Spotify Wrapped Is Everything Wrong With The Modern Music Industry

This rant was written by Ori.

It's early December, 2024. Holiday lights twinkle in the night sky, powdered snow blankets the icy roads and slushy sidewalks, and convenience store aisles are lined with candy canes and peppermints. This can only mean one thing...

It's Wrapped season!

For the uninitiated, Spotify Wrapped - and its contemporaries, Apple Music Replay and YouTube Music Recap - is an end-of-year event where the streaming services compile a bunch of fun stats about your music listening habits over the course of the year, and then boil them down into little bite-sized images that 'wrap' your music tastes up in an easily-sharable format.

It's a fun little way to socialize over music, and it also demonstrates everything wrong with the current music landscape.

I want to preface this writing with this: I think Spotify Wrapped is a cute idea. I absolutely love keeping up with music stats (check our last.fm page!), and I love being able to share my music with friends. But seeing all of these recaps just made me realize one thing - these stats mean absolutely nothing, and they don't say anything about the music, or the people who listen to it.

I think the best way to start is to explain how we got thinking about this topic.

When we got our Spotify Wrapped this year, it told us that the vibe for our March was "Indie Sleaze Cheerleading EDM". And, you might be asking yourself...

What the fuck is "indie sleaze cheerleading EDM"?

And it was pretty easy to figure out what it was - March was when Porter Robinson released his new single, Cheerleader (one of my favorite songs of the year). I listened to it a lot on repeat, so it's no surprise that Spotify wanted to make a note of it. However, what really piqued my curiosity and interest was finding out that Porter Robinson himself got the exact same thing. So not only was it boiling down an entire month to one specific song, it wasn't even customized per person!

And that's what got us thinking about music, art, and the algorithm, and how it all ties together.

Why are we so disconnected from our music now?

The Algorithm

I generally despise talking about "The Algorithm".

It's a meaningless term. It doesn't really stand for anything, or refer to a specific feature or anything. It is, loosely, just a kinda-shitty shorthand for "a platform's recommendation engine". That's all there is to it. Now, I want to say that I don't hate recommendation engines, per se; they can work! I find YouTube's to be pretty okay most of the time. I just also think that in the context of music, they're more harmful than they are useful.

Many streaming services would like you to believe that the algorithm is 'personalized' to you. It's your algorithm. Spotify would really like you to think that it's giving you music it thinks you'll like. It knows what you listen to, and thus, it knows what you are probably going to enjoy. And for a while, it does. It pushes you, bit by bit, towards music that you do find yourself enjoying. But after a while, one thing will become abundantly clear:

Spotify has put you in a box.

That's what algorithms are designed to do - put you in a box. Sometimes, that box is "indie sleaze cheerleading EDM". Other times, it's "mallgoth vocal video game music". But you will get watered down, eventually, and put into a neat little category that can be summed up in a quirky little sentence. As author Kyle Chayka put it in an interview with Digging the Greats, you'll eventually get filtered into the "lowest common denominator...what's already popular gets more and more popular, and what is already obscure gets more and more obscure." Spotify is inherently incentivized to play it safe, slowly and surely filtering you towards things that will (a) make it more money and (b) keep you listening on their platform. (You didn't think they weren't selling your listening data, did you?)

Spotify's algorithm has led us to some songs that we do genuinely enjoy. If we wanted to find more happy hardcore-adjacent tracks, we'd put on Spotify's generated "Srav3R Mix" to discover new stuff. And it works! We found music we liked! But I'll be 100% honest with you, I cannot remember the name or artists of half of the songs that it recommended to me. I listened to those songs. I liked those songs. I added them to a playlist that I listen to regularly! But I can't remember a thing about them, just that I liked them enough to listen to them while I play Smash or something.

This, to us, feels like a problem. Music we enjoy, recommended to us by a machine, that we can't remember the names of. Was this really discovery? Could we say that we found new music we liked? Or did we just find more...Content? Useless padding for our mixes?

Total Disconnection

This past year, we've gone to a few concerts.

You see, we have a rule about these shows - if we don't know who the openers are, we don't listen to them in advance. Why? Because we want to have the chance to listen to new music with a fresh and open mind, one that can't just 'skip' a song it doesn't immediately enjoy. Artists like Forests, Arm's Length, and Heart Attack Man are all artists that we've really taken a liking to.

The reason we bring this up is simple - we got a proper opportunity to give these bands a chance, and we had a physical, tangible connection to them. They weren't just suggested as individual songs we might like, no; we got to go through bits and pieces of these discographies, hand-curated by the bands themselves, and it opened our eyes to new music that we could quite literally resonate with. (Those concert subwoofers don't fuck around.)

The problem with these generated mixes is that they lack any form of context. They don't know what songs pair well with others. They might be able to say, "oh, you'll like this Origami Angel song", but they won't be able to say "The Title Track hits a lot harder when Escape Rope transitions into it". They won't be able to pick a cohesive order; instead, it'll just spoon-feed you individual bits of music, here and there.

This is inherently the problem with services like this. It's all about consumption. It's not about finding new music to attach to, new artists that can change your life. It's about getting you to find new music that you 'like', so you can add it to a playlist, so you can shuffle that playlist forever.

