugh uproariously about our storied 93 per cent match rating now that we can both agree that our brief relationship was a catastrophe.
At 34, I know that "what are your top five albums?" is little more than small talk. I've long since jettisoned the "It's not what you're like, it's what you like" mindset of the High Fidelity fan of old; loving the same albums doesn't necessarily mean that you'll love each other. And to be honest, I don't really care what type of music someone likes, I want to know if they like me.
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