PB003 - Why are you so petrified of silence?

^{This is my most popular song on Spotify - solely because it got onto a ‘study beats’ playlist.}

It’s over….

Last week, I cancelled my Spotify subscription. This had been coming for a while but was ostensibly triggered by reports of co-founder Daniel Ek investing his Spotify earnings in arms manufacturers. But that was just the trigger - what’s my real reason?

The most obvious, most cited criticism of Spotify is the exploitation of working musicians. While urgent, this isn’t what prompted me to start writing these posts. The old music industry wasn’t good for most musicians either. Copyrighting music and hiding it behind shopfronts or paywalls is also problematic. Sooner or later, we’ll need a completely different way to ensure people who make art can also afford to live.

The concentration of global wealth into fewer and fewer hands is a much broader issue — and not one I feel best placed to tackle here.

What has come to concern me — through my interactions with it — is how this era of the music industry is impacting the way we, as humans, relate to art. How the function of music is being shifted based on what will make certain people the most money. Maybe contributing to a discussion of how to loosens Spotify’s grip on how we even think about music is something I can do.

What’s my problem?

At the top level, my thesis is simple: the introduction of algorithmic playlists has encouraged us all — if not forced us — to treat music as something to fill silence, rather than something through which to better understand ourselves and others. This shift is detrimental to us as individual listeners, as a culture, and as musicians.

This post is my attempt to explain how the gradual evolution from the ultimate iTunes library 😁 to a machine that dictates the world’s listening habits 😭 has quietly changed the very way we think of music.

A Potted History of Playlists

The Personal Playlist Era

When Spotify was created, user playlists allowed individuals to collect songs and share lists between friends. This was no different from what was available in iTunes — directly analogous to analogue mixtapes.

Over time, Spotify realised the value embedded in these user playlists. If listeners A and B have playlists including Thom Yorke and Björk, then Listener C — who listens to a lot of Thom Yorke — will likely enjoy Björk too. This data became the driving force of Spotify’s ‘discovery’ feature — at the time not seen as a strategic priority.

Spotify began to actively promote its playlist features to encourage users to do this linking work for them.

The Rise of Editorial Power

For a brief period, Spotify experimented with hosting third-party apps. Many of these were independently run public playlists that gained popularity and became highly valuable assets.

Spotify bought one of these playlisting companies and used it to build its in-house editorial playlists. This marked the beginning of ‘lean-back listening’ — playlists that took the place of radio and elevator Muzak, not just record shops and iTunes.

The popularity of these playlists made them powerful marketing platforms. Record companies began putting significant effort into getting new releases placed on them. These playlists became the gatekeeping mechanism by which Spotify determines which songs succeed and which don’t. For independent labels, they could make or break an artist on launch day.

Editorial playlists quickly shifted focus from genre to mood or activity: study beats, ambient chill, peaceful piano, calm.

Eventually, it became clear that Spotify was commissioning its own music to appear on these playlists — so-called perfect fit content. Spotify pays far less — or nothing at all —on music it commissions or licenses directly, undercutting traditional artists. It undermines the traditions and cultures of the genres it aims to replace, and it’s a direct response to their assertion that people don’t really care what they’re listening to — as long as it’s chill.

The DIY Playlist Economy

Popular user playlists were — and still are — valuable assets. Third-party platforms such as SubmitHub or PlaylistPush offer a way for owners to monetise them. They charge DIY musicians like me a small fee to submit a track to the playlist owner. The owner is paid a portion of that fee to listen to the track and provide feedback. They may then decide to add the song to their playlist — or not.

This value has incentivised further proliferation of mood- and activity-based playlists. Playlist owners need to grow their listener base to prove their value to musicians like me — musicians trying to spend submission money wisely. Services have emerged to remove the admin of pitching songs to these curators, and they advertise heavily to people like me. Some offer guaranteed placements. Some sneak clauses into their T&Cs that auto-subscribe you to ten more playlists just by submitting — boosting the perceived ‘listeners’ of their other playlists.

The result is a strange, sometimes farcical parallel economy — full of ghost artists, forced subscribers, fake streams, and young, sexy influencers promising desperate, confused DIY musicians that their easy hack will boost them past the point where “the algorithm kicks in” 🚀📈.

Algorithmic Rule

Ultimately, algorithmic playlists have taken over from curated ones. We have arrived at the “frictionless” listening experience that Spotify pushed us toward. Many people no longer even select the mood they’re looking for. Even if we do choose a song — or a playlist we’ve made ourselves — Spotify will turn on its algorithmic feed the moment that selection ends. Forty minutes later, we might realise it’s playing something entirely different. Maybe we just expect this, and don’t even give it a thought.

Why This Matters

I realise I risk overstatement here. Have we all turned into mindless consumers with no sense of what music we like? No. But undeniably, we spend much less time listening to music we have actively selected — or that has been chosen for us by someone we know, share a connection with, or even occupy the same space as.

Speaking personally: I rarely share or have music shared with me anymore. I don’t discuss songs the way I used to. I rarely listen to whole albums, and almost never repeat-listen. I don’t know the lyrics to any songs I discovered during the Spotify era. And I know from dinner parties that the songs I’ve ‘discovered’ have a striking overlap with those my friends have ‘discovered’ too.

I’m sure the songs I’m exposed to aren’t the weird album-closers that used to take a while to grow on me but would become my die-hard favourites. They’re not songs with janky tempo changes halfway through. They’re not unexpected heavy tracks or ones that take four minutes to get going but then deliver something much greater than their radio-friendly unit-shifter counterparts.

I’m hyperaware of all this because I’m trying to get people to listen to my music. I know the power of a constant feed of broadly acceptable music — always one click away — because I know how hard it’s been to get even people who care deeply about me to step out of that system for a few minutes and listen to something I spent hundreds of hours making. I know my most popular song — by an order of magnitude — is the one that made it onto a study beats playlist and is mostly played in countries I have no connection to.

I’m certain our listening habits have changed because of algorithmic streaming. The role music plays in our lives is different now. These changes didn’t come about because we asked for them — or even because streaming platforms thought we’d prefer them. They are just the changes - found through trial and error - that make billionaires most rich.

Is anybody listening?

A few days after cancelling my Spotify subscription — and after writing most of this post — I started reading Mood Machine by Liz Pelly. It’s a really engaging read that comes to many of the same conclusions I have, but goes further, replacing personal anecdotes with thorough journalism.

Early in the book, Pelly includes a quote from Ek that resonated with some changes I’ve been making in my life, and provided a new angle on my problem with Spotify:

This is horrifying. I think we should strive to sit comfortably in silence — rather than pay billionaire arms-dealers to fill it for us — and we should try to make time to really listen to music.

The constant, passive feed pushes us towards a narcotic dependency on music, and away from a willing appreciation — or sometimes even reverence. More is not always better. Easier is not always better. I had mostly stopped using Spotify anyway. My aim now is to rebuild more intentional ways of finding and listening to music — even if it’s more work.

Coming Up….

I already have a few post half written in head, and it won’t all be economic analysis:

• Influences: a look at the reference points for the incoming wave of songs I’ve recorded

• Making of: a rough walk through of making my latest song, A River.

• Levelling up: What I learnt on a music production retreat I did earlier in the year.

Speak soon,
Free Palestine 🍉 
PB