It's a really dark business model, but it works - overwhelm the user by giving them millions of options, and then funnel them down the path of least resistance. Then, when the user eventually gets tired or sick of the same things over and over again, slowly suggest them towards 'safe picks' - songs that are already widely popular within a specific category, or worse, songs that Spotify profits more off of due to licensing arrangements. (The fact that a recommendation can be more profitable than another keeps me up at night.)

The big way that Spotify and other services do this is by incentivizing playlists, from both an artist perspective and a listener's perspective. From the listener's perspective, a playlist is the solution to all of the platform's (self-imposed) problems. Overwhelmed by choice? Want to curate your own taste? Make a playlist and listen to it. Feeling a specific kind of vibe? There's a playlist for that. Want to add a song to your library? Go ahead - it'll be in your Liked Songs playlist. It's the epitome of "set it and forget it". For artists, getting your songs playlisted generally means 'more popularity', so more playlists = more popularity = more plays = more playlists = rinse and repeat. For many artists, a modern album can only exist as a vehicle for singles to be playlisted if financial viability is a concern.

This hurts everyone. For artists, the only way to see major success is to play the social media game, and hope one of their songs blows up one day. It incentivizes shorter songs with less time between releases, leading to burnout and stress. It results in artists learning how to game the system just to survive ("prove that you're in love with music / by reinforcing this useless platform / fucking abuse it" - Sixth Cents (Get It?), Origami Angel). For users, it leads to an ever-dissolving connection between the music they can call their own, and the music they listen to. You don't have a library. You have Playlists. You have Songs. You can listen to them, but the artistic value and personal connection can and will slowly whither away as you pick the first playlist at the top of the home screen, hit shuffle, and mindlessly listen to music while you're doing something else.

Now, you're probably thinking "what does this have to do with Spotify Wrapped?" And you're right - this is a pretty long tangent. But it's one that I think is necessary to illustrate why seeing these recaps frustrates us - they're the perfect example of every one of these issues, bundled into one little image. One that's easily sharable, and memeable, and yet completely and utterly devoid of all meaning.

There's nothing 'personal' about it. It assigns you a quirky genre based on a grand total of three of the dozens or hundreds of artists you listened to. It boils down everything you've listened to - whether that's albums, or songs, or playlists - into raw numbers. Cold, hard numbers - no emotion, no value. Like, yes Spotify, sure, I listened to 25,000 minutes of music this year. What does that mean? What does that say about me? That I left you on in the background while I played Call of Duty? That I was wistfully listening to an album at 3AM during an emotional moment? That I spent five hours straight one day listening to Cheerleader on repeat? I can post this image, sure, and maybe people can joke about my top 5 artists or riff on the songs I played on loop, but they're not going to get anything about me from this image. They're not going to glean any information that might help them get to know me as a person - they're just going to see that I listened to a lot of SEGA Sound Team over the past 365 days. It's a marketing stunt - that's all it is. It's a cute, silly little ad for Spotify, disguised as some deeply personal reading of your soul through music. Music that, in all likelihood, you probably didn't actively choose to listen to.

How did we let music become so impersonal?

The Solution

As music continues the trend of becoming nothing more than "content" for people to enjoy, rather than works of art or pieces of self-expression, it's getting increasingly difficult to really feel like there's a particular solution to all of these issues. The solutions that do exist can get largely inconvenient, especially now that we live a very mobile-first life nowadays.

But the big solution is to own your fucking music.

Find the songs you love. The albums you like. Buy them on vinyl, or cassettes, or on CDs. Borrow discs from libraries and rip them. Put that shit on an iPod, or an MP3 player, or sync it to your phone, or listen to it on your computer, or burn some CDs, or roll your own god damned streaming service using something like Navidrome or Plex if you have the knowledge/skills/time. But own your fucking music. Find the shit you like, or what you want to like, and form a connection to it. Something tangible, something real. Something with intent. Buy it, rent it, borrow it, have a friend send you a digital copy. Buy that shit on Bandcamp. Stop being paralyzed by choice, having access to everything under the sun - listen with intent. Find the things you love. Don't let these stupid platforms dictate what gets big and what doesn't.

Luckily, right now is the best time to start. As of writing this post - Friday, December 6, 2024, it is the last Bandcamp Friday of the year. If you spend money on Bandcamp today, every single cent goes to the artists - they're waiving their platform cut. So go to Bandcamp.com, search up some artists you like, and start a collection. Buy some music. The $10 you spend on a Bandcamp Friday will still probably pay more than any streaming service ever would to these artists, and you'll have DRM-free, lossless versions of your favorite albums.

Some personal recommendations from us:

Sun Eat Moon Grave Party - Forests: Forests is an emo band. (We saw them open for Origami Angel a few weeks ago!)

Constant Companions - Jamie Paige: The latest album from Vocaloid producer Jamie Paige.

Endless Fantasy - Anamanaguchi: The 2013 chiptune classic, and our favorite album ever.

Feeling Not Found - Origami Angel: One of our favorite albums of the year, and one that was a huge inspiration for this post.

That's all from us for now. Thanks for reading.

Until next time.

Ori out.