I haven’t posted in a while, as I’ve been busy. I’m having a lot of success with my writing project (an update is coming soon). You can also find this post over on my blog, https://rustworks.io/ where I plan on moving most of my activity over the next few months.
I use Spotify a lot. I still look forward to New Music Fridays, I still browse the genre lists, and I still listen to the playlists it creates for me. Hell I even like the DJ feature (I know you’re just pretending to be my friend, robot, but I like the way you say hello).
But it just isn’t the same. It’s boring now. I cannot overstate how cardinal of a sin this is. Music is a large part of my identity—not to the extent that I’m a musician, but like so many others it is probably the primary method I have of accessing my emotions, and without the catharsis of music that genuinely moves me I’m pretty sure I’ll end up like those bitter old white dudes who are so emotionally constipated they have huge outbursts of feeling when some (also old, also white, also constipated) politician tells them they matter. There but for the grace of god, and all that, though in this case, it’s the grace of music.
I like music, is what I’m saying. Spotify is taking that away from me.
You know how I know it’s Spotify and not something arising from my own internal state? Because I like music. I get just as much enjoyment out of music as I used to when I find something that sparks (often from other sources now), and a good song still gives me all the feels. I am also still just as eclectic as ever, which is to say that while I’m no world-traveler capable of finding joy in culturally unfamiliar musical forms, I am still finding sparks from a lot of (predominantly) western artists across multiple genres.
But god damn Spotify has stripped music listening of so much of its joy. It is killing my curiosity. I like one interesting electronic song and suddenly instead of a varied and eclectic Release Radar playlist to spark some deep dives, I get a bland list of electronica that all sounds the same as the one song I really liked, but, you know, all of them worse somehow. More boring. Likely boring only by virtue of me having heard similar sounds recently and being oversaturated in it, but fuck off LRN Slime, I’m over it.
Okay, okay, let’s get more upbeat here before I go off any more. Why? I don’t know. I’m trying to be more positive in life, I guess, but mostly because complaining about the enshittification (do we still need to link to Cory Doctorow when we use that term or is it in the general lexicon now?) of major companies is pretty tedious at this point. Everything sucks, it’s all getting worse, you know the drill.
Except it isn’t getting worse. I mean, for real, are you kidding me? There is so much interesting stuff out there and it is so accessible. I used to listen to a godawful dial-up tone scream at me in digital when I booted up the ol’ internet, and then watch a little progress bar slowly fill over the course of multiple hours just so I could download one single song on Limewire. The problem is not that everything sucks. The problem is that people who are trying to make money (Spotify execs, probably) have completely forgotten why we do any of the things we actually do.
Love.
Yeah, love, that’s why. That’s why we do things. A person who doesn’t absolutely love that Elliot Smith song is not going to sit through the dial-up demon screech and rural Idaho internet speeds to get their satisfaction. I’ve never enjoyed most of the music I listen to, but I’ve never minded putting some hours in with the stuff that doesn’t do it for me while hoping to come across the one song that does, because when I do find that song, it’s love. It’s worth it for that three or four minutes (or if I’m really lucky the entire album length) that, for whatever indecipherable reason, speaks to me.
So it’s not that everything is getting worse (Hey! We’re being upbeat!), but there’s no denying that Spotify is getting worse. It’s getting worse because it’s lost the ability to connect with me. Spotify doesn’t love me anymore.
I’m not joking. I’m completely serious when I say that.
Noah, one of my closest friends, put me onto this blog post from Glenn Mcdonald, who was involved in creating the algorithms utilized by Spotify, but was laid off in 2023. Here are some of the choice excerpts that stood out to me, but I really recommend giving it a read yourself:
“The premise of the genre system was that genres are communities, and so most of its algorithms tried to use fairly simple math to capture the collective tastes of particular communities of music fans.”
I was immediately onboard with the description of genres as communities, as opposed to genre being defined through acoustic similarities. I wear songs out. I listen to them a lot, and then I get tired of them and I want something different, not similar. I can hear someone out there going “Aha! That doesn’t sound like love to me.” But it still is; some loves burn themselves out quickly. It is love, not momentary passion, because the songs remain powerful mnemonic signifiers of life at the time when I was listening to them. I can hear a song from ten years ago and vividly remember who I was then—that isn’t consumerism, isn’t fleeting passion. That’s love. It’s also why describing genres as communities speaks to me: we might be interested in acoustics, we might be passionate about an artist’s musical choices, but it’s communities where we put our love.
“Or, to phrase this from the world into streaming data, rather than vice versa, there is a thing in the world called Maskandi, a fabulously fluttery and buoyant Zulu folk-pop style, and there is an audience of people for whom that is what they mean when they say "music", and their collective listening contains culturally unique collective knowledge. Using math to collate that collective knowledge can allow us to discover the self-organization of music that it represents. If we do this right, we do not need to rely on individual experts approximating collective love with subjective opinions. If we do this right, we support a real human community's self-awareness and power of identity in a way that it cannot easily support itself. There's no magic source of truth about what "right" consists of, which is the challenge of the exercise but also exactly why it's worthwhile to attempt. For 12 years I spent most of my work life devising algorithms like this, running them, learning how to cross-check the cultural implications of the results, and then iterating in search of more and better revealed wisdom.
In general, I found that collective listening knowledge is not especially elusive or cryptic. Streaming is not inherently performative, so most people listen in ways that seem likely to be earnest expressions of their love.”
Earnest expressions of their love. One could actually track the visible process of me falling in love by looking through my listening activity: letting a playlist play song after song until one gets repeated, and then repeated again, and then my activity changes to listening to other songs by that artist and the album if it’s not a single, and then returning to the first song that caught my interest and adding it to my own playlists. An expression of love leaving visible tracks.
“(…) no other major music service has developed a cultural taxonomy of even remotely the same scale as the genre system we built at the Echo Nest and Spotify, while all of them have implemented versions of opaque personalization based on machine learning. ML recommendations are an arms-race with only temporary advantages. The machines don't actually learn, they always start over from nothing. ML engineers, too, can be trained from nothing or bought from other industries, without needing special love. But machines that do not run on love will not produce it.”
I can feel the shift away from genre as community and listening as expression of love towards genre as acoustic similarity and listening as engagement. Look, I was wild about Spotify, it was the best as far as I was concerned. And, slowly, it’s been getting really meh. For a while I thought maybe it was me, maybe I was just in a low place, maybe I just wasn’t resonating with things the way I used to, but after diving deeper I can see that no, something fundamental really has changed. It didn’t always succeed, but Spotify really did actually try to connect me with communities of music that I could put my love into and feel redeemed by the emotional catharsis they gave back.
Now it doesn’t.
Spotify doesn’t love me anymore.
I’m not going to quit using the service or anything. As my close friend Noah put it, “the reality is that [Spotify is] probably just a few years away from a bunch of major labels pulling their stuff and launching their own competing services directly,” but that until then “it's still basically got a youtube-like level of depth so I think it's useful/critical for looking up songs and albums.” It’s the biggest show in town, so it’ll continue to draw an audience, but…
I think it’s time to start looking for alternatives. It sucks when something stops loving you, but it also means that there’s something new out there that does, or is being built and it will, and we just have to find it, or help it grow.