"Waiting Room" Has Been Removed From Spotify, and Phoebe Bridgers Fans Are NOT Okay

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“Waiting Room” by Phoebe Bridgers is no longer available on Spotify, and that should worry everyone. The six-and-a-half-minute gut-wrencher wasn’t on any of Phoebe’s core studio albums, EPs, or various side projects but appeared instead on a 2015 compilation put together by Lost Ark Studios. 

Having been released five years prior to Punisher (aka before Phoebe Bridgers became Phoebe Bridgers) and on a relatively obscure comp, “Waiting Room” was a hidden gem in Phoebe’s discography. The track was a diamond in the rough, waiting to reward those willing to dig around for it. Now it’s gone.

We have no idea whether the song is off Spotify because of some random copyright nonsense, a license renewal lapse, or something else entirely. All fans know is that they can’t easily listen to one of their favorite Phoebe tracks. 

If I were to guess, I don’t think Phoebe or her crew even assumed people would notice if this song disappeared. In fact, they might not have even known. The track had over 24 million streams on Spotify but was buried so deep under other, more popular releases they probably didn’t foresee any outcry to this song being yanked off streaming. But outcry there was. 

One of the first warning shots came from “phoebe daily,” a Phoebe Bridgers fan account on Twitter with over 15k followers. On Tuesday, the account tweeted in all lowercase, “‘waiting room’ is no longer on spotify,” with as much pseudo-journalistic authority as a fan account can muster. The tweet quickly garnered thousands of likes and shocked quote tweets.

“This is literally the worst thing that’s ever happened in my life, and I watched my dad die when I was 17,” tweeted one distraught fan. Elsewhere, people used humor to soften the blow. Some users held mock funerals for the song, while others reminded people to be kind to their gay friends and the hot girls in their lives because they would be in mourning. It was collective group therapy at its finest and the kind of reaction that feels hilariously on-brand for Phoebe’s fanbase. People were truly Going Through It. 

As word spread through Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok, one question was being asked consistently: why? Why this song? Why now? Why would Phoebe do this to me? The frustrating thing is we don’t know. 

While some guessed it might be a copyright issue, others noticed that Lost Ark Studios (the recording studio that put together the release) was labeled as “temporarily closed” on Google and reasoned that they might have gone out of business. No money means no more paying to keep your songs up on streaming. 

An optimistic fan hoped that maybe this meant Phoebe was recording a new version of “Waiting Room.” This is a nice theory, especially in the wake of the return of Boygenius, but in the following sentence, the same person also speculated that Phoebe herself doesn’t resonate with that song anymore given how old it is. That’s a common phenomenon that many artists have with their early work, especially those who rise to success as astronomically as Phoebe. In any case, we still are left guessing, and that puts everyone in a similar frustrated position.

Whether or not you count yourself among the ranks of Phoebe fans lamenting the loss of their favorite under-the-radar deep cut, this news is symptomatic of a bigger problem with streaming services. Spotify ain’t free. It isn’t free to use as a listener, it isn’t free to run as a company, and it isn’t free for the bands who upload their music to the service. 

As I’ve written about before, this could all go away at any moment. Spotify could go under tomorrow, and you’d lose everything: your songs, your playlists, and every single artist you follow. The same thing goes for Apple Music, TIDAL, or any other digital-based streaming subscription service. 

Even if the company didn’t go bankrupt (admittedly a far-flung catastrophic scenario), there are other ways you could still lose access to your library. Stop paying for your monthly account? You better have a backup plan. Spotify’s servers go down (as they did earlier this month)? Good luck listening to your music. Violate Spotify’s terms of service? Kiss your profile goodbye. 

My point is there are a million different ways you could lose access to your music library, and for a person like me who spends countless hours/weeks/months of their life building these intricate webs of musical obsession, that’s terrifying. 

This is why seeing “Waiting Room” going away is such a shock; it feels like a violation of our personal music library. Removing the ability to hear a song just flat-out sucks, no matter how you cut it. The second kick in the ass came when Lost Ark also removed the track from their Bandcamp page, essentially eliminating any easy (or legal) way to obtain an MP3 copy of the song. Fuck that. 

Things like this are why I have a safety net. I know sometimes I probably sound like a physical media doomsday prepper, but the whole “Waiting Room” fiasco should act as a reminder to save the things we love. It’s a reminder that preservation is important. It’s not like this song is gone forever, but it sure is gonna be a hell of a lot harder to hear now. And who knows? Maybe “Waiting Room” will be re-uploaded to streaming in a few days, and it will be like none of this ever happened. But maybe it won't.

