Mathematics Says You Love Sabrina Carpenter, Maybe.

Little in mathematics is as intuitive, or explains so much of the world, as preferential attachment. It doesn’t even need a complex formula to be appreciated. You can just look around and realise that the more popular an entity is, the more likely other entities are to try to hitch themselves to it.

On social media, for example, bigger accounts attract more new users than smaller accounts and thus grow even larger. Huge brands like Nike or Apple draw in acolytes until they’re cemented as cultural icons. Even beauty spots have succumbed, successive Instagram photos turning some of them into “must selfie with” destinations. Popularity begets popularity.

Preferential attachment can be simple, like beauty spots, or highly complex. Pop stars are a fantastic example of the latter - once they reach a certain level of popularity, they unlock a whole range of new superpowers. Promotional opportunities start pouring in, their digital footprint explodes overnight, fan groups bloom around the world, and the best publicists, choreographers, songwriters, producers, fellow musicians, and so on want to work with them. That’s what turns a hardworking and talented artist into a megastar.

Take Sabrina Carpenter, for instance. She is everywhere right now, her catchy and memorable hits suddenly catapulting her into the stratosphere and putting her on billboards and talk shows, and her name on every set of lips that matters. Except, not so suddenly, actually. That Espresso song you’re hearing isn’t from a smash debut album, nor even a breakthrough second, but her upcoming sixth studio album. She was hardworking and talented for a long time before she reached preferential attachment.

Her tipping point came last year when Feather - a gem of a song - generated a fortuitous public argument with the Catholic Church, and somebody on Team Sabrina had the genius to print the words “Jesus was a Carpenter” on a T-shirt. Couple that with a warm-up stint on Taylor Swift’s hyper tour of the universe, and you’ll get more exposure than the worst parts of the internet.

At least, that’s the theory I’d buy. An article in The Spectator suggested a rather different reason for the singer’s recent fame. It seems Spotify might be queuing Carpenter’s songs at the end of your playlists, artificially inflating her exposure to your ears in the hope that her breezy, dopamine-inducing rhythms will lull you into staying on the platform for longer. And they might, to be honest.

All music worth listening to is based on anticipation and release cycles. There has to be something in the music that can be withheld from you, something that you can anticipate and get a dopamine hit upon hearing. A snappy chorus is the simplest example - it’s withheld from you by the verses, and your anticipation grows until you hear it. But many other anticipation and release cycles are hacking into your brain juice while you listen.

Classical music, for example, does it with long cycles of building tension and releasing crescendos. Conversely, funk does it with micro cycles of irregularity around a consistent downbeat. And different combinations of brain hacks can make you feel different things. Listening to Tina Turner sing Proud Mary makes you feel energised, while listening to her sing We Don’t Need Another Hero makes you reflective and a bit melancholy. Anticipation and release cycles can make you feel anything a skilled artist wants you to. That’s music - good music, anyway.

And it’s why DJs exist. A good DJ will select the right songs for the moment and, crucially, the right songs to keep the moment going. They’re masters at reading a crowd, at picking up on social cues to gauge if things need speeding up or slowing down, or if it’s time for group energy or intimate couples’ dances, or if the room requires adrenaline or a burst of something silly. If the music is well selected, you’ll barely notice the transitions from dining at a wedding to dancing to peeling away with the groom’s hot cousin.

Spotify is like a DJ that lives rent free in your mind, a data harvesting machine that knows which songs you personally like listening to, on which days of the week, and at what times. It knows if you’ve been pausing a lot today, switching between playlists, adding to playlists or passively listening, skipping songs, skipping through intros, skipping past outros, and it uses that information to profile who you are. Spotify knows you.

I have so many objections to that - to the state of algorithmic surveillance we’ve let the world fall into - and my objections are compounded by the simple practical fact that the algorithms are very, very good at spying on us.

So, if Spotify’s algorithm thinks Sabrina Carpenter will keep you listening past the end of a playlist, then the simplest explanation is this - you’re a fan, even if you haven’t realised it.

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