Sheriff: “Alexa, [dramatic Alexa pause], play Workin’ Me.”
AlexaTron XLT: “I cannot find the song Working Me.”
[insert puzzled Sheriff here]
Sheriff: “Alexa,
[dramatic Alexa pause],
Play Workin’ Me by Quavo”.
AlexaTron XLT: “I cannot find the song Working Me by Quavo.”
Sheriff: 🤔
This interaction was a few days after the video for Quavo’s song Workin’ Me came out, so I thought to myself “Oh, maybe it’s not on Spotify yet…”
But lo-and-behold, after going to the Spotify App, there it was:
Aha! - There are spaces between each letter in the song title! That’s why Alexa couldn’t find it, because what I was saying couldn’t be mapped exactly back to that song title.
I guess if I yelled the song, maybe that would work?…since all the letters are capitalized?…anywho…
At that point, I pantomimed to myself silently: “Alexa [slightly shorter dramatic Alexa pause], play W - O - R - K - I - N…” imagining an effort to spell out the song title correctly, being sure not to get interrupted by the AlexaBot 3000 before I finished speaking.
In all, I was thinking to myself: “This is inconvenient…”
I’m sure Quavo, nor anyone else in his camp, knew that there would be any voice-activated device issues to consider when deciding on a song title, so it’s interesting to experience this edge case outcome in the wild.
Putting on my strategic design hat, I can assume that rappers aren’t designing their song titles with accessibility in mind. The clash between how the artists want the art consumed and making the art accessible for all bring up topics to think about overall. It’s not a bad thing that artists may not be making these considerations, but it’s an opportunity area to help artists creatively get their media out to more people effectively.
Furthermore, considering “song title design” beyond voice-activated devices, you can imagine things like screen readers or dictation software reeling off the title of the song as someone is browsing their music app of choice:
Screen reader: “4 AM By 2 Chainz”, “W - O - R - K - I - N - M - E by Quavo”, …
Listener: “Hehn? What that one song or two?… maybe it’s a bug?”
There are other songs I’ve been a fan of that fall into this accessibility grey zone:
“Skrrt Skrrt”
“Esketit”
“Lyk Dis” (and almost any song by the great Knxwledge)
Of course, the potential improvements that can be made to accommodate the artistic integrity of song-titlers and the variety of music browsers:
“Alt Titles”
Alt titles may be a thing, but I haven’t had much success with it. Alt titles are a similar concept to alt text for images. Alt titles can give the artist the opportunity to provide the phonetic pronunciation of the song title and even their names.
Interpolation
The music streaming services can interpolate what the title or name should be, allowing the artist not to have to worry about having to provide an alt title and increase their media’s accessibility. Using tools to validate grammar of a song title could help. Checks like:
- “Is the title or name close enough to another word to make a guess?” For example Knowledge v. Knxwledge, one character away. We can guess Knowledge may be the way to pronounce this artist’s name.
- “Is this a grammatically correct term or what could help is be so? For example: removing the spaces in W O R K I N M E to see if it sounds like a familiar phrase.
- “Does this sound exist in other ways we’re familiar of?” For example “Dis” in Lyk Dis. We’re familiar with the prefix ‘dis-‘ with other words. We can guess that’s how you say that part of the title.
Of course, an interpolation system would require verification that would be best for the artist to provide, but it makes the process more interactive with the artist, an excellent opportunity to engage them as a user of your system.
Meet in the middle
Of course, in a similar way many companies have print brand guidelines and digital brand guidelines that include different typography and color shades for consumption reasons, a similar model can be applied here. For marketing purposes like social media, print media, and any other promotion, showing the actual title as intended to be is 👍🏿 (W O R K I N M E). For digital media, that has different consumption dimensions to consider, erring towards an accessible title can be best (Workin Me).
And that’s what happened with the song W O R K I N M E:
You can see here the actual song listing the user interacts with is “WORKIN ME,” but the cover title is “W O R K I N M E.”
I’m not sure how soon the change was made after I encountered it, but recently I noted it in Spotify. I then had the same brief chat with my Amazon RS Sport as I did when the song was first released to see if I could play the song and it was successful!
Not sure what drove either Spotify, Quavo, QC, or whomever to make the change in Spotify, but good on them. They may not have made the change with a wider view in mind, but the change has likely lowered the barrier for more people to listen to the song.
If there are any artists out there that want to team up on assuring their media is consumable by as many parties as possible through being considerate of accessibility from an ability standpoint, and various others dimensions may they be physical, social, international, or economic drop me a line. It doesn’t have to be music either! Imagine providing a consumer of your art more than one route that’s just as valuable and vivid as your primary route, thereby growing your fan base? There’s a wide range of experimental options that would be great to explore, and I’d be glad to guide you to get your art to as many people as possible.
👍🏿✌🏿