At the end of our interview, Ogle and I talked about how most music fans (but not all) are fundamentally conservative. They like what they like, and they don’t want to be too challenged by music. “The line from psychologists is, if you’ve seen it before, it hasn’t killed you yet,” I joked. Ogle’s face lit up. “I have a story for you,” he said. The original version of Discover Weekly was supposed to include only songs that users had never heard before. But in its first internal test at Spotify, a bug in the algorithm let through songs that users already knew. “Everyone reported it as a bug, and
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