A collection of all my essays.
Essays
709 words | about 3 minutes
Spotify and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Read on to find out why.
Spotify is non-free software
Everyone already knows why this is bad. At least, everyone who matters. If non-free software runs faulty code (a program as bloated as Spotify almost certainly does) or even worse, malicious code, no one outside the development team can fix it or even check it. Additionally, there is no way to fork or tinker with it - this harms the end user as well as the whole software ecosystem. So it's bad for the program, bad for the user, and bad for the world. Proprietary software is a relic of a time when programs were made by giant monolithic companies and very few people knew how their company's specific hardware and software worked, let alone were able to even code. The only reason it's still around is because companies are stuck in a tragedy of the commons in trying to control who gets access to source code.
Spotify is bad for artists
Again, more low hanging fruit. As everyone knows, Spotify pays artists a pittance for their work. Soytify defenders might say that 'it gives most of its revenues to rights holders', as if the concept of a 'rights holder' as applied isn't also an anachronism from a more oligopolised 20th-century world. There are myriad ways to support artists directly without so many often needless middlemen.
Spotify killed the album
The rise of streaming heralded the end of the album era. This is unambiguously a bad thing. While it's great for poptimists and has arguably allowed the music industry to remain commercially viable at the massive scale on which it operates, it's bad for music as an art form. The commercial constraints of a pop song demand brevity and memorability, meaning a full artistic statement can only be made over the course of an album. When music sales were primarily physical, it meant listeners were forced to consider albums as cohesive pieces because all the songs were on the same record, and it was often more bother to skip a track you didn't like than to just let it play through. This complaint is perhaps a fragile one as it relates to wider issues in the music industry, not just to Spotify. I would think it's certainly possible to create a streaming platform that retains an albums-first orientation, but I haven't seen a viable example yet.
Spotify actively harms your musical taste
Spotify's playlists and homepage are curated to what you already listen to, rather than introducing you to new things. Moreover, they are seemingly trying to hide this fact as it's not clear anywhere in the program that this is the case. Nevertheless, if you follow a new artist or add a new song or album to your liked, you'll see that content in the playlists designed to introduce you to new music. This is less objectionable on the homepage, but it's still not particularly clear. Bizzarely, it tends to recommend you music based on the time period rather than the artist or genre. I guess this is because like all soyftware it's run on byzantine nuDystopia 'machine learning' algorithms patterned on user behaviour, so it thinks you're a boomer if you listen once to anything released before the turn of the millenium. In any case, it railroads you into listening to whatever was popular around the time of release of your faves, with only vague trimming in favour of genre (you know, the way actual rational people divide music). As with video, there was nothing wrong with tags as a way to sort your favourite music. They got people more involved in exploring new music and in curating their own collections and replacing them with algorithms has only served to drop the musical IQ of the world down another 10 or 20 points. Why has this happened? The only reason I can think is because it's more marketable this way.
In summary, the abysmally low standards of modern music can in no small part be attributed to this one program. It's shoddy at the best of times, but it's actually worse than useless as a discovery tool. Spotify is bad software, and you shouldn't use it.
"Having fun as a boy online"