The return to serendipity is a win for creative problem solving

The Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony has got to be one of the best driving songs out there. And I should know, having just driven eight hours for a family holiday. The long intro of the song, as each instrument adds to the tune, creates an anticipation for the lyrics, which, when they finally arrive, you can all sing along to. Slightly bemused I was, then, when I learnt that that kind of song would never be written today.

The reason, that intro. Today, songs need to be short, and they need to be catchy: don’t bore us, get to the chorus, is the refrain. The recent pinnacle of this perhaps being Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road, which is only 1.53 seconds long; a third of the length of Bitter Sweet Symphony. What’s made songs shorter and catchier is us, the listeners. By playing songs through music apps like Spotify we give over a whole treasure trove of insights into when, where, how, and what we like to listen to – and key to one of them is a catchy song that we won’t skip. This is in turn incentivises song artists to make short and catchy songs.

Though that is what the data says, is it actually what we want? I’m not so sure. At the start of Will Page’s Tarzan Economics – a behind the scenes look at how Spotify, and the like, lifted the music industry off its Napster-induced knees – he highlights a few of the erroneous ways of a bloated and arrogant music industry of the 80s and 90s. One being how the weekly music charts run-down was not a scientific calculation of music sales, but rather a basic sampling of a handful of music shops and what artists had sold the most there – a policy that was ripe for abuse by record labels looking to push their artists up the charts, by buying up all their band’s music in that store. What we have now, celebrates Page, is a truly meritocratic charts, based purely on number of plays and downloads.

The downside of that is that you end up with what you’ve always got. The songs you are currently listening to are understood to be the style of songs you want to listen to next week. The old sampling systems’ imperfection was its perfection, allowing for a greater diversity of songs in the charts.

The rise of entertainment apps that capture all the data around your consumption, which in turn feeds algorithms that offer up more of the same content, is fairly commonplace now. Because I watched Explained I must like Connected, The Movies that made us, and The future of. So, this is what tops my Netflix listings. And to a degree that’s true, but it’s not all I want. This is perhaps best illustrated by the Olympics.

If I’m at all like most people, when the Olympics are on, you tune in for a handful of events – say the 100m athletics & diving – but end up being engrossed by something completely different, perhaps the shotput, or show jumping, or my favourite of Tokyo 2020, the modern heptathlon. A sport you may never have heard of before, but there’s something enjoyable in learning about the event as you watch it unfold before your eyes. My point being you don’t always know what you want. It is the serendipity of discovering something you didn’t know you liked.

Harry Truman said ‘when you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship,’ and I wonder if this same sentiment can be applied to entertainment, when the tracking of your preferences becomes too efficient, your options are suddenly pre-determined for you. The opportunity for choice and serendipity is lost.

This seems to be a concept that is slowing being recognised. Prime Video is returning to linear TV - Amazon Prime now includes Live TV, linear TV channels of their own content helping you discover something new. Social media is moving to new discovery - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram are all cloning TikTok’s ability to offer up new content from a greater diversity of creators. Amazon's rolling out bricks and mortar stores, provides a greater opportunity to discover new items and brands that are easier to encounter in store.

These moves are providing a greater opportunity for new discovery, to find something completely different. Yes, it takes you away from the comfort zone of what you know you like, but it can help broaden your experiences. And this can only be a good thing – it is often the serendipitous experience, rather than the planned action, that leads to the best outcomes. Steve Jobs, in his Stanford Commence Speech, recognised that his random undertaking of a calligraphy class ultimately helped make his Apple products better. His learning about serif and sans serif, of letter spacing and size – completely useless at the time – came back to aid him when developing Apple’s fonts.

By allowing ourselves to have new and different experiences we break out of our own echo chambers and test our assumptions of our viewpoints, of our preferences, and of our capabilities. And we get a much richer, more diverse bank of knowledge to call upon – a huge bonus for creativity.

Creativity has been referenced as an import/export business of ideas; it is placing something in a new, novel context. To return to Jobs, as he put it – ‘creativity is just connecting things.’ In other words, analogy sits at the heart of creativity and creative problem solving. What matters most then is to have sufficiently different experiences that we can connect back to, and which provide the fuel of analogy. This is the beauty of serendipity; you don’t know which random experiences may one day come back and be just the right fit for what you need.

Indeed, it was serendipity and the bringing together of random influences that made Bitter Sweet Symphony what is was, as Richard Ashcroft explained of the many samples on the track, we wanted “to take something but really twist it and f*ck it up into something else. Take it and use your imagination." Wise words to live by indeed.