December 12, 2024 14:32 IST
First published: 12 December 2024 at 14:32 IST
At 2 a.m. on one of those rare nights I give Rosa Lin a chance when my sleep fails me. The lyrics to her number ‘Snap’ are incomparable, or just as poignant as another pop song. But there’s something arresting about the Armenian musician’s voice—a soaring range, an influence that slows you down. I listen to the song on loop all night, feeling exhausted and suitably excited to have “discovered” a new musician to explore.
As you can imagine, dear reader, this has become a permanent fixture on my playlist, making it onto my Spotify Wrapped, that annual marketing gimmick that makes listeners feel woozy. Its remote revenue sharing model? I did too.
We were both wrong.
Instead, it’s a wrap around my wrapped head, which is wrong in my taste — and the stealth-creep algorithmic patterns of corporate behemoths, built on the data one spends over time. listeners. Spotify isn’t about personalizing you, or inspiring you to discover new music and new musicians. It wants to hook you by adding stuff that sounds familiar and easy enough not to quickly click into your ear.
Now, you may question my taste in music, but never my range. From Tagore songs to Nina Simone, Mohiner Ghoraguli to John Armatrading, Simon and Garfunkel to Leonard Cohen, John Baez to Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga to Billie Eilish, 90s Bollywood, all his songs have the same tone. Walker and why-am-I-listening-to-what-he-is-yuk, plumbed me six deep so that no one would make the mistake of sharing my schizophrenic playlists. But this year my rap gives me pause. In a whole year of 13,335 minutes while away on Spotify, I can find few new musicians besides Lynn, falling in step with the algorithm that has mastered how I listen to the things I like.
Wrapped is a model that’s clearly worked for Spotify—an annual summary of a person’s listening habits features more than one might try to remember in cheerfully received social media updates. And yet, the personalization in Wrapped, ostensibly outsourced to AI, is impersonal and gimmicky – “This is some serious dedication,” it exclaims at one point. “Where do you find the time,” it jibes at another. The reveal of my top five songs and favorite artists is a disappointment; I have reservations about the stats (‘Falling Colour’ by Vanbur 52 times. Seriously?).
Much of this has to do with the fact that the company apparently let go of a large portion of its workforce in favor of an AI-powered upgrade in December 2023. Spotify CEO Daniel Eck has said that the decision to lay off 1,500 employees caused bigger disruptions than expected. The results are telling. But not in a pleasant way.
Scrolling through my soundtrack to 2024, I realized that Spotify has forgotten why people come to music in the first place – to feel. That song by The Smiths a co-worker sent in the middle of the night to brighten up a hard day at work, a Noel Harrison song you’ve yet to share with anyone because it’s too precious to you, a plaintive Mausumi Bhaumik number that’s yours. Loved a favorite brother who died too young – music, like literature, is tied to memory and nostalgia, personal and fascinating.
Brady Brickner-Wood writes in The New Yorker, “…while Spotify essentially fails to deliver on its promise to be everything users need — a record collection, an archive, a jukebox, a merch bar, a book of burnable CDs, liner notes, FM radio, MTV, our favorite magazine, a conversation with a friend—audiences feel cheated and existentially unstable if we can’t trust apps to tell a meaningful story about our art consumption, including ourselves How does one detect idiosyncratic structure?”
It may be too much to ask for a profit-maximizing corporation to be the record keeper of our inner lives, but perhaps, it may be a more faithful custodian of the background score on our fleeting days so it guesses who we are. Who we were and who we have become.
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