The Cornershop Algorithm

Double Decker Eyelashes wasn't something Instagram showed me. I was already listening to Cornershop and that song just stayed on. Those lyrics. That voice. I used to put it on when I actually wanted to hear it, the full thing, not a clip.

I am glad if someone else likes it. I am not trying to keep it. A song is supposed to move. That is not the part that bothers me.

The part that bothers me is how it arrives now. I open Instagram and it is there again. Same stretch. Same few lines. Under a clip that has nothing to do with the song. Then again an hour later. Then again at night. I did not put it on. The app did. After a while I am not choosing the song anymore. I am being worn down by it. A thing I loved on purpose is now a thing the feed keeps placing in front of me until the first listen gets hard to reach.

Other people are finding it there too. That is fine. That is how most things get found now. But they are finding a slice. Fifteen seconds. A mood. A caption that says "this song." They may go on to play the whole track. I hope they do. A lot of them will not. And even if they do, the song has already been used as background so many times that when I put the album on later, a bit of the feed is still stuck to it. I hear the reel first. Then I have to wait for my own version to come back.

I still go to the songs where she is singing like that. The close ones. Not the big track everyone already knew. This one. I just cannot live inside it the same way when I have already heard that piece of it twelve times before noon, with no album, no room, no choice.

So I stop putting it on my story. I skip when it comes up. I wait and play it later, off the phone. Not because I want the song to stay hidden. Because I want to hear it as a song again, not as content the app learned I would not swipe from.

That is the Cornershop Algorithm. It does not only show a niche thing to more people. It repeats the niche thing until even the person who loved it first starts to step back from it. The door is open. I am not standing in it. I just wish the song could arrive as the whole song, once in a while, instead of as the same fragment on a loop.