Even still, I hope this instance inspires at least a few people to start offline music collections. Download a bunch of MP3s to your computer, back them up on a hard drive (or two) and keep them safe. We can only trust artists, labels, and companies to be stewards of their work to a certain point. Sometimes it’s best to assume that if you’re not backing something up, then no one is. 

In the case of “Waiting Room,” Phoebe is a big enough artist that this track will live on through file sharing, Youtube uploads, and live performances until the end of time, but she’s the exception to the rule. All of this could go away at any time and for any reason, so preserve what you love, back it up, share it, and treat it with the reverence that it deserves. Most importantly, as with all art, love and appreciate it while you can.

Welcome to Spotify's Algorithmically Generated Hellscape

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This is Big Thief.
This is Soundgarden.
This is Neil Young… Well, not anymore.

We’ve all seen these playlists when searching for our favorite artists on Spotify. If you open the app, press the little magnifying glass, and type in the name of virtually any band with more than 50 songs, you’ll probably see some variation of the same results; the Artist’s page, a few popular songs or albums by them, and then a playlist boldly declaring, “THIS IS [insert artist name].”

Those playlists exist for any artist that meets the minimum criteria, and they are designed to put together a decently-sized 2- to 4-hour-long playlist of all the artists’ most streamed songs in one place. Spotify’s “THIS IS” playlists exist for artists of all sizes and every music genre. This is Ed Sheeran. This is Michael Jackson. This is Weird Al. You get it. 

The scale of these playlists ranges from gargantuan collections of classic works to mildly successful indie rock groups from your hometown. In some cases, they act as decade-spanning histories of massively influential artists like The Rolling Stones. In other cases, they are pretty serviceable representations of a band’s collective work, like Stone Temple Pilots. In every case, these playlists are meant to do one thing: emulate a Greatest Hits record. 

This allows a casual user to search for a band, stumble upon this playlist, and scroll through a bunch of their most popular songs in one place. These playlists, along with the addition of a dedicated lyrics function, signify a change in Spotify upping their SEO and bolstering their recommendation engine. Alongside these more helpful quality of life changes is a new initiative that’s simultaneously goofier and far more sinister. 

Back in early November, Twitter user @_gaydro posted a picture of their Spotify app showcasing a playlist flatly named “Evil Mix.” The description beneath the automatically-generated playlist cover reads, “Evil music picked just for you.” 

People in the comments and quote tweets were quick to dive into their own Spotify apps and report back the most obscure and outright hilarious examples they could find within their libraries. Fast clown music. Spooky evil jazz mix. Tennessee pirate mix. Each title seemed more incoherent and absurd than the last; a gobbledygook combination of nouns, buzzwords, and vaguely musical terms, all denoted as from Spotify and “made for you.”

One Redditor commented on the sheer breadth of dog-specific playlists that Spotify had crafted for him: Calm Dogs Mix, Dogs Calming Mix, Dogs Pet Calming Mix, and more. “I must have searched once for music to help my dog figure fireworks out, and now I am gifted with this kind of variety… If you scroll slow enough, the page just keeps loading, so I don't think there is an end to the algorithm attempting to satisfy your every need,” they observed. 

These playlists are essentially an extension of Spotify’s Daily Mix program. In a press release from early 2021, Spotify explains the fuel behind these mixes with an impressive stat, explaining that “every day, half a trillion events—whether they are searches, listens, likes, or countless other actions—take place on Spotify, powering and guiding our machine learning system. This gives us the ability to drive discovery in a way that audio has never seen before.” In their own bland, corporate, grey-cubicle-approved marketing words, “Spotify Mixes represent the next generation of focused, personalized offerings.”

So that raises a few questions, why so many? Who is this for? What the hell is going on? It was a fun day to be online and see what insanely specific playlists people were able to dig up, but I didn’t think much of this phenomenon until I traveled home for the holidays and was poking around the family computer to find that my own mother had saved one of these playlists. Happy Birthday Mix. There it was, staring me in the face. I finally understood.

Those far-out examples of “Goblincore Mix” and “Crazy Bagpipes Mix” are inherently goofy, but these “normal” instances like “Happy Birthday Mix” make much more sense. I can practically see my mom, on her birthday or the birthday of one of my brothers, searching Spotify for “happy birthday,” finding that playlist, and saving it. I mean, why not?

