I'm just gonna say it. Spotify sucks.

The everything everywhere all at once-ness of music streaming leaves me feeling overwhelmed and also lost

I know the headline for this post makes it sound like I’ve got some super hot take up my sleeve .. like I’m going to deliver a savage take-down of all the ways Spotify sucks as a company, sucks as a way to listen to music, sucks as an app interface, or just sucks in general. The truth is, I mean .. I believe those things .. but this is probably going to be more of a confessional-type post. Like.. I’m here to admit, at long last, that Spotify sucks *for me.* This realization exists as some combination of “I think the service is itself bad,” and also, “I know I am bad at using it.” But I’m really not sure where the former ends and the latter begins, so .. all I can say is just that — I’m getting older, I used to consume music differently than I do now, and I think the modern way is just worse. I blame Spotify.

To be sure, if I were to write about how the app is itself bad, there’s no shortage of material out there I could link to. There are myriad posts, articles, and videos about how Spotify screws over artists by forcing them to market themselves per song rather than generating money through album sales. How its algorithm has changed the way pop music sounds. How its “shuffle” mode isn’t really random and just repeats the same few songs over and over. How the whole damn business model is just fundamentally flawed and doomed to fail eventually. Maybe some of these takes/predictions are a little over-wrought, but I don’t think all of them are. Spotify just doesn’t make sense on a macro, consider-the-world-we-live-in scale. All of music, everything, in your pocket, on demand and with you wherever you go, for $10/month? It’s a ludicrous idea, when you think about it. This doesn’t exist for books, or for movies or comic books or television or magazines or any other type of creative medium. I don’t even have to do the actual math to see that my own Spotify era¹ amounts to spending way, way less money per month than I’ve spent on music at any time, ever, since I first started buying my own tapes and CDs in the 90s.² It’s all too good to be true. And as such, it’s deeply flawed.

Disco Stu sees nothing but good vibes ahead for Spotify!

The business of music aside though, I can’t help but focus on what’s been lost with Spotify. I was a huge collector of music in high school and college. I have hundreds of CD’s and CD jewel cases that now sit in boxes under my bed or in the bottom of closets, and I’ve been carting them around with me from one apartment to the next for decades. Of course, this might have something to do with me being in the prime target demographic for pop music in the 90s and early aughts — exactly when music sales were at an all-time high. That level of commitment to music and music purchasing had a real effect on me and a lot of my generation. I subscribed to Rolling Stone throughout high school and read it cover-to-cover every month — exhaustively pouring over the album reviews in the back pages so that I was up to speed with what I felt I “should” be listening to. I scrutinized liner notes and album art with every CD I purchased. If I sprung for a double CD, there was probably a whole book inside with lyrics and other ancillary info written in the tiniest font. I joined, dropped out of, and re-joined the Columbia House and BMG Music clubs dozens of times.³ I was, to put it mildly, a huge pop-alternative-indie music nerd. 

But that analog world just feels so removed now. It’s like.. using pay phones to call collect, or folding a highway roadmap so it fits in your glove box — absolutely ancient aspects of 20th century life that are just gone. The story of the music industry’s evolution is one we all know, of course. I still remember the precise moment my sophomore year in college when my friend Josh burst into my dorm room to tell me about this incredible new program called Napster. And in hind sight, the fact that this would utterly ruin the music industry as we knew it just seems obvious. The physical nature of curating a music collection and building a library of albums and by extension a sense of your own musical taste – that way of doing things was over. 

Post-college, I bought an iPod or two or three.  I stopped buying CDs at some point during the late Bush years. Eventually, sometime along about 2010 or 2011, I think I finally got digital music, and I learned how to adapt, as did the music industry itself.  Amazon’s mp3 store was a godsend, since it allowed you to buy songs for $1 each, but without the insane, overly restrictive copyright rules that came with iTunes. I downloaded albums and singles.  I paid for them and once again built a personal music library of sorts.  I subscribed to the Pitchfork email newsletter. I got good at figuring out which bands might plausibly be huge in six months and which opening acts at concerts were skippable. I had a steady habit of attending concerts and checking Pollstar to see which bands were coming to town when, and I would jump to make sure I got tickets to the 9:30 Club or the Black Cat or DC9. It was nice. My (digital) music library felt like an extension of myself, and I was good at seeking out and enjoying music that really meant something to me. Some of the best concerts I’ve ever attended were during this period (my iPod and Concerts Era, if you will).

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And then came Spotify. As I said above, like.. how could this possibly be a bad thing. No more blindly buying music without actually knowing if it’s any good! Instant access to *everything*! Endless ability to build playlists, discover new music, and share it with your friends.  It’s literally everything everywhere all at once.  Never on earth has there been such abundance. .. and that, dear reader, is the problem.

This epic rant

The reality is – with Spotify, I’m overwhelmed by choice and the lack of choice at the same time.  There are an infinite number of micro-targeted, expertly-curated Spotify playlists that are constantly being suggested to me in a stream of streams – playlists with meaningless “vibe names” that don’t identify a genre but that are meant to evoke a mood or setting like “Wanderlust,” “Thrifted,” “Aesthetic,” or “Light Academia.” (?!) Others are more obvious in their orientation but have weirdly specific names like “Roller Rink” and “Sad 80s.”  But even if I connect with one of these playlists and find that I actually like it, Spotify fucks with it every few days or weeks because its own algorithm says it has to, and I come back to the playlist only to find that half the songs I really liked are gone and it’s not really the playlist I remembered anymore.  It’s rare that I stick with any of these playlists for more than a couple of weeks.  They’re just kind of a mess.

