Spotify is bad, apparently. The charges levied against the app are that it stifles artists by paying them a pittance and listeners with its all-pervasive algorithm. ‘How Spotify ruined music,’ was the title of one recent Washington Post article, while the New Yorker asked ‘Is there any escape from Spotify syndrome?’ going on to conclude that ‘what we have now is a perverse, frictionless vision for art, where a song stays on repeat not because it’s our new favourite but because it’s just pleasant enough to ignore’.
Is it worth spending £20 to £30 on a record? Can you really be bothered with all the faff? Really?
Interest in iPods is said to be on the rise, with music influencers insisting that they’re a better option because they’re algorithm free. Kyle Chayka, the author of Filterworld, argues that ‘algorithmic feeds eventually route you toward the lowest common denominator’. Spotify’s bots have dulled our taste in music, or so the argument goes. When its main competitor is silence, as a former CEO once said, the company wants to make sure you’re never played a song that you want to switch off.
Then there are the allegations of fake songs. Harper’s magazine recently covered the phenomenon with an excellent piece by Liz Pelly, the author of a new book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. In her article, she explains how Spotify is ‘filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians – variously called ghost or fake artists – presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts.’ Put these facts together, and we’re left with another tech monolith making our lives subtly worse.
Well, despite those arguments, I disagree. Spotify is still great. It’s fantastically cheap, at £10.99 a month for access to 100 million songs. What a lot of these criticisms seem to miss is the crucial element: that we can still choose what we listen to. No one is making you stream the lowest common denominator playlists and you’re not forced to let the algorithm direct what you listen to. It’s simply there as a back-up, filling in the gaps when your choices have run dry (the last time Spotify did this for me, it put on ‘Beast of Burden’ by the Rolling Stones, one of their softer songs but not exactly muzak).
Sure, there’s something romantic about the clicky wheel of a classic iPod, with its wired headphone jack, limited storage and the requirement that you actually choose what you load on to it. But think for a moment about the pain of downloading music. Are you going to buy a load of CDs and burn them on to your computer? Or perhaps spend your time digging around for a contemporary version of LimeWire to pirate your songs? It’s the same story with records. If I had incredibly deep pockets, I’d happily buy albums on vinyl. But is it worth spending £20 to £30 on a record? Can you really be bothered with all the faff? Really?
So, like most people, I opt for streaming. And yes, that means an algorithm. But without the algorithms, I probably wouldn’t have discovered that I like Bjork. And there’s no way I would have found Bob Chilcott’s ‘Little Jazz Mass’, a boogiefied version of the Latin Missa Brevis. I love Discover Weekly, an auto-generated playlist of 30 songs based on what you’ve been listening to the week before. Some of it’s trash of course, but often there are excellent songs in there.
Last summer there was an internet rumour that Sabrina Carpenter, a sugary pop star who first emerged on children’s TV, was being surreptitiously promoted by Spotify. Users said their algorithm was playing Carpenter’s tracks whenever their own playlists ran out of songs. I don’t doubt the algorithm does stuff like this, either through accident or design, and I’m pretty sure a similar thing has happened among the BBC Radio 6 tribe. Which is ironic really, because they (and really I mean we, because I identify as a 6 Music bloke) pride ourselves on our discerning tastes.
I found myself listening to what I thought was a wonderfully obscure Ethiopian jazz artist from the 1970s, Mulatu Astatke, only to find that when I visited my sister, she had him on repeat too. I’ve just looked at his artist page and his top song has over 50 million streams. A similar thing happened with William Onyeabor, a 1980s Nigerian Afro-funk artist who I was sure I had ‘discovered’ through Spotify. First, I heard his music in a London vintage clothes shop (natch). Next, the 50-something-year-old Onyeabor track appeared on a BT television advert, flogging fibre-optic so I could stream seemingly obscure African artists even faster. It was a little disconcerting; a sense unspoken pride in my good taste took a bit of knock.
But does it really matter? Do I care if I’m being conditioned into listening to certain songs? If it sounds good, I’ll listen to it. I can always do some virtual crate diving and spend an hour looking up music I might enjoy (incidentally, Spotify’s ‘similar artists’ function is particularly useful for this). What I can’t understand is why people seem to be bothered that when they leave the app running, eventually some computer programme kicks in to try to give you more of what you want. Where’s the malice in that?
What about the charge that Spotify is killing the music industry? Well, I know at least three people from university who have their music on Spotify. They no longer need to be signed to a label to present themselves to millions of potential listeners, they simply signed up to a distributor for a few dollars and their music appeared on Spotify. So really, there is something deeply democratic about streaming. Add to that the ability to record studio-quality songs from a laptop, and I think there’s a strong case that we have far greater choice now than we did in the pre-Spotify era. There is, I admit, something a little off about Spotify inventing fake artists to avoid paying royalties. But I would humbly suggest that there are more important things to worry about than the plight of music graduates.
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