Why I Quit Spotify
It's not only for ideological reasons
For a couple of months now, I’m no longer a subscriber to the Spotify music streaming service. I had been on and off for some years, unsubscribing for some months only to be hauled back by special offers, such as “3 months for the price of 1”. This fall, I finally ignored those messages and celebrated my decision by visiting one of the local record stores to buy some vinyls.
But isn’t it kind of foolish to turn down something like Spotify? One can get almost the entire library of recorded music for the price of two lattes a month - why turn down such an offer? I might hear you wondering whether it has something to do with the fact that Spotify doesn’t support musicians enough, i.e. that my stance against Spotify is in some sense ideological. While that is certainly an important part of it, that is still far from being the only reason. My main criticism has to do with the platform itself. Let me explain.
First, let’s establish the difference between hearing and listening. If you’re out walking in the woods, you can suddenly hear the sound of a dog barking, but you can also listen for the sound of a particular bird. If you’re in a concert hall, you can’t help but hear the orchestra playing, but you can also listen for the first violins, or the clarinet played by someone you know. As we can see, to hear is a way of passively experiencing the surroundings (you hear things whether you want to or not), while to listen is something you do, an act. You can hear a teacher speaking even though you’re not listening to a word s/he is saying.
Playlists on Spotify can work as a kind of wallpaper. You hear that they are there, but you’re not listening to them. The pieces are bland enough not to attract attention, but at the same time not offensive in any way, so you don’t press “skip” either. This is what Satie called “furniture music”. This is not bad in itself; elevator music is certainly not hurting anyone (except music snobs like me perhaps). But the fact of the matter is that Spotify’s platform passively encourages people to write this kind of music. Why? Because Spotify pays per plays, not per listens. Therefore, music that performs the trick of gently flowing in the background without being actively listened to will get more plays, whereas music that is more demanding and that you perhaps actively listen to once or twice a week gets less. Be aware of the fact that quality and enjoyment are not a part of this equation, at all.
Let’s imagine a long, difficult piece of music for symphony orchestra that eventually brings you to tears when you listen. The music means a lot to you, but since listening to it is emotionally challenging, you only put it on occasionally. Then imagine a cute, soothing but emotionally quite uninteresting piano piece that you sometimes put on in the background while you do some reading. Which piece will get by far the most plays? You got it, it most likely would be the piano piece!
Second, there’s something deeply unsettling about having so much music at your fingertips all the time. I think we humans handle it pretty badly, and the abundance of choices makes it hard for us to choose one particular thing to listen to. One famous joke that Jerry Seinfeld told about cable TV relates to this. His point was that we don’t watch cable TV to see what’s on the channel we’re watching - we’re watching it to see what’s on the other channels. An example of this is that pop musicians today often try to cram as much content into the first 30 seconds of a song, since if the user presses skip before 30 seconds, this will not be registered as a stream. We therefore see a constant battle for the short attention spans of many modern-day Spotify users. If you put on a vinyl, you won’t skip through to the hit songs, but focus more and give every track a chance. There’s an important difference here that I think most people will acknowledge.
Third, I believe that streaming should only be one part of the whole equation of music enjoyment, but the way the industry is organised today, companies such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and so on want to own the whole market. “Subscribe to our service and you will have the whole music catalogue at your fingertips, at least for as long as you keep paying us the monthly fee!” There’s no middle ground here. You can’t pay, say, $5 instead of $10 each month to get a certain amount of hours to spend each month. No, you have to choose between all or nothing. And when you spend $10.99 on Spotify each month, you have less of an incentive to buy Bandcamp digital albums that you can listen to anyway on Spotify, and your budget for vinyl records is also smaller. This monopolisation of the listening experience is frankly quite maddening because it moulds the users into one type of mindset, which in turn functions to promote one kind of music before another.
How do we fix this? I’d love to hear some comments here on this thread. One of my ideas is for a platform such as Bandcamp to start a kind of streaming service of its own, alongside their pay-to-own philosophy. Listeners could pay to get a certain amount of streaming minutes to spend as they please, and the artists would get money from streams just as they get money from sales today. It is even possible to envision a system where listeners can get discounts for albums that they have already spent streaming minutes on, so that if you’ve listened to an album for the worth of $2, you could buy it for $8 instead of $10. A sort of stream-to-own system.