Department of unintended consequences, part 1: Is SPOTIFY's Autoplay feature, which plays music it thinks is similar to what you've been listening to after it's done playing the songs in your queue, secretly turning 20th century indie-rock obscurities into 21st century indie-rock hits? Stereogum's NATE ROGERS chronicles the journey of a GALAXIE 500's "STRANGE" from long-overlooked album track to most popular Galaxie 500 song in Spotify—"by a significant margin"—and of PAVEMENT's "HARNESS YOUR HOPES" from three-decade-old b-side to digital crossover success story. Not only is the latter more popular in Spotify than Pavement staples like "RANGE LIFE" and "CUT YOUR HAIR," it's also turned into a go-to Pavement track on other platforms including APPLE MUSIC and TIKTOK, which is where things start to get a little eerie. Is Autoplay somehow sharing its secret discoveries with Spotify's competitors, or is this just how cultural momentum works? They're both good vintage indie-rock songs, for what it's worth. Whether you read all this as good or bad news may depend on whether you're thrilled for an old song to be discovered by a new generation, or worried at the prospect of artificial intelligence asserting programming power over our future, picking winners and losers for reasons that aren't clear to us non-artificial intelligences. Did Autoplay latch onto "Strange" because it was the most conventional song it could find in the Galaxie 500 oeuvre (drummer DAMON KRUKOWSKI, who has a parallel career as a musicologist and digital thinker, makes that case), or did Autoplay's design point it toward an '80s rock song that would sound good to current rock ears? Tastes change, and there's no reason a band's most popular song in 1989 should automatically be its most popular song three decades later. But whose taste are we talking about—that of music fans, or that of a few lines of code?... Department of unintended consequences, part 2: Music and tech strategist BAS GRASMAYER games out how digital music promotion might change if digital services ever switch over to user-centric royalties, as many artists, including Krukowski, have been pushing for. One potential side effect: Artists would be incentivized to get their fans to turn off that Autoplay feature, lest they move on to other artists. The ideal fan in a user-centric world, Grasmayer suggests, is a fan who listens to one artist and one artist only... No, DOLLY PARTON was not the primary financial backer of MODERNA's potential Covid-19 vaccine. But the million bucks she did donate was "critical" in the early days of vaccine development at VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER. I detect no untruths in this tweet ("EOTY" = Entertainer of the Year at the CMA AWARDS)... Though this admirable and honorable playlist leans toward dad-rock (and dad-pop and dad-hop and dad&B), POTUS #44 remains the only POTUS—ever?—who's demonstrated an ear for current pop music. But he loses a quarter point this week for a less-than-nuanced take on hip-hop... One of the reasons—besides MJ—that THRILLER sounds as good as any album ever made is that engineer BRUCE SWEDIEN recorded the rhythm track for each song on a dedicated two-inch analog tape, then locked the tapes away and didn't play them again until he was ready for his final mix. You can thank him for all those drum transients you can still, therefore, hear 38 years later. Also: layers and layers of stereo tracks. The innovative jazz and pop recording engineer, who worked side by side with QUINCY JONES for decades, died Monday at 86... RIP also ANDREW WHITE and ERIC HALL.