Track 1: Headlock — Imogen Heap

As the cliché goes, I was a library kid before I became a librarian. As a teenager, I took the metro on Saturday mornings to the newly opened Grande bibliothèque in downtown Montreal and waited for the doors to open. I took the glass elevator to the fourth floor, which housed the music and movie collection. I picked out CDs to borrow, checking off the call numbers I had located in the catalog.

The year was 2005, and I was developing my taste in music. A favorite at the time was Imogen Heap, the iconoclastic electropop musician who went mainstream after her song “Hide and Seek” appeared on The OC. Over the next few years, I followed her on YouTube as she vlogged about producing her next record, recording weird sounds in a big house in the British countryside — an early example of an artist engaging their fan base on social media.

Fast-forward to the late 2010s, when I traded my carefully curated iTunes collection for a Spotify subscription. A “cold start,” as the industry calls it: when a new user signs up for an algorithmic platform for whom they don’t have any data.

A few years in, as the pandemic supercharged our screen time, I started feeling uneasy about Spotify. I was discovering new music, but I felt little connection to it. My Spotify Wrapped felt like a distorted mirror image of the music that I actually connected with (did I really like Taylor Swift that much?). I felt a bit offended at some of the algorithm’s suggestions.

Around this time, I decided to become a librarian. Joining a profession built on providing equitable access to information and culture was an opportunity to explore these feelings. I wasn’t loving the algorithm’s answer to the question “What’s next?”. How, I wondered, might a librarian answer it differently?