Spotify redesign another brick in the wall of joyful discovery

This is a basic and perhaps unfortunate truism in life. The older I get, the more I miss the things I lost in my youth.

Some gray-haired people may be nostalgic for a world with less screens, or the old Walkmans and Nintendos. As for me, I miss a streaming music app called Rdio (pronounced “are-dee-o”).

Although it closed in 2015, what made Rdio so great were two things that set it apart from modern competition. It focused on albums rather than individual tracks, and it had a useful social element that let you know what your friends were listening to.

That focus on albums is not something shared by its competitors, and I lament its absence. rice field.

You don’t just see a list of albums when you open the app, you also see a “feed” like TikTok or Instagram. In addition to music, you can get photos, song clips, or video podcasts.

In a way it is inevitable. Everything is moving in a direction called snippet culture. In other words, a world where all entertainment has a snack-sized version for lounging on the subway.

But that inevitability doesn’t make it any better. Spotify’s redesign, after all, is just another nail in the album’s coffin. More importantly, it’s another shift to a world where “content” is determined by algorithms.

Spotify is a service I use every day. But its impact on my life has been a mixed bag at best.

Yes, having millions of songs at your fingertips is convenient and affordable. But convenience comes at a price. I almost never listen to albums. Discovery of new songs takes place in the form of playlists. That is, curated or computer-generated lists of songs with themes such as modern classics, morning jazz, and indietronica.

Now, with a further shift to clips and snippets, Spotify continues its trend towards a pastiche approach to culture. It’s about combining experiences rather than working on deliberately or thoughtfully constructed ones.

This reflects a broader trend away from albums and long-form content in general. It’s often a mistake to be nostalgic for the sake of nostalgia, but when your engagement with art is fragmentary rather than meticulous and contemplative, you can’t help but think that something is lost.

But it is the attention economy that is driving this change. The attention economy refers to the fact that getting attention is the primary economic driver for digital apps.

That’s why all apps, including YouTube and Netflix, have short, digestible formats called infinitely scrollable Stories.

But Spotify doesn’t have exactly the same purpose, but that context is also why Spotify made the change. Partly because Spotify will recoup its huge investment in podcasts and video content and start challenging YouTube as the home of video podcasts (essentially filmed radio shows). We want to build that vertical by showing these things.

But there is cunning at work here too. In chasing TikTok and following the feed idea, Spotify is also focusing on algorithms that serve content based on previous likes and activity.

This is the idea that dominates what you see on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and more.

But it may also have the effect of flattening the culture. Recommend what is popular with you and everyone else. Then click it to see similar recommendations in the future.

Author and New Yorker columnist Kyle Chaika, who is working on a book about exactly this effect, recently said on Twitter: AI generation will automatically generate that average from the beginning. “

It doesn’t matter if good art is still being made. is. But just as great independent films get overshadowed by dissonant blockbusters, the question of art now isn’t its quality, but whether it’s findable—whether it’s found.

Spotify claims its new redesign is all about helping users discover new things. it may be true. But are they treasures found in the rubble? Or is it also “content” created for the insatiable needs of algorithms and our own constant thirst for more?

In answering that question, we may be able to find the future of cultural expression.

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