I’ve been trying to learn how to run Meta ads. This is apparently what being a musician means now. Once I thought the job involved learning chords and writing lyrics. Today I am studying conversion events, pixels, ad sets, placements, cost per click and something called Advantage+, which sounds like prostate medication endorsed by Gretzky.

I make an ad. Meta says it is Learning. Good. So am I. The fascinating part, trying to understand who I’m talking to. Meta asks me to define my audience. People who like songwriters? Piano players? People within forty kilometres of Sudbury who are free Thursday night and have recently experienced an unexplained yearning for an old man sitting at a piano?

Apparently the machine knows.

I give it twenty dollars and say, find my people.

The old system wasn’t necessarily better. You stapled a poster to a telephone pole, called the newspaper, mailed something to a radio station and hoped somebody noticed. Now I can theoretically locate the exact person who likes John Cage, Keith Jarrett, Judee Sill and stories about raising kids.

Which is incredible.

Meta assures me these people exist.

There are 1,700 of them.

For another $14.63 Meta will introduce us.

Somewhere an algorithm is learning about my audience.

Somewhere I’m learning about the algorithm.

And somewhere between the two of us, Troy buys another ticket.