I asked the doctor when, if ever, I would start feeling better again. He gave a well-meaning shrug and said there was no way of knowing. I left the consultation room, put on my headphones, and opened Spotify. Prompted, as always, to listen to an album I had heard a thousand times before, I put on the Cocteau Twins record that sounds like a warm bath. The album ended, and Spotify automatically transitioned into the band’s “radio”, an algorithmically generated sprawl of other Cocteau Twins tracks and bands that sound similar. The familiarity made me feel a little bit less terrified.
It wasn’t always like this. When I worked on the culture desk of a newspaper, I spent hours each week eagerly seeking out the best new music – going to gigs, scouring forums and trawling record-label rosters. Finding something exciting felt like opening a portal to a new world. Spotify’s algorithmic model, an arcane data-tangle that churns out recommendations based on previously listened-to tracks, felt bleak and synthetic by comparison. At least, that was my haughty argument. Really, I feared the algorithms would render me obsolete.
As it happened, Covid got there first. I caught it in the summer of 2021 and was left with interminable fatigue. Regular work became impossible, so I resigned and moved in with my parents. Days of sofa-bound nothingness mingled with faceless dread; I still don’t entirely know what causes the tiredness.
Discovering new music the way I used to felt impossible, partly because of my lack of energy, but mostly because it was too wrenching a reminder of the life I had left. Listening to familiar music – egged on by Spotify’s suggestions – became the precious constant I craved. Before I knew it, I was hooked.
This is what Spotify wants. We see only the surface, with albums or tracks simply presented as “for you”, or playlists with slippery, benign titles such as “daylist”. But swirling beneath are torrents of harvested data: preferred genres, times of day, devices used, even how long you listen before skipping. It all coalesces to offer one thing: music you will like.
The fact that Spotify has a 626 million-strong user base suggests this approach works, backed up by the fevered social media response to its annual Wrapped summary, in which users are congratulated on how many hundreds or thousands of hours they have listened to one artist or genre.
But after a period of falling into step with the algorithms, I realised that by smoothing over my jagged anxieties, they had all but eroded my motivation to unearth new music. Truly new music, I mean – the kind that reignites your synapses.
I wondered what Spotify thought of me. Indecisive? Boring? How could the machine know that I listened to that old D’Angelo track repeatedly not just for his honeyed tones (though, obviously, that was part of it) but because I needed familiarity to distract myself from my inability to walk for more than 10 minutes without feeling sick? The algorithms have an intimate understanding of how we listen, but they haven’t a clue why we do.
Three years in, my health is improving. Spotify’s model helped when I needed it most, for which I am sincerely grateful, but now, as I try to reclaim the joys stolen by fatigue, the algorithms are holding me back. The company’s marketing prides itself on “discovery”, but this is not the kind of thrillingly fallible adventure I used to embark on. I have bought albums in the past purely because I liked the look of the cover, and often they have been rubbish. Fine.
But then there was the time, years ago, when I went on a whim to an experimental Japanese music night in east London, full of artists I had never heard of, and had my mind bent out of shape by an underbelly scene I never knew existed. I loved it. Spotify, instead, takes us on a tentative, calculated, dull meander. It is, ultimately, nothing more than a ploy to maximise customer engagement.
I am sure I am not the only one who has been seduced. Life has many ways of steering us away from active engagement with our passions, and the algorithms are ready to hasten things. But if you do not want to abandon streaming, there are steps you can take.
Spotify does, in fact, have some excellent human-made playlists – seek them out. And remember the world outside the app. Your local record-store employee will have their favourite album of the year – ask them about it. Music venues are still hosting gigs – go and see someone you’ve never heard of. The radio still exists – listen.
I’ve tried all these things over the past few months, and after hearing the Oklahoma band Chat Pile on an independent radio show earlier this year, I’ve been electrified by the noise-rock genre. It’s aggressive, unsettling, brilliant music – not the kind of thing I previously thought I liked, and certainly not something that would ever have been stuffed into my Spotify pigeonhole.
You may already do all of these things to broaden your horizons, and I understand they might seem like the embarrassingly obvious suggestions of an algo-riddled fool. But, for me, they have been quietly revolutionary.
