The New Yorker:

This year’s recap, with A.I. bots and uninspired presentation, revealed a company that seems chiefly concerned with profit margins and squashing its competition.

By Brady Brickner-Wood

I joined Spotify, the Swedish streaming service, toward the end of 2020, spending the better part of a Sunday transferring my Apple Music library and local files onto the platform. I had nothing against Apple Music—I was even a little sad to leave it. I’d been using iTunes since 2004, and, in 2016, when I could no longer resist the possibility of streaming every song ever made at any moment, I incorporated the service into my library of torrented MP3s and uploaded CDs. When I ultimately jumped ship, it was because I felt like I had no other choice: my friends all used Spotify, and I couldn’t access their collaborative playlists or shared links to albums and songs, nor could they access mine. What was the point of participating in the streaming economy if I couldn’t enjoy the experience with others, seemingly doomed to wander the halls of recorded music history alone? My favorite forms of musical exchange had always been rooted in discovery and community, which was why I’d spent much of my conscious life listening to college-radio stations, frequenting now-shuttered record stores, and trading burned CDs with friends in my high school’s hallways. Spotify, with its much vaunted algorithms, had usurped these old modes of finding new music and promised something greater: a centralized hub where the entirety of one’s discovery and listening could occur.

There was another carrot that convinced me to convert: Spotify Wrapped, the app’s annual offering of shareable slides that numerically documented a user’s year in listening. In December, 2020, five years into the wildly popular online event, my Instagram and Twitter feeds were flooded with friends showcasing their Spotify data. Across brightly colored backdrops and goopy graphics, subscribers shared their top-streamed artists and songs, their to-the-minute listening totals, and the number of genres they explored. These statistics were intended to communicate a person’s unique taste and curatorial acumen, providing a coherent narrative to the often random experience of consuming music online. As an Apple Music user, I felt alienated from these public demonstrations of fandom and artistic interest, and I wanted in. I was also, admittedly, curious as to what story Spotify would tell about my listening habits. Would my data clarify something specific and singular about me that I could then share with others?

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