Spotify Trapped: Is there any alternative?

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Spotify Wrapped has become an annual marker of time, akin to the deluge of chocolate and flower advertising come Valentine’s Day. For some, it’s a time of excitement and validation.

For others, it’s a depressing seasonal occurrence that prompts a futile stay-at-home, avert-your-gaze response. 

For the latter category, the garish splashes of colour and Spotify branding on Instagram stories and Twitter feeds taste a little sour, a little off, but it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact ingredient sullying the flavour.

There’s the obvious reasons: the sheer self-absorption of publicising our individual musical tastes, the self-deprecating humour of pop star tragics, cringe to some, the dick-swinging and not-so-subtle flexes of hipsters posting their top artists (all Albanian neo-bounce psy-jazz artists ok, you wouldn’t know them) and the irrelevance of personal indulgences in the face of an unfolding genocide, ongoing wars, climate emergencies and a national housing crisis in Australia.

But none of this online self-representation, however selective, however disconnected from authenticity, is new. There is, I believe, a deeper underlying angst here.

So what’s going on? Is this just harmless fun?

Let me be a soul-sucking fun sponge for a second.

It’s not coincidental that this fetishisation of numbers has popped off at this particular historical moment. As art critic Ben Davies writes, we are approaching an era of “quantitative aesthetics” where metrics serves as a proxy for artistic merit. This is world where artists pray before the ever-shifting algorithmic altar, offering up their souls and identities as tribute, and fans read teachings from statistical manuals.

As enrolments in tertiary education humanities courses declines in the developed world, Davies contends  in an essay for Artnet, data journalism and the language of statistics have become stalwarts in the shifting landscape of analytical prestige. It’s a similar story at the grassroots of taste. Within pop fandom, devotees internalise numbers, treating the number of streams, likes, followers and retweets cultural icons command as personal battles and proof of value, often subconsciously. They listen to songs on repeat to elevate the status of their idols, some theorise, or at least in part anyway. It’s the ultimate capitalist victory: the invasion of the mind and the obstruction of creativity.

In recent years, pop music has moulded itself around the financial imperative of keeping people listening as long as possible on streaming platforms like Spotify. Tracks have shortened and a new playlistable sound designed to be innocuous, little more than background music, has proliferated. New York Times journalist Jon Caramanica has disparagingly labelled this music “Spotify-core”. Defined by emo lyrics, slow chill beats, hip-hop influenced production and an early chorus to satiate ever-shortening concentration spans – think Spotify-sponsored artists like Drake, Charlotte Lawrence and R3hab – this music is far from boundary-pushing. There’s a decent argument that Spotify is stimulating substandard creative output from pop stars by encouraging a dependence on metrics.

Spotify Wrapped is the logical end point for this worshipping of statistics, and a harmful one at that. For many musicians, Spotify Wrapped is a time of mental ill-health and envy. As the Australian radio announcer and musician Tim Shiel wrote last week, Spotify Wrapped creates a “measurable ladder of ‘success’, and reminds you firmly where you sit on that ladder”. Thus, friends become foes and songs become competitors for attention in an industry already overshadowed by loneliness.

There’s an air of capitalist realism to our inability to think beyond numbers. Let me explain.

In his seminal work Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?, the late Mark Fisher argued that late stage capitalism functions by convincing us that “it is the only viable political and economic system… it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative”. He coined this form of cultural indoctrination “capitalist realism”. A sense of inevitability pervades the text; our plight within late stage capitalism is one of “spectatorship”, lost futures and cultural inertia.

Via Spotify Wrapped, which is essentially free advertising for Spotify, we’re duped into believing that the platform’s popularity comes from us, from the humble user. We’re duped into believing that our choice to use the service is organic. We’re duped into believing that Spotify is everywhere – an invisible, all-seeing, benign force.

Do we really want this?

It’s well established that Spotify is problematic. In the eyes of critics and musician unions, Spotify’s entire model, although legal, is ethically unsound. It’s akin to digital piracy. Not only has the service has shifted consumers away from directly supporting musicians through CD, vinyl and cassette tape sales, the service pays out rights holders a pitiful sum for each time someone plays a track. It’s a fraction of a cent, around 0.004 cents for independent artists. Those signed to music labels earn far less per stream. Enamoured with the joys of song recommendations and predictive modelling, those of us who use Spotify as consumers often lose sight of the fact that much of the debate is not about us. It’s about the artists who publish, or don’t publish, their music on the platform. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if Spotify makes our lives better because, in doing so, Spotify rorts artists and encourages them to turn against each other.

If you really want to jump down the rabbit hole, there’s a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to criticism of Spotify. Warning: the scrolling required to reach the bottom of the page made my thumb sore, and my brain even more sore. But I digress.

According to the IMS Business Report 2023, Spotify holds roughly 30 percent of the market share in the global music streaming industry, and its cut of the pie is shrinking. It’s not exactly the last-ditch scream and blood rush of a dying animal, but the fight is slowly turning against the streaming service.

Based on the viral saturation of Spotify Wrapped, however, you’d think Spotify’s market share is near 100 percent. In this environment, it’s easy to lose hope and fall into what musician and researcher Mat Dryhurst labels “streaming fatalism”. Put simply: it’s easy to forget there are other alternatives to Spotify. This is capitalism realism at work.

Then there’s the implications of our digital footprints. In this modern era, data is a tradable commodity, hunted as much by hackers and scammers, who scour cyberspace for privacy breaches, as advertising companies and multinational corporations.

Spotify collects intricate data sets: your browser of preference, for instance, your phone model, whether you change the volume of a song. On the surface, giving away this data appears low-stakes. But experts have warned that Spotify may indulge in “function creep” – the evolution of a technology’s use beyond its originally-intended purpose.

In the words of media theorist Robert Prey: “data collected for the purpose of recommending music may be found to deliver a reliable predictor of financial solvency, IQ score or relationship status. What if a taste for early ’90s Nu Metal indicates a higher propensity to default on a debt repayment? This example may seem far-fetched, even ridiculous, but there are already scores of companies that correlate data on a bewildering array of indicators in order to assess any applicant’s credit worthiness. Discovering unanticipated patterns is precisely what data mining is designed to do.”

What happens when Spotify’s management team realises that certain data sets hold significant financial potential? Do we really trust Spotify? Remember: this is a company run by a man who has invested €100 million in a European security startup that manufactures artificial-intelligence software for military use.

In saying all this, it is not a political failure to post your personal Spotify Wrapped graphics online. You’re never a lesser supporter of the arts for doing so. Treading on others to boost your own activist credentials is toxic.

I merely dream that we can use this seasonal phenomenon as a time of reflection because we need to reframe how we perceive Spotify Wrapped en masse. It is as an in-your-face reminder that the streaming giant’s business model is based on surveillance, the exploitation of creatives and machine learning models that replicate and perpetuate human prejudices.

We need to call Spotify Wrapped what it is: a sham.

That Spotify has managed to wrap up this phenomenon as a gift, as a cause of celebration, is the ultimate snake oil salesmen ploy.