Maybe I’m just being overly precious about “mah playlists,” but it rubbed me wrong to see some algorithmically-generated bullshit garnering attention and listens just because Spotify has created a glut of playlists meant to catch any possible combination of terms a user could type into their app. 

In almost every case, these mixes are filled with “just some songs.” The more straightforward playlists will populate with a handful of songs you’ve already listened to and a dozen others that the Spotify Machine Brain thinks you will enjoy. For instance, my 70s Rock Mix (clocking in at an even four hours) opens with “Iron Man” and Tangerine” before throwing to some Heart and Pink Floyd. In these cases, Spotify is serving you music it already knows you like and throwing a few deeper cuts into the mix here and there. That’s where the “made for you” comes in; Spotify is just pulling your own data and serving it back to you under the guise of something specific like “Sensual Noise Mix.” 

As you would expect, the goofier playlists are where things get even weirder. The more absurd mixes contain songs that fit their criteria in very literal ways with song titles, artist names, or even album covers that fit the description. For me, “Fast Clown Music Mix” includes songs from a band named Clown Core taken off an album called Van, which has cover art depicting a blue minivan. The same playlist opens with a song off an album called Mirror Might Steal Your Charm, which features a sort of jester-like figure on its cover. Now that sounds like Fast Clown Music picked just for me.

So why does this matter? This technology is still in its infancy, but I believe these mixes are something Spotify is testing to trick their users more effectively. People have no insight into how these playlists are made, what goes into them, or how many of them there are. People just look up a term and are served a loosely-themed collection of music that they’re probably already familiar with. Alternatively, they’re given a playlist packed with a bunch of tangentially-related songs that fit some surface-level criteria.

Where this gets complicated is that Spotify can choose what songs are placed within these mixes with zero transparency. After all, we’re talking about a company that gives out $4 for every thousand plays. They’re notoriously cheap and view the music being uploaded onto their platform as mere content. On the one hand, Spotify is making music more accessible than ever; on the other hand, they’re actively devaluing art. 

A couple of years back, Spotify introduced “Discovery Mode,” which is like the platform’s own version of pay-to-play. With this feature, the streaming company borrowed a concept from the days of radio where an artist (or, more likely, label) would pay a station to play their songs more frequently. With this in mind, it’s easy to see how Spotify could manipulate what tracks appear on these playlists and therefore get streams. 

Am I saying these bands are fake? Not necessarily, but that is something Spotify has been accused of. By the same logic, it’s easy to see how Spotify could fill hours of these types of playlists with ambient music, “peaceful piano” tracks, and faceless acoustic fare. It doesn’t matter if the artists behind these songs are real because the playlists are meant to fill a specific vibe, mood, or need. Cozy Christmas Music Mix. Dinner Party Mix. Beach Music Chill Evening Mix. They mean nothing.

This could just be the rambling of one overly-concerned overly-online music nerd, but I think that any time Spotify removes the agency out of music consumption, it’s a reason to be wary. Their series of “This Is” playlists are a microcosm of a platform-wide issue of pushing streams (and money) only to the top. Most artists do not turn a profit from Spotify, and that isn’t a sustainable business model. 

Tricking people into clicking on (and listening to) an algorithmically-generated playlist of songs is a step further. It’s gaming a system that’s already rigged. It will be fascinating to see what comes of these playlists over the next year or two. I’m interested to see if they become more plentiful, elevated higher within the app, or how often they start popping up over actual playlists and albums made by real humans. 

The truth is that Spotify has a vested interest in keeping you on their platform, but even more so if you’re listening to the artists they want you to listen to. They don’t want you to think. Spotify doesn’t want you to search for a small artist or listen to a specific album; they want you to throw on a four-hour-long megamix of music they have already chosen for you. Conscious listening is bad for business, Spotify wants you to devour slop from their trough.

Ultimately, when Spotify chooses what we listen to, we’re not listening to music anymore; we’re just listening to Spotify.

Metadata, Alienation, and Music Ownership

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Let’s talk about metadata. That’s right, metadata; the least-sexy part of cultivating your offline media library, even for a geek-ass music nerd like myself. 

For those unfamiliar, metadata is “data that provides information about other data,” which, yes, I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose as I wrote that. How could you tell? Within the context of your local music library, this includes things like song titles, album names, track numbers, artwork, and everything in between. 

