We Need More Tastemakers and Gatekeepers

“Any musical movement that claims to be all-embracing is probably lying, both to the outside world and itself.” — Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels (p. 236)

There’s a short story by a writer who died before you could hear about him. Henry Dumas. Gunned down by a cop in a New York City subway station at 33. Championed posthumously by Toni Morrison. Musically inclined offspring of Baldwin and Baraka. The story’s called “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” It’s about a crew of white musicians who try to get into the Sound Barrier Club, a jazz joint featuring Black musicians and an all Black audience. At the door, the bouncer warns the intrepid white hipsters that they enter at their own peril. Sure enough, when they do, the music proves too potent. A power they cannot process. It kills them.

They were warned.

I won’t tell you we need gatekeepers because music can kill you. Unless it’s played at a volume that would make CIA torturers cower, I’m not sure music alone can kill you. Among the many things Dumas’ story says about music— access, privilege, understanding, and history—it speaks to the necessity of gatekeepers as guides. Those who can provide passage to places we’ve never imagined. Those who can give context to the things we’ve yet to mentally metabolize. Those who can tell us we’re not ready yet. Or those we disagree with, who enable us to form our taste in opposition. Gatekeepers are not just cool kids or elitists to be mocked, they’re essential elements of a healthy commercial art ecosystem. Without them, we lose ourselves in a contextless drift.

Lack of trust defines our era. Tides of doubt—for institutions, for authority, for older generations, for foreigners, for truth—ripple back to the roots of American society. Suspicion became our default in the nuclear age. The love and peace movements of the 1960s gave way to the dark 1970s, the “greed is good” 1980s, the mainstream pessimism of the 1990s.

By the early 2010s, digitally-driven information and social media revolutions transformed the ways we confronted the world. Changes first appeared net positive: the ability to connect with lost friends, the potential to foment socio-political change from the ground up, the democratization of music distribution and conversation.

Legacy music publications, in particular, faced an unexpected threat: hobbyists, upstart collectives, and encyclopedic lone voices suddenly garnered more trust than well-paid staffs of decorated journalists. Companies like Vice, Uproxx, and Complex launched sprawling affiliate networks and gobbled up talent.

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Gatekeepers are not just cool kids or elitists to be mocked, they’re essential elements of a healthy commercial art ecosystem. Without them, we lose ourselves in a contextless drift.

In 2015 and 2016, the words “pivot to video” wafted plague-like over editorial staffs, shredding some of the best and brightest young writers as media companies sought optimization at the behest of newfound funding partners and profit imperatives. Simultaneously, streaming behemoth Spotify began the silent shift from human-led editorial to algorithmic playlisting, as detailed in Liz Pelly’s excellent Mood Machine.

In 2017, Spotify introduced “personalized editorial playlists, marking the dawn of ‘algotorial’ playlists that draw tracks from ‘candidate pools’...associated with certain moods and themes.” (Mood Machine, p. 98) On TikTok and YouTube, algorithms encourage unchallenging interviews, controversial opinions, and bald-faced promotion, crowding out those looking to provide real context. In this climate, the distrust and discarding of tastemakers and gatekeepers proved almost inevitable.

Now more than at any time since the peak of publications like Rolling Stone or The Source, it feels like we need gatekeepers to help guide us to greatness, not just what algorithms push our way.

I’m biased. My music career began in the blog era. In the time-honored tradition of “did a ___ write this,” yes, a former gatekeeper wrote this essay. I spent countless hours in college trawling Aquarium Drunkard, Gorilla Vs. Bear, The Smoking Section, Cocaine Blunts, and, of course, Pigeons & Planes before I ever imagined I might one day write for a blog, let alone make a living as a manager and general music weirdo.

Years before the blog era, before music on the internet became mass sport, I wanted to be a producer like DJ Premier or early Kanye West. I spent a lot of time at record stores digging for gold in dollar bins, trying not to be noticed. On those hunts, I spent a sliver of time at New York’s legendary Fat Beats. When I did go in, I got mocked—probably for how I dressed, partly for whatever I was buying (Jurassic 5 or something that drove home the point that I was a Young White Conscious Hip-Hop Listener™).

The dudes behind the counter at Fat Beats were some of the earliest gatekeepers I encountered. Their derision let me know my taste in everything sucked. I wasn’t up to the task of sharing their airspace. This kind of friction can freeze you. It can also motivate you to push past inertia; an inertia that stops you from getting better at making music, from learning more about the history of music, that prevents you from stepping fully into yourself.

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Algorithms don’t have perspectives ... They optimize for retention, not quality. Surprises and true discoveries get smoothed out of existence when fans end up siloed based on niche interests.

What does the landscape look like when we silently lose this friction and decide that the opinions of gatekeepers are no more important than a song played in the background of a random video we see in a social feed? Are we all just pushing past the proverbial bouncers at the club in Dumas’ story at our own mental peril, swept away in the digital brain rot deluge?

The new game is no secret. Marketing tactics used to be proprietary sauce. Now? Billboard interviews bluntly showcase how companies like Chaotic Good manufacture algorithmic momentum, flooding platforms with coordinated content that capitalizes on momentary trends, gaming the signals that determine what gets seen, engineering the appearance of organic breakout.

