WASHINGTON—A federal grand jury issued a formal subpoena today targeting the 5 best songs of the week, initiating an unprecedented criminal investigation into the music curation industry. The Department of Justice alleges that these five specific tracks conspired to monopolize listener dopamine receptors. During a tense hearing in U.S. District Court, prosecutors grilled a prominent industry insider regarding the selection process. The following transcript excerpt reveals the systematic manipulation behind the weekly music charts and the dark economy of internet music blogs.
Q: State your name and occupation for the record.
A: Barnaby Quill, Senior Analyst of Unsolicited Forecasts at Goldman Sachs and consultant for Stereogum.
Q: Mr. Quill, let us discuss the 5 best songs of the week. How does a song actually enter this elite tier?
A: We use a proprietary algorithm. It measures the artist's pitchfork density and the density of their publicist's emails. If a song does not make a listener feel vaguely superior to their coworkers, we reject it.
Q: So you admit the public has no say in determining the 5 best songs of the week?
A: The public listens to whatever we tell them to listen to. If we put a forty-minute track of a dial-up modem on our Spotify playlist, three thousand indie bloggers will write essays about its liminal space architecture.
Q: Is it true that major record labels pay you in artisanal cheese to secure these spots?
A: I cannot comment on the cheese. However, I can confirm that the third-best song of the week was funded entirely by a shell company owned by a prominent beverage conglomerate.
Q: And what of the fifth song? The acoustic ballad about a dead dog?
A: That song was engineered in a Swiss lab to induce crying in Subaru owners. We own the patent on the chord progression.
At press time, the Department of Justice seized the five audio files and placed them in a high-security evidence locker, where they are currently being outplayed by a twenty-year-old OutKast track.
