Spotify killed the radio star

The list of Spotify’s sins, which include, fake stock artists, slave wages despite ever-increasing revenue, and algorithms primed to decontextualize and recontextualize once powerful tunes, should weigh heavily on its artificially crafted soul. Even though Spotify is king, it’s clearly closer to Ivan the Terrible — including the filicide — than Prince Charming. 

Spotify, and other music streaming platforms, fulfill the need of the attention economy by giving users access to an infinite universe of music. Each Spotify curated playlist on the front page of the app is a doorway into a different world, something that would have seemed magical and life changing 40 years ago. But as a result, users know less about the music they are listening to than ever. 

This summer I spent time working in a record store, talking to people I met there about the music they picked out or the music they wished we stocked. I realized that, even though I was listening to more music than ever, many of the songs I was adding to my Spotify playlists I could only remember the title of but not the artist or album name. 

When I was in high school, my listening habits were focused and obsessive. I didn’t just listen to Elliott Smith, I was reading up on the music scene he was a part of. I was listening to his albums from front to back, and I was purchasing physical copies of his records. Now, I can’t name an artist I’ve cared that much about in the last four years. 

Spotify is a symptom of a new “regime of convenience” where it’s easier to have the machine pick for you than to intentionally choose which song you want to listen to. In a world of infinite options, how are you supposed to make that choice? 

Regardless of its clear and much discussed flaws, Spotify is still the most popular music streaming service, boasting 150 million subscribers, far above the second place app, Apple Music, that has 94 million subscribers. 

Despite its prominence, Spotify has the worst audio quality of the top music streaming services. It compresses the songs on its platform into mp3 tracks, discarding “unnecessary” data to save space. While economically sound, this means the songs come out flat and muddled. 

The rise of “Spotify-Core” goes beyond actual musicians that are catering to the algorithm. Now, Spotify is fast-tracking the process by creating “Perfect Fit Content.”  Liz Pelly talks about this process in her article “The Ghosts in the Machine.” This occurs when Spotify will pay a stock music company for a batch of songs they can add to their platform and playlists, under the guise of them being real musicians.

Instead, the company will pay session musicians for a day to play. They will then cut this up into multiple tracks to put on Spotify.

The benefit of “Perfect Fit Content,” for Spotify, is that they don’t have to pay artists fees for these songs which will rack up millions of listens on playlists like “Deep Focus,” “Cocktail Jazz” and “Ambient Relaxation.”

Most people that listen to these “ghost artists” on Spotify generated playlists will probably never realize. Many who listen to real artists on playlists generated by Spotify will never listen to the artist’s back catalog or investigate the history behind the kind of music that they are consuming, but that’s not their fault.

The songs on the platform are made extra lifeless by Spotify’s algorithm, artificial intelligence playlist generation and the inconsistent shuffle feature. The playlists that Spotify creates for the platform take music away from its original context, rather than putting together music based on genre. Even in their genre playlists, songs are organized by “vibe.” 

John Harris from The Guardian discussed the way a Spotify generated playlist called “Farmer’s Market” will put songs like Joan Baez’s cover of “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “undressed” by Sombr next to each other. These songs have nothing to do with each other and have completely different lyrical themes and genres. In placing them together, alongside other songs that are equally as unrelated, Spotify replaces genre and history with images of tote bags and organic produce. 

This is not something Spotify does unintentionally. Rather, the platform wants to create a sonic backdrop for its users because it encourages them to keep listening, instead of turning it off because the music is “too much.” Spotify increases traffic by erasing the “muchness” that exists in music.

The singles and artists that blow up on Spotify are those that mold themselves to fit this algorithmically primed “chillness.” In their pop music reviews, The New York Times will often call this type of music “Spotify-Core.” Liz Pelly in The Baffler describes this kind of pop music as having a “soft emo-y, cutsey thing to it”. 

These songs with their abbreviated lengths, early choruses and beats that seem as though they were birthed by AI trying to recreate a Khalid beat gain millions of streams on playlists like “Mood Booster” and “Chill Hits.” 

Despite this, these songs leave as quickly as they came. The main quality they all share is their disposability. 

Not just Spotify, but music streaming as a medium, is popular, but also insidious, because of the level of convenience it affords its subscribers. Starting with platforms like Napster and then Limewire in the early 2000s, these services which allowed peer-to-peer file sharing over the internet meant that if one person with the software had the file downloaded onto their computer, everyone did. 

At the time, these services were facilitating piracy which led to the creation of the everpresent “you wouldn’t steal a car” commercials from the 2000s. The legality issue would be their eventual downfall. However, when Spotify used this same model after gaining the licensing rights for the music on their platform, their popularity exploded. 

This idea that music should be free, or “freeish” for a low subscription price, led to the devaluation of music as an art form. Many people quantify their interest in music from the “minutes listened” section on their Spotify wrapped, with little thought to how much of that music they remember, or how much of it actually moved them. 

As part of my own process of putting faces to the names of the artists, movements and albums that I love, and yet knew nothing about because of my lack of intentionality, I’m using this column as a space to write about the music that I learn about from the people in my life. From people I love, people I just met, to a man who once argued with me about whether or not Fall Out Boy and The Clash are both punk (they are not). 

Until then, take the time to listen to the full discography of an artist you love, or the album one of your favorite songs comes off of. If, like me, you are unable, or too emotionally attached, to find other ways of listening to music than Spotify, try bit by bit to take back a little bit of your attention.