Spotify Trapped

Personalized Spotify Wrappeds are currently flooding social media. It’s not ideal, but what are we gonna do about it?

I get it. No matter the degree, it’s been a universally stressful year for each and every one of us. Governance abandoned us in real time, racism and transphobia reared its ugly head, and news organizations consistently played on our anxieties for clicks. Meanwhile, our normal avenues for stress release were all shuttered because of the pandemic, forcing us to find some solace in home entertainment and social media. If you’re a regular music consumer, streaming services like Spotify likely meant more to you this year than ever, and the kinds of music you consumed to help get you through the days is itself notable.

So to a degree, I get it. I can understand why it’s exciting to receive a personalized illustration signifying that The Hotelier was your guiding light, that Folklore largely soundtracked your coziness or auto-generated new age music proved hilariously to be your rock. Surely you don’t need to hear from me that temporarily becoming a walking advertisement for one of the most insidious forces in the music industry is widely problematic, especially when the people who fill that role are ideally supposed to be champions of the artists the industry aims to exploit.

So why do we still do it? Why do we engage in such hypocrisy? If Spotify is such a huge problem, why are we proudly displaying ourselves as part of it?

It can’t help but showcase how inextricably tied we are to our corporate overlords, and how hollow our anti-capitalist screeds really ring. There’s something so sad about seeing people I respect railing about Spotify and then turn around and displaying, in huge white numbers, just how heavily they’ve relied on the service.

Sure, a candid display of fact that you devoted much of that listening time to a niche act or an invariably cool band says as much about your own trustworthy sense of taste as it does about reportedly under-known music. (A show of goodwill laced with an underlying self-service: it’s about as classic as capitalism comes.) For journalists in particular, the crucial currency of the field is credence, and to that extent it’s necessary to convince people that you’re as fervent of a listener as you claim to be for the sole purpose of forging an audience that trusts your words. Meanwhile, many of us are still in the old hipster mindset of overemphasizing cultural capital, and it’s worth something to prove to others that you’re right on top of what could be popular, or what’s “arbitrarily” good in music. Maybe I’m wrong and I’m just grasping at straws to circumvent the grim reality that the very systems we aim to reject are still controlling us all along, but this is the sense I get as I scroll through my feed as pass by all that orange and pink.

Of course, it’s easy for me to say these things. I haven’t paid for a Spotify Premium account in about two years, so I don’t have a Wrapped to share. I don’t wanna be that guy, but it’s straight-up a moral thing for me; I just don’t feel comfortable putting it in for Daniel Ek and his stupid little face. Call it my personal tiny act of rebellion. Yet even that, in essence, feels like a half-measure. If I need to listen to music that’s outside of the realm of Bandcamp, I’ll go to Soundcloud or Youtube, two services that are as much a contribution to the problem as anything.

That’s really the crux of the issue. As much as I want to get on my little soapbox and shout at people, I really can’t fault anybody who wants to indulge in sharing their Wrappeds. For one, as mentioned, it’s been a hell of a year. If people want to share their love of music or their love of obscure talented bands, regardless of where it comes from, there’s no point in suppressing that love. For another, streaming services are as much markers of growth as they are siphons of earnings, and functions like Wrapped are admittedly great tools for up-and-coming acts to display just how much they’ve expanded their audience. Artists who knowingly do so are taking pride in that, and we should be proud of them in kind.

The fact of the matter is that, while there are undoubtedly better ways to support the artists you love, enormous companies like Spotify have the money to hire thinkers, coders and marketers to deal in conveniency. Sure, it only takes a few screenshots and a free photo editor to display the music you bought on Bandcamp, but the end result feels cluttered and nowhere near as eye catching as the soft gradients and fun fonts of a Wrapped infographic. And besides, what normal consumer’s gonna go to all that trouble? 

There’s simply nothing in America we can expect to function smoother on a macro level than capitalism. As long as there’s a service that performs better, that provides more convenience than its competitors, we can’t expect the masses at large to make the effort. It’s the same reason that loud critics of Amazon, a company well-deserving of its criticism, will still begrudgingly use their services even if they feel crushingly guilty about it.

At least this year, Spotify continues to flex its dominance over the music industry by sheer force of user engagement. I’m just hoping for a little more effort from people to put their actions where their words are. Yes, convenience is important, especially when we feel strained already by a hard year. But if we want to make small choices in making the kinds of difference we claim we want to make, then convenience can’t be the only thing. If it is, then who are we fooling?