What we get wrong about streaming

“But beneath the shifting economic and technological sands, I think the very bedrock of relationship to music is now on the move. A fundamental rewiring, from a spontaneous, culturally contextualised, messy, chaotic, sophisticated artform, to a simple utility, a diet plan, a source of mental nutrition.”

I don’t know, I think things have always been this way for a majority of “music listeners” (which are people who need some kind of background sound while driving or working so that they don’t have to hear themselves think). Radio stations have worked like this for about fifty years — Arbitron tracked what radio stations were being listened to at any time, and a big central entity (ClearChannel) tracked what songs were playing when people listened to what station. This data was used to create the next day’s playlist, and the cycle repeated. People would be fed what the data said made them listen to the station for longer instead of changing the channel (including when the song was played and what songs it was played next to), and that would create their tastes. The only difference I can see from how Spotify operates is that the old way was less honest about what it was doing — it had DJs who pretended like they were curators (even though DJs didn’t control the playlist on network-affiliated radio stations; they were just pretending), essentially lying about why listeners were being fed the songs that they were, meanwhile Spotify spooks some people because it’s honest about doing the same thing.

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