i’ve been thinking a lot about the unique humiliation that comes with being fed ads for video streaming platforms that use clips of shows or movies i like in their campaigns. when HBO recently started promoting their movie selection again after a few weird years when all major streaming platforms pretended they only carried TV series (and a handful of original films they presumably committed to financing years ago), dream scenario was one of the most prominently-featured titles—likely because it was among the newest on their platform, but it felt personal knowing how poorly received it was by just about everyone but me.
i imagine it’s nowhere near as humiliating for me, though, as it is for the creators of these shows and movies, whose artistic vision is being co-opted by Big Streaming to sell their services. but this general campaign of you-like-that-don’t-you that the capitalist entities i detest more than anything in the world use to lure me into paying them unreasonable amounts of money every month for a service which more often than not is deeply unintuitive—if not downright janky—still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, as it’s the streaming libraries they’re promoting rather than the platform they’re housed on, where, in the case of HBO, i have to scroll endlessly just to find my watchlist—beyond a bar of “recommended” titles led by a series i’ve literally just finished watching, a row of “continue watching” titles i’ve finished but which need to be manually cleared for some reason, and several rows of nonsense categories displaying the same titles under different headings that do little more than turn me off to them: “literal LOLs,” or “hidden gems” (the latter of which I recall featuring zone of interest immediately after its oscar wins and ensuing controversy).
yet at least with visual streaming platforms, there’s some sort of undergirding distribution deals dictating the ever-changing filmographies each service promotes. their interests may be financial rather than artistic, but at least HBO performs something resembling a curatorial role in limiting our watch lists to their limited libraries, even if third-party entities—publications like paste, or watchlist guides like just watch—are required for us to grasp their depth beyond the limited and often unappetizing titles littering their homepage. spotify, on the other hand, does no such thing. instead, it’s music’s questionably legal 123movies, an open-world discovery space for music that increasingly sees itself as a hub for music discovery in what the platform’s creators want us to believe is a post-journalism world, as well as a library of alexandria for all existing musical recordings. spotify isn’t giving us this music, which exists freely all over the web—it’s just letting us listen to it without navigating various URLs.
after all, spotify is a playlisting service. it’s a playlisting service that’s effectively tricked us into thinking that it’s responsible for democratizing music in a post-napster world. there are so many angles from which you could very reasonably attack this company, from their ongoing initiative to make sure that as few of the artists who are entirely responsible for fueling their machine as possible make a penny from providing access to their entire music catalog, to the fact that i tend to become well-versed in the various glitches that plague their browser interface, mobile app, and desktop app only to—without fail—have them roll out new ones next time i rely on them. but these past few weeks, after ceremoniously being banished from the premium plan i’ve shared with my family for the past eight years, i’ve been contemplating spotify’s bloated sense of entitlement when, again, the only service it provides is simply helping us build our little playlists.
i’m sure i’ve already communicated through this newsletter the fact that I only rely on spotify to stream music i’ll later write about for FLOOD or on here. i’ve written about my perhaps-unhealthy dependence on apple music to house the massive personal music library i’ve been lugging around since before spotify entered my life, which spotify also serves to complement as a testing ground for music i may want to add to this personal library in the future. and i don’t mean to insinuate that this is the only correct usage for engaging with spotify—i get the sense that most listeners use it to stream full records. but it’s important to remember that there’s generally a full linktree’s worth of alternative platforms this music is streaming on. it’s not like HBO, where you have to wait until a limited miniseries based on a nearly forgotten late-’80s blockbuster debuts for the title it’s based on to become accessible exclusively to that app.
i recall first giving spotify a shot in the early 2010s when it began taking off, streaming an album i didn’t have in my own library only to be too turned off by the constant ad breaks to give it another chance, and too disinterested in their subscription model to opt in for that rather than continuing to purchase individual titles on bandcamp or other digital retailers. but spotify has changed a lot since then. now that we’re seemingly all dependent on them, they’ve significantly reduced their functionality for non-paying users to the point where their interface is virtually unusable. tracklists on both albums and playlists (including your own) are hidden, and there’s no option to turn off shuffle. meaning yes, you can listen to a 30 minute album, but it might take closer to 45 with the ad breaks. which at least gives you time to piece together the track order while a nasally white lady sells you dunkin with blatantly shoehorned-in gen-z speak over cringy millennial EDM.
beyond that, they subject you to music that doesn’t appear on the album or playlist you’re listening to for several tracks before switching over to whatever it is you’ve selected, with the stingy “six skips per hour” stipulation constantly forcing you to hear something totally unrelated. streaming one of my playlists became an even more infuriating ghost-in-the-machine phenomenon than what i’d gotten used to navigating spotify with the premium plan, while i additionally felt like i’d regressed 20 years to a time when i’d listen to the radio all day just to hear one song i knew was somewhere in the station’s rotation.
spotify is a playlisting service that doesn’t cede control of the playlists you build unless you pay them upwards of $144 per year. in effect, spotify’s non-premium option isn’t withholding their product so much as it is withholding the music that doesn’t belong to them, and which they’re barely paying the artist for—in money or, again, in most cases, merely exposure. in doing so it intentionally creates the sort of negative associations with music that have already spoiled every other corner of our late-capitalist world, beginning with the inter-album ad spots that previously meddled with films repackaged for network TV (only in this case there’s no one in charge of finding the most natural breaks). even in its infancy spotify cultivated this association between music and commerce, which they’ve spent the past decade developing to the point where it reflects the kafkaesque labyrinths of shoddy healthcare portals and malicious e-filing services that serve as untrustworthy middlemen in a process—which is, again, listening to songs you choose in an order you choose—that shouldn’t require one. it’s a theme: the user and artist are always made to suffer unless they’re willing to debase themselves to meet spotify’s increasingly unreasonable needs.
but as a user, i continued to suffer after i debased myself. due to a miscommunication seemingly tied to spotify’s minimalist account setting options, my whole family got booted from my brother’s family premium plan with what was essentially a cease-and-desist notification banishing us from trying to join it again for a full year. further, when trying to add my account to FLOOD’s company plan, they sent me the same soup-nazi-esque brusque dismissal email before they even asked me to corroborate my home address, in neither case really specifying what i did to deserve such a dramatic exile. the weird harassment emails they continued to send me felt like the first time spotify ever singled me out as an individual, despite their leaning into shilling quote-unquote personalized playlists and surprising me at the end of the year by telling me my favorite artists, based on the precise data i knew i was feeding them.
while it’s a personal critique of mine that spotify oversteps their lane every time they insert themselves into my listening habits as they try to tell me what music i like—which they continue to find new ways of doing—a much more universal critique might be that they’ve simultaneously managed to slide themselves between artists and listeners without drawing any attention to themselves, in doing so bringing with them (and normalizing) all the worst aspects of capitalism that the creative individuals whose work they’re capitalizing on tend to stand against. i guess i shouldn’t be so naive as to be surprised that spotify and HBO—both of whom recently raised their subscription rates, the former of which has just threatened to do so again—have devolved to turning us upside down and shaking all our loose change out of our pockets with a service that’s very obviously very predatory towards the individuals who continue to provide all the labor. maybe i’m just surprised they’re still getting away with it.
“the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind,” mcluhan quipped. he was right: as we continue to be slapped in the face with whatever cuts most appeal to us personally, these burglars have our credit cards on file for the foreseeable future as they provide one small—though arguably crucial—service very, very poorly.