Chaotic Good founders Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman lay out a blueprint for any enterprising online obsessive with enough time, money, and remaining serotonin to develop similar agencies. These tactics, broadly employed by labels of all levels, have come under recent fire for bringing indie darlings Geese to the brink of mainstream success. In the past weeks, some have argued that the sort of astroturfing campaigns and digital chicanery employed by Chaotic Good make Geese industry plants. Others have argued against.

Save your vitriol and shock; I can assure you Chaotic Good is not alone (nor is Geese). Theirs is a service with a rate card. I can’t damn it. Whether marketers work for major labels or venerable indies, they’re undoubtedly hiring companies like Chaotic Good to fill channels with of-the-moment content in hopes of tripping the viral wire. A song often goes as far as an artist’s budget will allow. Algorithms reveal themselves as readily manipulated sets of data points, rather than neutral taste arbiters or engines of natural breakouts. You might like some of what you’re hearing and seeing, but the very notion of trusted sources has faded into a distant memory (particularly when you realize most of us have no fucking clue how recommendation algorithms work).

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Some might argue that algorithms have democratized music discovery, or that they’ve perfected it, surfacing precise playlists and soundalike songs for listeners looking to tune into the infinite slipstream with minimal effort. Algorithms don’t have perspectives (though they do have programmatic biases). They don’t have voices. They’re data rivers, reacting with invisible precision (or feigned precision) to various user inputs. They optimize for retention, not quality. Surprises and true discoveries get smoothed out of existence when fans end up siloed based on niche interests—the bedrock concept of Spotify and YouTube’s recommendation algorithms.

This flattened algorithmic reality calls to mind a Kelefa Sanneh quote on fandom from his excellent 2021 book Major Labels: “...snobbery is essential to fandom, especially music fandom, because adoring one thing inevitably means disdaining something else.” (Major Labels, p. 23)

When we lose these attitudes, we lose expertise, positive friction, and the sort of serendipity that comes from conversation and self-guided deep dives. We get infinite radio all around us, lo-fi beats and ambient clips stashed behind cooking videos and eerie clips of historical moments that may or may not ever have happened. A machine learning engineer interviewed by Pelly speaks to this growing divide:

"‘What do you want when you listen to music?’ he continued. ‘I don't think there's a single answer. Some of the records that I would consider really life-changing, really profound, are records that in terms of listening time, they wouldn't even show up in my top 100. Partially because they're really challenging records. They're records that opened me up to certain things. But they require a lot of investment. I'm not going to sit down and eat dinner to it. I need to be in a space where I can really devote myself. There is a lot of music that listeners find important but it's not what you want to listen to all day." (Mood Machine, p. 103)

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The debate about Geese is more than just a Rorschach test for taste; it is a reminder that even great products require real money to find their market. Those with the most money on the longest time scale tend to win.

We don’t need to like gatekeepers. Many people misplace this notion because they associate gatekeeping with removing access and opportunity. That’s fundamentally different from the kind of tastemaking that was so instrumental to the blog era. Sometimes it’s crucial to recognize that you dislike a gatekeeper’s taste, allowing you to define your own in contrast.

Returning to the bubbling “controversy” around Chaotic Good’s campaigns for Geese, one quote from John Shemley’s previously linked Wired article stands out:

“The idea of a PR firm creating dozens of social media accounts to push new music or artists may seem slightly sinister, in part because the very idea of an account arguably presumes some sort of independent consciousness behind it. But is it really any different, in essence, than dozens of music blogs republishing the same press releases pushing that same music and those same bands? These tactics follow a golden rule of so much online discourse, which another of Chaotic Good’s founding partners summed up in that Billboard interview: ‘Everything on the internet is fake.’”

To this end, it is worth calling out that a Chaotic Good campaign, or any marketing campaign, for that matter, does not guarantee success. Even in the peak MTV and radio eras, massive marketing spends could still produce expensive turds.

In these moments, gatekeepers matter more than ever. Readers of the tea leaves, arbiters of taste (even bad taste), passionate voices fighting for specific genres, specific artists, specific songs.

In a time defined by slop and burnout, when human voices fade into grayed out information overload, we need gatekeepers who can point us to the things that matter. Music of cultural importance. Sounds resonating in real spaces. Oddball art that even indie labels don’t support. We’ve seen websites and whole wings of music history disappear in the last decade as corporate mergers and DMCA takedowns decimated an internet landscape improperly perceived as permanent.

We shouldn’t lose further ground because the new era demands algorithmic manipulation on an industrial scale. We don’t just risk missing new discoveries. We risk ecosystemic collapse in the face of rapidly worsening winner-take-all stakes, like so many other facets of our fast-consolidating world. The debate about Geese is more than just a Rorschach test for taste; it is a reminder that even great products require real money to find their market. Those with the most money on the longest time scale tend to win. Independent gatekeepers can’t solve that problem, but they can be lights in the long dark.

For the record, I’d be one of the dead white kids in the Dumas story.

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