A few weeks ago, I cancelled my Spotify subscription. I was a paying Spotify user for over a decade, and during that time I used it pretty much daily. I still remember the day when Spotify first washed up on our shores from Sweden in 2011 and quickly, almost instantaneously, changed the way that we (over 600 million daily users and counting) listen.
I also remember wondering how such cheap, comprehensive access to music could be in any way ethical or beneficial to artists or healthy for the industry, but I signed up anyway. We all did. And before I knew it, streaming became my default means of consuming music, even with the steadily growing suspicion that it was maybe not the best thing for music, or for me.
But it was so. Damn. Easy.ย
I can still remember things from those hazy, pre-streaming days: sitting on a beach rewinding my brotherโs cassette copy of Toxicity so I could listen to it all over again; writing the name of a crush across the slick surface of a freshly burned CD; admiring the way a piece of cover art furnished an album with deeper meaning; scanning FM stations for a shred of something familiar or excitingly new; inhaling the garage-rot smell of an old copy of Court & Spark pulled from a dollar crate. All that romantic, bygone crap.
But my radio never took it upon itself to create daily mixes, riffing on my favorite genres. My Walkman never offered up hidden gems based on my recent affinities, showing me things I might have missed or never knew existed. When a record ended, my turntable never picked the next record for me and kept right on spinning without pesky human intervention. And lo, at the end of each year, came Spotify Wrapped. That annual tribute to my streaming prowess, packaging up the sum total of my musical consumption into tidy, colorful, and most importantly, shareable assets.
All of these neat features and all of this ease is, at least in theory, supposed to free us up to do other things. Thatโs the idea, isnโt it? Now…