See, I first started cultivating my music library when I got an iPod Mini sometime around 2006. Gradually, my iTunes collection blossomed from a handful of Matchbox 20 singles and Weird Al albums into the sprawling 60k-file monstrosity that it is today. Over time, this library has been corrupted, lost, recovered, converted, moved between computers, backed up, digitized, and, most importantly, edited. 

It’s the closest thing I have to a documented musical history. Sure, I have last.fm, but that just shows what I listen to and when. This collection of MP3 and ACC files sitting in my iTunes feels representative of my entire musical taste and, by extension, who I am as a person. I have music from every phase of my life: Bandcamp rarities from DIY bands, Myspace-era metalcore demos long since lost to time, a one-for-one replication of my childhood CD collection, and screen recordings of Tiny Desk performances that I’ve painstakingly spliced up into individual songs. It’s a labor of love, there’s no other way to put it. 

Aside from the act of obtaining and listening to this music, a seldom-discussed aspect of curating an offline music library is how much work goes into actually organizing it. Not just the structured nest of Artist > Album > Song folders buried deep in my computer’s hard drive, but also the way that iTunes interprets, arranges, and displays these files.

Despite using Spotify almost every day, I’m still hyper-critical of the platform and streaming giants at large. First, there’s the issue of just paying the artists, which, any rational person will agree, is one of the most imbalanced systems in the entire music industry today. There’s also the far more amorphous topic of how streaming has adjusted the way we value and consume music, making it more disposable in the process. It’s also robbed us of things like hidden tracks and any sense of physicality related to our music. This perceived loss is one of the big reasons why vinyl, cassettes, and CDs have all regained popularity in recent years.

Another negative aspect of streaming that I’d like to talk about today is the idea of ownership. The music on your Spotify app is not yours, full stop. That company could go bankrupt, destroy your account, or go down tomorrow, and all would result in the same thing; you losing everything attached to it. All your saved albums, hearted songs, and carefully constructed playlists; gone in an instant. 

That’s standard operating procedure for any digital-based company in 2022. You buy a game on Steam? Sure, you “own” it, but if Steam ever goes away, that shit’s gone for good. This is why companies like GOG and Bandcamp have gained extra momentum over the last decade because they offer the consumer a digital purchase without any DRM (digital rights management). That means when you buy a game or an album from those platforms, you can download it, play it, share it with a friend, back it up to a USB, and generally do anything you want with it short of going off to sell it again yourself. Those files are yours, and you are in control. 

So how does this apply to Spotify and streaming?

Well, one of the recent downsides I’ve been grappling with in regards to streaming is how out of my control my library feels. God knows I’ve spent dozens, if not hundreds, of hours just making playlists on Spotify. For the most part, these playlists only exist on that one platform, and that scares me. By contrast, the playlists in my iTunes library are based on actual files saved directly to my machine, which means they’re in my control. Hell, I can burn those playlists to a CD or export them to Unicode, XML, M3U, or even good ol’ plain text if I wanted to. If you don’t know what all that means, it’s okay. Essentially, even if my computer gets fried and my backups fail, I still have the playlists. This freedom is a massive benefit to cultivating an offline music collection.

This applies to everything outside of playlists too. I can import a CD, download my Bandcamp purchases, or rip a song off Youtube and then craft those files in my image. I can add the album art, adjust the song titles, change the album name, or give the songs track numbers, and all of that is my decision. If this seems overwhelming or doesn’t sound like something you’d do, that’s totally understandable. But when you’ve spent the better part of your life carefully curating and adding on to this collection of files, this freedom means the world. 

If I like the physical cover of an album more than the digital one? I can change that. If I want to add a one-off B-side to the end of an album in order to keep the entire release in one place, I can. If I have a remastered version of an album where all the song titles end in “(Remastered),” then I can take that word out of every track and keep the song titles in their original form. Why would I care about this? First off, it looks nice. I’m a control freak, and it feels good to keep these files as clean as possible. Another very simple answer is last.fm.

See, in a way, my last.fm goes hand-in-hand with my iTunes library. My last.fm account might not be as longstanding as my music collection, but it still goes all the way back to 2010. That platform has recorded over a decade of listening history and statistics that I view as priceless. It’s cool to look back and see what I was listening to on a random Thursday in college, or what my listening habits were like over the summer of 2016. There’s value to be had in that kind of information, especially for a music nerd like me.

