Young man wearing headphones and plaid shirt covering eyes, expressing stress or fatigue indoors.

Are We the Real Music Ruiners?

Related Hobbies: Discovering and Listening to Music
  • Streaming encourages ‘functional’ rather than meaningful, aesthetic musical experience.
  • Streaming encourages bland, unchallenging music.
  • Streaming makes musical experience passive and distracted, and music recedes into the background.
  • Streaming makes music tracks and songs shorter, and musical experience more fragmented.
  • Streaming discourages and/or limits musical discovery and adventurousness
Streaming’s Effects on Music Culture: Old Anxieties and New Simplifications – David Hesmondhalgh, 2022

Rather than challenging your tastes, algorithms only provide shuffled versions of what you already enjoy.

How to break free of Spotify’s algorithm | MIT Technology Review

[…] we also find that algorithmically-driven listening through recommendations is associated with reduced consumption diversity. Furthermore, we observe that when users become more diverse in their listening over time, they do so by shifting away from algorithmic consumption and increasing their organic consumption.

Algorithmic Effects on the Diversity of Consumption on Spotify

The history of recorded music is now at our fingertips. But the streamer’s algorithmic skill at giving us what we like may keep us from what we’ll love.

What Spotify Is Really Costing Us | The New Yorker

Yes, I have the app too. But I barely use it […]

Why Spotify Has Ruined Music. A psychological deep dive | by David O. | Publishous | Medium

Spotify thinks that even if we say we want to listen to something new, we always return to what’s familiar, McDonald explains. He argues that in practice, slipping a reggae track into a playlist of “bedroom pop” (a genre that mainly features dreamy melodies and hushed vocals) often makes for an uncomfortable listening experience: “If you’re given something new, it’s odd, in the same way being teleported to random spots around the world for three minutes at a time would not be a pleasant tourism experience.” 

How to break free of Spotify’s algorithm | MIT Technology Review
A screenshot of Spotify's "More of what you like" section.
Left unattended, Spotify will give you more of what it already thinks you like. Yes, I enjoy relaxing jazz, but not only.

As we grow accustomed to the convenience of shuffling a generated playlist, we forget that discovering music is an active exercise.

How to break free of Spotify’s algorithm | MIT Technology Review

The problem isn’t that Spotify’s algorithm is bad, but rather that what we are looking for likely can’t be created by an algorithm, so we shouldn’t rely on it. Our inner soundscapes can’t be algorithmized, nor should we expect them to be. Instead, we should take an active and intentional role in our musical discovery journey. The joy is in the journey, so we shouldn’t look for shortcuts anyway.

Footnotes

  1. Criticism of Spotify – Wikipedia ↩︎
  2. How Spotify’s algorithms are ruining music ↩︎
  3. Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, by Liz Pelly  ↩︎
  4. You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music, by Glenn McDonald ↩︎
  5. How to break free of Spotify’s algorithm | MIT Technology Review ↩︎

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