The records the algorithm won't find for you: Jonny Trunk's story

The record was sitting in a shop, on a shelf nobody bothered with. Jonny Trunk pulled it out because he had no idea what it was.

A Bosworth LP. Library music: material cut to catalogue for television, radio and cheap cinema, never meant to be sold to a person.

He says himself that finding it by chance is what let everything else happen.

Knocking on a door in Soho

Finding the record isn’t the interesting part, and it isn’t what makes him unusual either. What he did next is.

He went to Bosworth’s offices in Soho and got them to explain how the business worked, and by his account that was the moment the whole thing clicked into place.

A music publisher isn’t a label. It commissions music, files it by category, and rents it out to people who shoot pictures.

The records weren’t stock. They were a warehouse.

If you can’t get into the warehouse, that music doesn’t exist as far as you’re concerned. It isn’t rare in the collector’s sense. It’s outside the shops by design.

Faxes, and phone calls at three in the morning

He sums up the method in three things: faxes, late-night calls to oddballs, waiting for the post.

That isn’t a joke about how quaint it all was, it’s a precise description of how you recovered a catalogue before any of it was indexed anywhere, which is to say by asking the people who happened to own copies, one at a time, and hoping they wrote back.

“The Super Sounds Of Bosworth” came out in 1996, the first Trunk Records release and the first library compilation ever put on sale.

Paul Giovanni’s soundtrack to “The Wicker Man” followed in 1998. A red vinyl pressing of five hundred picked up the description of rarest record of all time.

Listen while you read

Rarity wasn’t the motive. He couldn’t buy “The Wicker Man”, couldn’t buy the things he was watching on the telly, so he did it himself.

Why a recommender can’t reach it

The story runs into a technical problem here. Better to put numbers on it than nostalgia.

A system that suggests music by similarity between listeners needs listening. A record nobody has played has no neighbours, because there’s no pair of people who’ve heard it alongside anything else.

A De Wolfe disc cut to underscore a documentary in 1968 starts from precisely there. Zero.

Dominik Kowald, Markus Schedl and Elisabeth Lex measured what that does to the listener, working on LFM-1b, a set of one billion one hundred million logged plays, from which they drew three thousand users and 352,805 artists and sorted the users into three groups of a thousand by how closely their listening resembled everyone else’s.

The point isn’t that the algorithm has bad taste. It’s that the system serves worst the people who most need taking somewhere else.

What the listeners say

Sebastian Cole interviewed twenty Spotify users between 2022 and 2023, aged twenty-one to sixty-five, asking them to open the app and talk while they used it.

What comes out is that nearly all of them know a mechanism is running, though they know it from using it rather than from studying it, and their sense of what it does is built entirely out of what it has done to them.

One of the more critical puts it in a single line. He doesn’t think Spotify knows him very well, and he’d handed over years of data.

I just accept everything they ask me. I’m totally a give-upper.

That one is a different interviewee, at the opposite end.

What gets lost, and what doesn’t

It would be convenient to stop here, with the shop beating the phone. It doesn’t add up.

Hunting records that way cost time and money, and it selected for the people who had both: you needed to live near the right shops, keep your afternoons free, and carry cash for a warehouse clearance. It wasn’t democratic. It was just hard.

And the catalogue that now opens from a chair in any town at all used to sit physically in a handful of streets in a handful of cities.

There is one thing no recommender does, though, and it isn’t a technical shortcoming. It can’t put a record back on sale that was never on sale.

Library music reached us because somebody turned it into a record you could buy, at a point when no such record existed. That’s an editorial act. It sits upstream of any suggestion whatsoever, because without it there’s nothing there to suggest.

We had “The Super Sounds Of Bosworth” on while writing this, and the odd part is exactly that. It starts on the first tap, as though it had always been available.

It hadn’t. It took somebody walking into a shop without knowing what he was looking for.