This leads to genuine anguish when I look at my music history on last.fm and see that I’ve listened to Nevermind by Nirvana a certain number of times, but those play counts are allocated to two different versions of the album; one simply titled Nevermind and a second one titled Nevermind (Remastered). This is aside from the other versions that exist on Spotify like Nevermind (Deluxe Edition), Nevermind (Super Deluxe Edition), and Nevermind (30th Anniversary Super Deluxe). Guys, what are we even doing? At a certain point, this is just bad stewardship of your own musical catalog, and for what? A twelfth demo version of “Something In The Way” to catch runoff streams? No thank you. 

This on its own is frustrating, but where Spotify gets even more cheesy in this metadata conversation is how little autonomy you have in what you want to listen to. To continue the grunge examples, let’s say that you want to listen to Gish by Smashing Pumpkins. Well, I hope you don’t mind listening to the two-disc 2011 Deluxe Edition with 28 tracks because that’s all that exists on Spotify!

In my mind, this destroys the sanctity of the core album experience as originally envisioned by the artist. Sure, you can still listen to tracks 1 through 10 on Gish and experience the album as initially released, but that’s not what Spotify wants. Most importantly, they don’t even give you the choice. Gish as it originally existed in its 1991 form with its ten tracks and non-codeine-colored album art does not exist on Spotify. 

To keep using this one album as an example, this problem gets even funnier if you want to listen to those bonus tracks like the killer 8-minute version of “Drown” that ends with an alternate guitar solo, which is inexplicably not playable right now for some unknown licensing reason. You can listen to all the other 27 tracks of Gish (Deluxe Edition), but the last song is just… unplayable. 

 
 

Sometimes, this even results in instances where an objectively worse remaster of an album (like Soundgarden’s Superunknown) will be the only version available on your streaming service of choice. Want to listen to the songs as they existed in their original form? Well, you can’t! Examples like this are few and far between but still highlight how little choice we have in the music that’s readily available to listen to on these services. 

This is a horrible way to interact with music. It hurts the “vision” of the original album and poses more problems than it does conveniences. Sure, for the average music listener, these details are negligible, but when you’ve spent your whole life caring about shit like this, it’s hard not to notice. 

At the risk of sounding like a doofus equating music listening with genuine human suffering, I’d like to relate this to Marx’s theory of alienation. For Marx, this theory essentially posits that the further workers are from the end product, the less satisfaction they will find in their work. It’s obviously a lot deeper than that, but that’s the best I got for a one-sentence summary. 

If you’re a cog in a machine sitting on a computer all day and you never interact with the thing you’re actually making (or theoretically contributing towards making), what are you actually doing? More importantly, what do you have to draw satisfaction from in your work? Sure, you’re making money so that you can live, but you’re also making more money for someone further above you who’s even more removed from the process. You lose connection to your autonomy, so you become increasingly alienated from the goods and services produced by your labor, eventually estranging you from your own humanity. 

Now, look at your streaming library through this lens. Your library is not yours. These files exist to play when called upon, but the entire thing could go away tomorrow, and you’d be left with nothing. Owning these files and having them on a hard drive I can hold in my hands is a satisfying feeling. Knowing that I can change these files, edit their data, and load them onto any device I please is a relief. Sure, there are lots of other things that could go wrong that would lead me to lose this data, but it’s my data to lose, not some mega-corporation.

The same day that I wrote the majority of this 2,000-word rant, the awesome Endless Scroll Podcast uploaded an episode talking about Spotify Canvas, album visualizers, and things of the like. One of the most poignant conclusions made about 33 minutes into the episode by host Miranda Reinert was, “Spotify doesn’t want you to have a library; Spotify wants you to use Spotify and perceive Spotify as music.” And therein lies the problem. It felt serendipitous to hear this the same day that I spent hours articulating my own feelings on the topic.

I write this, riddled with caffeine, not to shame anyone for using Spotify but to get you to think about your music collection. If you care about it, you might want to re-analyze what’s actually yours. When music is as integral to your identity as it is for me, it’s easy to spend hours thinking about this type of stuff. I’ve also spent countless hours doomsday prepping for a world without streaming. It’s a world that seems further away with each passing day, but one I’m willing to hold onto just in case.  

