The Fredösphere

The critics are still talking about that bit of crystal ball gazing they did a few weeks ago at ArtsJournal.com.  Here's Anne Midgette  at the NYT, and here's Kyle MacMilan at the Denver Post.

Midgette describes a friend who doesn't "like" classical music but was caught listening to Tan Dun (and not the music he wrote for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, either).  She didn't know anything about it except that she liked it.

I wish Midgette had taken a minute to talk about collaborative filtering.  As this technology takes off, it will create many more opportunities for people who are supposed to like Tan Dun to listen to him.  Previously, we relied on genre as a crude but useful tool to cull all music we probably wouldn't like from what we paid attention to.  With collaborative filtering, the genres become customized almost to the point where one exists for each person's individual taste.  It provides a way for someone to find that one Kronos quartet piece (and that one Dixie Chicks song and that one Latin motet by William Byrd) he or she happens, by a strange confluence of personality quirks and life experiences, to like.

Formerly, 5% of the population were classical music fans.  The day is coming, and is almost at hand, when 5% of each person will be a classical music fan.