But just build your own library, I hear you say!  Yeah.  I try to do that.  I do.  But that doesn’t really work, either.  I try to follow particular artists, and I immediately feel like the algorithm is once again hijacking my effort at building my own library.  Oh!  You like Jenny Lewis!  Here is some Liz Phair!  And Phoebe Bridgers!  Everyone loves Phoebe Bridgers!  (Yes, I do like Phoebe Bridgers, but shut up, Spotify, I’ll listen to Phoebe when I’m in the mood to, for god’s sake).  The algorithm fails spectacularly at what Max Read calls the “Doesn’t Make Me Wish I Was Dead” test.   DMMWIWD is what all apps should aspire to — a level of user-friendliness and ease that makes the app itself actually enjoyable. The opposite of DMMWIWD is, essentially, Facebook. Or Instagram. Or Twitter. Algorithms whose first and primary goal are to keep you in the app as long as possible, mindlessly thumbing through #content. It’s the design theory that leads Netflix to auto-play programming while you’re scrolling programs trying to figure out what to watch — not because this is convenient or helpful (it’s profoundly annoying!), but because it makes you more likely to just give up scrolling and get back to watching.

Dall-E image for “streaming music is an over abundance of riches that ultimately leads to disappointment and ennui”

But yeah. Spotify makes me wish I was dead. That’s probably overstating things, but it is true that I’m constantly fighting with the app rather than simply enjoying it. I’m fighting to find new music I actually want instead of what Spotify wants me to want. There are so, so, so many songs I’m served up that just sound repetitive and over-optimized as streamable earworms rather than being interesting or different. There’s so much abundance, so many hundreds upon hundreds of artists with only one or two songs or a single EP available — the idea that I could become deeply familiar with a particular genre or inter-related group of artists just seems impossible. I’m fighting to make playlists and organize collections of albums or artists in a way that’s coherent and sensible. Fighting (and losing the fight repeatedly) to stop Spotify from relentlessly suggesting things to me and being so incredibly bad at it. All of which is to say nothing about the inevitable future of Spotify — when AI-generated sound product and 19-second TikTok loops will eventually come to dominate what we listen to and call music.

I guess what I’m saying here is – the joy is kinda gone for me.  Here in my fourth decade of choosing and consuming music, I don’t really feel like I discover much in the way of music anymore, and my library feels like it’s evaporated.  I’m just scrolling.  I’m thumbing through an algorithm, and maybe Spotify occasionally gets it right and shows me something I like, but usually it doesn’t.  Even if I do connect with a particular song, the actual attachment to an artist – let alone an album – it doesn’t feel the same.

And look, I get it. There’s an element of “you just don’t know how to keep up anymore, old man” that’s going on here. I don’t expect someone who’s 20 years younger than I am and has never known anything other than Spotify to understand or agree with any of what I’m saying. And that’s to say nothing about how music itself inevitably ages and grows stale, irrespective of the medium. The Shins and Iron & Wine and the Frightened Rabbit and Deathcab and Rilo Kiley aren’t fun, cool new bands doing something different and exciting anymore. There’s no spark of joy left to be found in discovering those bands anew. They’re all just middle-aged artists past their prime who go on tour every couple of years to sell $90 concert tickets and promote an album that has one third as many streams as their old stuff.⁴ John Mayer made a truly great album about being anxious and uncertain and full of a certain kind of hope in your early 20s, but he’s not that anymore, and neither am I.

Anyway. You get my (somewhat obvious) point. Old music doesn’t feel fresh and new because now its old. I can’t experience music in my 40s the way I did when I was in my 20s because now I’m in my 40s and the weight of years drags down what once felt vital and exciting. No one wants to think of themselves as a washed-up old fuddy-duddy.⁵ No one wants to say they don’t “get it” anymore. But it’s undeniable that I used to get it way better than I do now. Maybe some of this is inevitable. But I can't help but feel that Spotify exacerbates the problem. Compared to how I used to discover and listen to music, it just sucks. I wish it didn't.

1. Thank you, Taylor Swift and the Internet, for making it so I talk like this. Let’s now leave my footnotes era and go back to the body of the post era (reprise).

2. Last cassette tape I ever bought — Pocket Full of Kryptonite by the Spin Doctors. First CD — Either River of Dreams by Billy Joel or The Sign by Ace of Base, I can’t actually remember which one was first. I stand by these important life choices made by tween-Nigel.

3. For the uninitiated — Columbia House and BMG were both subscription music services that you could join by filling out a card and completing the membership promo that offered you an insane deal like 8 CDs for a penny or 12 CDs for a dollar or some such. Then you had to buy like ONE more CD at regular (inflated) price of like $17 plus shipping, and after that you could cancel your membership and rejoin later. This worked great unless you forgot to do the canceling part, in which case they sent you the crappy CD Selection of the Month you almost certainly did not want and billed you another $17 plus shipping. I ended up with a couple of Jon Secada or Kenny G albums this way. But for the most part I was able to game the system pretty well for years.

4. Except for Frightened Rabbit, obviously. That one hurts.

5. To quote one particular singer songwriter of a certain age, the “wiz man” never fit him like the “wiz kid” did. Sigh.