Spotify is a bad company for many reasons, and it’s okay to ask for more. I still use Spotify almost every day… that said, if the service went belly-up tomorrow, I wouldn’t lose that much. Would you?

How Spotify Made Music Disposable

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“You can’t record music every three or four years and think that’s going to be enough.” That was a sentence uttered in an interview earlier this year by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. Widely derided by musicians and fans alike, this sound bite brought the “Streaming Discussion™” back to the forefront of music circles on places like Twitter and Reddit. While very few artists are happy with the financial arrangement between themselves and Spotify, this statement breathed new life into the unrest at the heart of this agreement. This suggestion of “just release more music” also brought to the forefront a litany of problems with the current economic model that platforms like Spotify and Apple Music have used to make millions off of the backs of artists. 

It’s no secret that these services are notoriously stingy, offering up fractions of a penny per stream, but a less-discussed byproduct of this model is how it has literally devalued art and made music more disposable in the process. 

The pandemic (and general state of the world) has obviously caused irreparable damage to our collective mental health and finances alike, but musicians have been hit especially hard. Robbed of the outlet of touring, this has been an unspeakably horrible year for musical artists. Album rollouts have been disrupted, tours have been postponed, and musicians are struggling to make ends meet more than ever before. 

As creators flock to alternative sources of income to keep themselves afloat, the music industry as it stood at the beginning of the year will look very different than the one we see on the other side of this. Groups like Ratboys have taken up Twitch streaming; promoting their merch, prompting donations, and forging direct connections with fans along the way, all while promoting their (excellent) album that released in the weeks before quarantine. Bands like Mannequin Pussy, Prince Daddy, Glass Beach, and Diet Cig have taken to Patreon offering exclusive covers, merch discounts, and access to Dischord channels as benefits. On top of all this, Bandcamp has made a monthly tradition of eschewing their own cut of earnings, the end result being fans putting more than 20 million dollars directly into the pockets of artists, labels, and charities over the course of the summer. 

Then you have Spotify, where it takes 229 streams to make one dollar. Their solution to this? Silly bands, it’s so obvious: simply make more music. Fill their playlists, servers, and coffers with your art if you want to be successful in the musical landscape of 2020.

Near the beginning of quarantine, Spotify gave artists the option to add “donation” buttons to their pages, which, on the surface, seems like a nice gesture, but ultimately proved to be an unsuccessful endeavor. It’s something Spotify can point to and say, “look, see, of course we care about the bands!” Then turn around months later and say things like, “maybe if you were shoveling more coal into our content furnace, you wouldn’t be struggling so much to make ends meet.”

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I’ve written before about how “disposable” streaming services have made music, but never went into detail articulating what that meant to me, and this feels like the perfect time. 

At the dawn of commercial music, you’d go to a store and buy your music in the form of a large piece of plastic that you’d bring home and listen to. As time went on, the size and shape of that plastic changed from vinyl to tape to cassette to CD, but the process always remained the same. Soon you could take your music on the go, listening in the car, on a boombox, a walkman, or a portable CD player. At this point, you might be thinking, ‘okay, yeah, thanks for mansplaining physical media to me,’ but this process actually had an impact on how we viewed and interacted with the music itself. 

Due to the financial (and physical) investment you just made, when you bought an album like this, you were going to listen to it, and you were going to listen to it a lot. At a certain point, it almost didn’t even matter if the record was bad or not, because you just sunk $20 into it, and now it’s going to be on your shelf forever. You were going to listen to it over and over and over again. 

My first collection of childhood CDs was pretty appalling. It ranged from stuff like Sum 41, Good Charlotte, and Simple Plan to Eiffel 65, Aaron Carter, and the Baha Men. Hell, I owned multiple Baha Men CDs. You can probably think of one Baha Men song off the top of your head, but I listened to the deep cuts because I had no other alternatives. If “Who Let The Dogs Out” released in 2020, it would go viral, get the band millions of streams, and then fade out in a month or two. People wouldn’t listen to that song and think, ‘Gee, I wonder what else these guys have to offer’ and then jump into the rest of their discography. 

Even in the mid-2000s, once iPods and mp3 players became widely accessible, your digital music library still had some semblance of connection to who you were as a person. The songs sitting in your iTunes library were all files that you ripped from your own CD collection, bought from Apple, were sent by friends, or obtained through more… nefarious means. It felt like every album, and sometimes even every song, had a story and a purpose. Everything was in its right place, even if it was just a 5mb file sitting somewhere deep in the tangled web of folders on your hard drive.

