Thirty Tigers' David Macias Diagnoses the Algorithm in First Book

David Macias, president of Thirty Tigers, publishes his first book on Jan. 14. "Circulation: How Culture Moves in the Age of Algorithm," out from Whitefox Publishing, argues that recommendation-driven music consumption is starving listeners of discovery and starving the industry of new scenes. Macias set out the argument in a recent interview with Variety in Nashville during AmericanaFest.

Macias co-founded Thirty Tigers in 2001. The company runs distribution, label services and management under a model that lets artists keep ownership of their records. That track record, he says, gave him standing to ask why a system designed to help listeners find new music was instead walling them off from scenes beyond the ones they already know.

What does the book actually claim?

The core numbers come from Macias himself. "Around two years ago, the business just started feeling worse, and I couldn't quite figure out why it felt harder," he told Variety. He has seen estimates that algorithms now recommend 70-80% of all media people consume, social media included.

He cites Luminate data on nostalgia. In 2024, he says, music released in the last five years accounted for 49% of all streams; last year that share fell to 43.6%. People are comforting themselves, he argues, and the algorithm obliges. "We can only be fed the same emotional cues before we become desensitized to it over time."

The book opens with Fab 5 Freddy, who moved between Grandmaster Flash, Blondie, Andy Warhol and downtown New York. Macias recounts how Freddy brought a cassette of Grandmaster Flash's music to dinner at Debbie Harry and Chris Stein's house; the result was "Rapture," the first No. 1 pop hit to feature rapping. Macias was 14, watching "Friday Night Videos" in Lakeland, Florida, and seeing things he had never seen before. That cross-breeding, he argues, is what the industry is losing.

Macias is careful about what the book is not. "This is not an old-man-yells-at-cloud book," he says — not an attack on Spotify either. "Every person I've ever met at Spotify is pretty nice." His read is structural, not moral: businesses optimize for customer retention, and a 5% increase in retention compounds into long-tail value. "Spotify's not trying to fuck us. They're just trying to please us, right?" The end result, in his phrase, is "a sclerotic music ecosystem" that leads to "cultural tune-out."

Which scenes does he want to build up?

The book names three under-served communities Macias believes have growth potential:

• Queer music, where he says he has talked to a major promoter and city officials about a west-coast festival — "a queer version of AfroPunk."
• The Big Ears community, built around the eclectic annual festival in Knoxville.
• Music for progressive Christians, an audience he measures through Texas senatorial candidate James Talarico, whose faith-and-service content drew seven-figure followings on TikTok and Instagram before his Senate run.

On the Christian market, Macias reports a blunt exchange with an executive: asked whether fear keeps the business from platforming liberal expressions of faith, the executive laughed and said, "No, if we thought we'd make money doing that, we'd do it." Praise music crowded out everything else, he says; Thirty Tigers signed Amy Grant, who does not fit that mold. He has asked Live Nation whether a faith-informed bill could sell out a minor league stadium and says the answer was yes. He also invokes the late writer Rachel Held Evans: "What if Rachel Held Evans were a music genre?"

The precedent, Macias argues, is Americana. "I and many, many other people showed up, and there was no data to tell us that we should," he says of building festivals, conferences and radio around the genre. That build-out produced a Zach Bryan — and then major labels, in his telling, fed the same sounds back "with an incredible velocity until it just chokes the system."

Does he have a streaming fix?

Yes, and it is a museum. Macias proposes that Spotify build an untracked "room" stocked with 200 classic experimental albums — he names Brian Eno's "Music for Airports" and Terry Riley's "Shri Camel" — plus new work and top-20 lists from artists in that community. Inside, "the algorithm will be turned off. It will be pure discovery," with a scan button pulling randomly from roughly a thousand albums. Whether any DSP would disable tracking, even in one room, is the plan's obvious weak point — Macias does not claim Spotify has agreed.

Macias says two years of work on "Circulation" left him reinvigorated. "I've gone from being where I felt like I don't know what the fuck is going on... to being more excited about what I'm doing than maybe ever," he said. Passage previews will appear on his Substack ahead of publication. His closing stance on AI and algorithms: "The agency is with us." The test of that claim begins Jan. 14 — and with the west-coast festival talks he says are already underway.