How Spotify changed my music consumption

I first signed up for Spotify sometime in 2011, which, in the life-cycle of the internet, feels like two thousand years. Since then I've used it almost exclusively to listen to music - some notable exceptions being Soundcloud and the occasional mp3 that friends send me. This has had some pretty significant effects on how I consume my music.

I'm an elder millennial, which means I grew up in the golden age of CDs. That's how we listened - on a CD, or on the radio. Not many people really listened to tapes by the time I started developing my own music taste. I went through several different models of portable CD players (like the Sony discman ), and at home I had a boombox with a 3 CD changer kinda like this kenwood.

The first CD I ever bought with my own money was in 6th grade. I had a cd tower that I kept the jewel cases in at home in my bedroom, and a cd wallet for taking my discs with me. Since I was a computer nerd, I also had a ton of blank CDs that I'd burn downloaded mp3s on to. This felt like a life hack because if your CD player supported it, you could fit 7 or 8 albums on a disc instead of just one.

At the peak of my collection, I had bought maybe 50 albums from stores, plus I had 20-30 mp3 cds. So at most, that's roughly 300 albums that I had amassed in my entire life. That's all the music I had! It was possible to go download more and burn more discs, but you had to know what to look for. To find new music to listen to, you talked to your friends or listened to the radio. If you were really in the know, maybe you read music blogs or were in some local scene that helped you grow your music knowledge base more. There was no centralized way to search and find new stuff. You just had to try something new, and sometimes you'd buy an album and it was shit and you'd be mad you wasted your money. Things are not like this anymore, unless you're one of those people that collects vinyl in 2024.

I did have an iPod for awhile with a couple thousand mp3s on it, and that felt like a huge leap in technological advancement, but the early iPods were pretty limited in terms of external connectivity - I could really only listen on headphones.

Discovery vs Depth

All this is to say that I listened to these same few albums a lot, because they were what I had. I got to know them really well. Today when I listen to one of the albums I had on CD from that time in my life, I know almost all the lyrics to all the songs. I've likely listened to some of the albums over a thousand times.

There's some beauty in knowing something that thoroughly. It imprints upon you, and changes you. Music from that time in my life is very meaningful to me - not all of it, but the stuff I loved, I really loved.

Today it's pretty different. Because Spotify lets me listen to almost anything at any time, I have a hard time picking what to put on. It might seem like there's a greater freedom of choice, but actually having all of these options is overwhelming and sometimes I just end up closing the app and not listening to anything. Spotify doesn't tell me how many albums I have "saved" so they show up in my library, but I bet it's well over 300.

The upside to all this choice is that I consume a much broader range of genres than I ever did before. There's so much out there, and expanding my own musical preferences actually makes me want to continually try new things.

Unfortunately, this expanding of my horizons means I don't listen to the same music very much. Instead of putting on an album I've listened to a bunch of times before, I put on something I don't really know that well. Some of this might be preference, like maybe I don't actually feel like listening to the same albums over and over again anymore, but I think it's actually more profound than that - knowing that I have much broader choices makes me less likely to choose something familiar, because I feel more pressure to keep listening to new music.

In 2024, my Spotify told me in their end of year Wrapped summary that the number one song I listened to that year was played a total of nine times. NINE TIMES! When I read that I couldn't believe it. Sometimes I used to listen to whole albums three or four times a day, so to find out I only listened to one song nine times in a year was mind-bending.

How I consume

My listening habit have changed a lot as I've grown up. I don't think this is a consequence of Spotify exactly, but it does play a role.

As a teenager I listened to music any time I was home in my room. Doing homework, hanging out with friends, and before bed falling asleep, I always had something playing. On the way to school, I had my discman and headphones.

When I got older and got a car, I listened to music anytime I was driving - on my commutes, in traffic, picking up friends, going for late night drives, I mean literally any time I was in the car, there was music going.

As a younger person, most of the time when I was listening it was intentional. I wasn't distracted by my phone or laptop. I wasn't doing two other things at the same time (driving not included, I actually find that a great way to listen to music intentionally). Now a lot of the time I'm listening it's with music on in the background while I'm doing something else, like coding or watching my daughter or cooking.