Now, streaming services have done a lot of good. Having a majority of this century’s auditory output one scroll away is an unspeakable achievement, but it’s a double-edged sword. The flip side of this is that it leads artists to game streaming numbers, create insanely bloated tracklists, and beg fans to fake streams. Those aren’t telltale signs of a sustainable business model. 

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The byproduct of this process for fans is that music is not held with the same reverence when viewed through this platform’s lens. If you’re a capital “M” Music Fan, you’re likely following hundreds, if not thousands of artists from different genres and backgrounds. This is rewarding because it means you have something new to listen to every Friday, probably too much in fact. When there are five to ten new releases to listen to every week, things become buried so quickly that you might not even realize it. 

An artist as big as Taylor Swift can now surprise release an album to critical acclaim and fan approval. It can break records, dominate social media feeds, and feel like a genuine event, only for it to fade from all memory not even a month later. I enjoy folklore, but it’s no longer part of the “culture” as of September 2020, so therefore I’m not thinking of it and not streaming it unless I scroll far back enough in my library to see it. 

You could argue that’s just because it’s a bad album or otherwise unmemorable, but I’ve found this happening with every band, even ones I love dearly. Earlier this year, The Wonder Years, my favorite band of all time, released an acoustic EP that I spun for weeks and weeks but haven’t listened to more than twice this summer. That would have been unthinkable in the era of physical media or iTunes. 

I think the problem here is two-fold. First, it’s platforms like Spotify who capitalize on the hype of something like folklore to generate more users, streams, and engagement for their platforms. Second, I think we’re experiencing an era of unprecedented acceleration in every facet of our lives. Perhaps a product of being sequestered in our homes for six months, our sense of time is skewed beyond repair. Things that happened mere days or weeks ago feel like months or years. How can I remember that an emo band I like put out a new EP two weeks ago when I’m busy filling my brain with social media rot, political discourse, and the horrors of the modern world. 

I’m not begging for the return of the monoculture here, we’ll never return to an era where one band dominates the hearts, charts, and minds of millions of Americans, but it’s frustrating to watch an artistic medium that I love so dearly be treated as a passing fascination. Yeah, cool album you just put out, but what’s next? Artists release one thing, and fans are immediately clamoring for what’s next. It’s harder than ever to fully-digest art as we used to, and streaming platforms like Spotify aren’t helping. 

This is the difference between sipping on a glass of finely-aged whiskey and slamming shots of bottom-shelf vodka…. Not to compare my childhood Baha Men CD to a bottle of whiskey, but you get the point. Dozens of albums came out this year that impacted me in the moment and then faded from my immediate consciousness over time simply because they became buried in the never-ending scroll of my digital streaming library. No matter how much I love an album, something will come out in the next few days that covers it up and pushes it further down the screen. I’ve learned to keep a database of new releases and a shortlist of my favorites, but that’s because I run a music blog, I am far from the average use case.

At the end of the day, most people are perfectly fine throwing on a Spotify-created playlist and vegging out to whatever the algorithm sees fit. I know active listening will never become a truly lost art, but I feel awful for artists who put hundreds of hours, thousands of dollars, and incalculable amounts of effort into their art only for it to be swallowed up by the streaming beast and fade into obscurity within weeks. This is yet another reason why vinyl and cassettes are enjoying a resurgence because people are hungry to reconnect with art. 

Try as we might with petitions, outreach, and just roasting them on twitter, Spotify isn’t going to change any time soon. This is the norm for the foreseeable future, and it kind of sucks. It sucks for artists, and it sucks for fans. In fact, it sucks for everyone involved except the people at the top making millions of dollars off the blood, sweat, and tears of every artist at the bottom of the pyramid. 

Streaming services treat music just like that; a service. Spotify will continue to exploit artists in order to fuel their machine, so as fans, we need to break out of that routine whenever possible. There’s no preciousness anymore unless you bring it, so let’s bring it. Go support an artist’s Patreon, go start a thread on twitter, go buy a shirt on Bandcamp, go post a makeup selfie inspired by a band’s album art. Those are only a few ways to connect with artists, but they go farther than you probably realize; you never know how much your support snowballs. As long as there are passionate fans supporting artists, sharing music, and spreading songs that they love, streaming services will never truly be able to make music disposable, try as they might.