Why Spotify is Bad for your Music Tastes
Our printing is in 3D, our information is just a click away, and our phones are full of pictures of our genitals — we truly live in an age of technological wonderment. And with these leaps into a brave new future the music we have access to gets wider and wider. On the internet, no record is ever cancelled and impossible to come by, any song we hear anywhere can be instantly named by Shazam and, rising above them all like the monolith from 2001 if it had been full of odd piano covers is Spotify.
Since it was released in 2006, Spotify has completely transformed the way we listen to music. In the past, a conversation about a new band with a friend who’s cooler than you had to be mostly carried out by you nodding and pretending you knew everything there was to know about Finnish 8-bit doom pop. Now, a simple Spotify search can bring up their entire discography for your listening (dis)pleasure.
In theory, this should make everyone better, wiser, more eclectic music fans, discovering increasingly deep cuts from a never ending list of strange bands. Music appreciation should be at an all-time high, with the unlikeliest people discovering original, obscure bands every day. But it doesn’t work like that. Instead, Spotify encourages a buffet-style listening experience, in which lots is available for you to feed yourself on, but none of it is of any quality. To carry on the buffet analogy, you gorge yourself on the bread and carbs before you even get close to the prime rib.
Why is this so? Well, partly it’s what philosopher Renata Salecl called The Tyranny of Choice, in which the modern world presents us with so many options that we find ourselves immobilised by it, and we just end up listening to what we’ve always listened to.
We lose ourselves in nostalgia and our ‘00s Jams’ playlists. The more music there is to discover, the less we do – when there are so many great albums released every week, which ones do you choose? The choice causes so much anxiety that we end up choosing nome of them.
So how do tomorrow’s music fans define a musical identity for themselves against this tyranny of choice? Well, take a leaf from my ancient-for-the-internet book of experience. Being 22, I can still remember a time when I would enter a record store (R.I.P Virgin Megastore at the Galleries, Bristol) with my pocket money on a Saturday morning.
With only £5 to spend, I had to make choice – a fiver would buy me two CD singles (how I miss those), or maybe three cassette tapes (…not so much). With such limited resources, the choices I made had to count, and with nothing else to listen to I would listen to those singles and tapes endlessly. If you chose a bad tape of a not very good song, you were stuck with it, so you had to be discerning.
Those careful selections have defined the music listener that I am today, beginning young with the standard kids pop of the late ‘90s – B*Witched, Spice Girls, I moved first into better quality pop and r’n’b bangers and classics that still stand the test of time like Aaliyah’s More than a Woman or Madonna’s Don’tTell Me.
From this, I began to slowly get more select in my music tastes. Still popular songs you heard on TMF or The Hits (again, R.I.P.), but popular songs in more alternative genres like Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out (it hasn’t stood the test of time really, but I remember the first time I heard it on Top of the Pops at 11 in 2004 being totally mesmerised) and The Long Blondes Giddy Stratospheres.
Over the course of maybe fifty to a hundred singles my music tastes crystallised from bubblegum pop to a music critic who has everything from Spoon to the Knife in his cultural repertoire (and, in fact, many bands not named after cutlery).
Without having to make those early informed choices, I would probably still be stuck listening to the worst. So a plea to young music fans everywhere: get off Spotify and into record stores. London has hundreds of them, from Rough Trade in the East to Sister Ray in the West. Visit them. You will learn more about the music you like from ten minutes in a London record shop than years on Spotify.
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