My music preferences have also changed slightly to accommodate that - sometimes I want softer, slower music that has the right texture to not distract me. This is especially true when I'm coding, I need electronic-y music that's not too fast or intense, and doesn't have any lyrics.

One thing that has stayed consistent is that I still strongly prefer listening to albums. I'm not a single song or a playlist kind of guy. Even with the erasure of physical media, the concept of the album is still something that exists in the industry, and I'm so grateful for that because I like the structure of albums. They have a beginning and an end, and the artist crafts the narrative how they best see fit. There's an art to an album - it's like telling a story.

Changing of philosophies

Not having to manage a physical or digital media collection is nice in some ways, but I really miss having a stack of discs to show people. It used to be that people would come over, browse through your CD collection, and it would some conversation topics. I suppose not having to carry around 50 discs in a wallet is a net positive, but there's also something rewarding about the tangibility of it.

There's also the concept of ownership. I no longer own any music. The CDs that I bought were mine, there was no DRM , and they felt like part of my identity. Now I pay Spotify a monthly fee for access to their collection, which is much larger, but it's certainly not mine. As soon as I stop paying, I lose access to all that music. It's funny that I have made a political decision to not buy e-books for exactly the same reason - I pretty much only buy physical books, or use Libby to borrow e-books from the library - but I don't have the same boundaries with music.

When I sold my car in 2013, I accidentally left my CD wallet in it. In the wallet was every CD I had ever bought, starting in sixth grade. After a few weeks I realized they were missing, and figured out what happened. I was surprisingly not that upset - I had been using Spotify for a couple years at that point, and I actually didn't miss them, because I knew I could access all that music again easily. I don't know where all my jewel cases went.

Costs

I've been paying for Spotify for about 14 years. For a long time I paid $10 a month, and awhile ago they raised it to $12 a month. That's at least $1680, which is not a ton of money, but could have bought me 112 albums (at $15 each) over the course of those years. Certainly I've listened to more than 112 albums in that time, so from that perspective it's a great deal, but there are other costs to this model.

Ethics

Spotify has been under fire over the years for various reasons, including their pricing model (which ranges from .003 to .005 cents per stream, and has decreased in the past years), to creating fake musicians so they keep the stream payouts, to replacing fan-favorite features like Spotify Wrapped with a mediocre AI generated version.

None of these issues surprise me, they are all exactly what I'd expect from a large tech company whose sole purpose is to continue to grow in size and revenue. But they do make me consider where my money is going.

I don't pretend to be an analyst here, so I don't know how to evaluate whether the traditional music industry business model is better for artists or if some musicians genuinely do prefer selling their music on Spotify. I imagine that like most companies, Spotify wants to make as much money as possible while paying as little as possible. The record industry also wants that, and has been notoriously shitty towards artists in many ways, but there's something dystopian about the size and scale of tech companies and how they strive for growth at all costs, endlessly, forever.

With all this said, I don't have any great options. I'm pretty unwilling to go back to buying CD and hefting them about with me, or managing tens of thousands of mp3s.

Other Considerations

While writing this piece I came across an article on nplusonemag. It talks about Netflix and their content model changing how people consume.

For a century, the business of running a Hollywood studio was straightforward. The more people watched films, the more money the studios made. With Netflix, however, audiences don’t pay for individual films. They pay a subscription to watch everything, and this has enabled a strange phenomenon to take root. Netflix’s movies don’t have to abide by any of the norms established over the history of cinema: they don’t have to be profitable, pretty, sexy, intelligent, funny, well-made, or anything else that pulls audiences into theater seats. Netflix’s audiences watch from their homes, on couches, in beds, on public transportation, and on toilets. Often they aren’t even watching.

It's an interesting point, and I believe that Netflix does suffer from this problem. If Spotify, with their previously mentioned fake artists, also created tons of low-quality generated content with the intent of keeping their customers listening as much as possible, then we're dealing with a classic example of enshittification across industries. Personally though, I don't seem to be affected by the fake music problem, because I don't spend much time listening to Spotify's algorithmically generated playlists.

So, I don't know what the answer is here. Tech companies do a good job of making their products convenient, accessible, and good enough for most people to ignore all of the ethical and political impacts they have on the industry and the world. I'm just another person who wants to listen to music, and I wish I had more options.