This isn’t a dig against Spotify, nor any other music streaming service (I’m still old-school and haven’t yet tried Apple Music, so I can’t offer an opinion there). It’s a recognition of the way that streaming is changing how we listen to music.
When you open Spotify, you are offered, first and foremost, playlists. Premade playlists of genres, moods, charts, trending playlists, etc. Here lies our first problem. Yes, sometimes you just need something buzzing in the background which you don’t need to think too hard about. Or you can’t be bothered remembering which songs you know all the words to so you need Spotify’s ‘Songs to Sing to in the Shower’ to remind you – only to end up skipping most of the tracks when you realise you aren’t in the mood.
However, this takes away one of the best things about listening to music- curating what you love and finding new things to listen to that fully suit your taste- i.e. not letting a massive company dictate to you what it is in their interests for you to like and play. I do believe that these playlists are perfect for some situations. For example, I wouldn’t really know where to start trying to assemble a playlist of songs to ‘Sleep Calm and Dream On’ to, ‘Focus the Mind’ to, or get my ‘Kitchen Swagger’ on to (yes, really).
The question is, however, do we really trust a service that puts James Blunt in a playlist of ‘The 100 Most Motivational Songs Ever’? Certainly not I, and I do hope someone got called into big boss Mr Spotify’s office for that questionable judgment-call. Maybe you’re having to skip a Klute Friday to write an essay, so you think to yourself, “Well thank God for Spotify and its ‘Feel Good Friday’ playlist – it’ll be like I’m actually there!*”, as you sip your DIY quaddie (hey, no laws about four shots of vodka in one drink at home). I digress. Beyond these extremely niche reasons, I personally think there’s no excuse for relying on premade playlists to satisfy all your musical needs. Yes, they’re easy, they take thinking out of the equation, but they also take personal choice and good taste way out of the equation too. If you’re struggling to find what music to listen to, search an artist you love, and I mean really love, click ‘related artists’, listen to them, and repeat with every artist you discover you like in the same way. Before long, you’ll be in a beautiful black hole of obscure artists and you become the ‘edgy’ one of your house, listening to music no-one’s ever heard of. The beauty of this is that once Spotify gets to know your taste, your ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist will just keep improving, thus taking the thinking out of listening to music again. We’ve come full circle! See! A little effort goes a long way. You can thank me later.
Another problem with streaming services is that they take music away from the way it’s supposed to be listened to. Now, I don’t mean I’m an old-timer who thinks music isn’t music if it isn’t listened to via original gramophone. What I mean is that artists generally make music in albums, and streaming services, as previously mentioned, generally present music in playlists. I understand the logic behind this – that’s to say, it makes sense to pick the best of artists and assemble them into thematic playlists. Playlists should really be things we just make ourselves, for ourselves, or in the form of mixtapes for people we like totally have a crush on, because only you know your taste, or what you think someone else might like. Do see how ridiculous what Spotify does is now? It’s like an app on your phone is hitting on you and doing the same to the rest of its approx 100 million users. Now that’s just freaky.
Playlists create enormous distance between how the music was created and how we hear it. The best albums tell a story from song to song, not necessarily because the songs are similar, in my opinion its often best when they’re not, and they are therefore designed to be listened to as whole units. When we use streaming services, we are often easily tempted to just give up on songs that don’t immediately capture our attention. Simply put: we just don’t give music the same chances we used to. I’m not going to argue it would be better to have to pay for albums individually like we used to, but I am going to use a disgusting sexist term to say what we’ve become: I hate to say it folks, but we’ve become music sluts. We are no longer willing to commit time, money and energy to specific songs and artists, because we now have a world of music at our fingertips, so we skip from song to song looking for something that instantly gives us pleasure (I’ll stop here before that metaphor gets any seedier).
Bottom line, we can listen to anything and everything, so why waste time on something you don’t instantly love? I think the effects of this on trends in genre and style of music are yet to truly reveal themselves. As TV has adapted to Netflix-induced binge-watching, for example through losing the need to recap previous episodes in the plot of the current, music must adapt to one of the many cogs in an instant-gratification society: streaming music. And I’m sorry to say, I don’t necessarily think this change will be for the better.
*Seriously, if you haven’t heard this playlist, try it. It will transport you to another Klute-shaped dimension and you can join me there in the conspiracy theory that the Klute DJ whacks this on for the night then fucks off home for a quiet night with the Mrs/Mr.