Reclaiming my taste

Why I quit Spotify

Last week I canceled my Spotify premium account, a step on the way to deleting it altogether. I’ve gotten off a lot of apps and platforms over the last several years, and I’m always surprised at how good it feels. I also, every time, feel like it’s impossible up until the moment I do it. I don’t necessarily think you need to cancel your Spotify account, and I’m not here to convince you to if you truly love it. (The Covid misinformation is bad, but as you’ll see, it wasn’t my main motivation.) I’m more interested in exploring what Spotify, and the general ubiquity of streaming, has done to my relationship with music, and why I decided it had to stop.

There was a point in my life, almost unimaginable to me now, when I was cool, and that coolness primarily expressed itself through music. This phase peaked in college, as it does for many of us. I was a DJ at the radio station and music editor of the newspaper. I went to concerts as many as five days a week. I wore out my CMJ pass many years running. I was drowning in free CDs. Once or twice I DJed sets between acts at actual New York City clubs. I also did slightly weirder things for a college student, like go to daytime rock shows for children and 24-hour marathons of experimental new classical music.

In short, I had taste, and I cared about cultivating that taste. I knew what I was interested in—indie rock, gentle singer-songwriters, experimental percussion, anything with clever electronic loops, what I hope we’re not still calling “world music.” That left out vast landscapes of really interesting art, of course. (I’m sorry especially to hip hop; I will never catch up now.) But that’s kind of the point of taste, right? It doesn’t include everything. 

My intense commitment to music, and especially live music, waned a bit after I graduated from college. Between the DJing and the music writing, I had turned my hobby into something of a job, or at least an unpaid obligation, and I was tired. I started to suspect I didn’t have anything of interest or import to say about music anyway, and I dug into science writing instead, which felt more exciting to me. At the same time, the mid-2000s indie rock peak started to fade, and the culture at large stopped reflecting my taste back to me quite so effortlessly. I moved away from New York and its endless buffet of shows. I questioned if I really wanted to spend so many of my nights standing up in a crowd anyway. When I did go to concerts, they started to have seats.

All of this was a more or less natural transition, I think, but I was conflicted about it, as we tend to be about signs we’re getting older. I think I would have found a new footing eventually, one that still allowed me to cultivate my taste without organizing my entire identity, not to mention all my leisure time, around it. But instead, Spotify came along.

The worst thing about Spotify initially appeared to be its best feature: That you could listen to anything, at any time. It was all there, or so it seemed. The opportunities for music education alone were infinite. The rabbit holes of punk or metal or K-pop into which newly minted teenagers could now descend were unthinkably weird and deep. No one would ever again have to spend years pretending they knew a famous band or song, something I did all the time—they could just stream it at the earliest opportunity and fill in the gap. I could have remedied my lacuna of hip hop knowledge within a matter of weeks, at no cost to me beyond the subscription fee I was already paying.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I never did. By presenting me with everything, all at once, Spotify turned me into a passive consumer of music. I no longer had to make any choices or invest any effort. I didn’t have to drive to a record store or dig through bins. I didn’t have to decide to spend money on this album, but not that one. I didn’t even have to make the minimal effort of finding an illegal download (which I hardly ever did) or ripping a CD onto my computer from the radio station or a friend’s collection (which I did all the time and resulted in an iTunes library so large it has to live on its own external hard drive). Spotify made music listening frictionless, which, for me, turned out to be another word for meaningless.

And so I never went down a rabbit hole, or filled in a gap in my knowledge, or even made another mix, which we now called playlists, a hobby I had once loved. I marveled at how well Discover Weekly knew the music I had loved ten years ago, and I didn’t think much about how rarely it helped me “discover” anything new. I went from someone who knew how to use curation to reveal and refine her taste to someone who felt like she had no taste at all.

Spotify didn’t do this to everyone. I know lots of people who intensely curate their libraries and build meaningful playlists. They find the infinity of streaming liberating, not deadening. If that’s you, again, don’t change anything. I’m jealous! But I suspect I’m not alone in not liking what music streaming did to me, and we don’t really have a shared vocabulary to talk about what we’ve lost as we’ve gained instant access to so much.

My sense of taste became so ghostly that for a while, I didn’t realize it was changing. I thought I was putting on background music for writing, and who cares about background music—a sentiment Spotify encourages with its endless lists of “lo-fi chill beats” and “classical for concentration.” All the potentially meaningful specifics absorbed, digested, and spit back out as a vibe. Because of this enforced weightlessness, I could spend two years listening to Philip Glass and the Tallis Scholars almost every day without realizing I like Philip Glass and the Tallis Scholars. Steve Reich and Terry Riley don’t make background music—they make art. There’s a reason Renaissance choral music is still being sung 500 years later, and it’s not because it’s great for studying. Nothing in the early music/new classic dyad I’ve become so interested in is necessarily cool, at least not in the way my taste used to be cool. But it’s still my taste, or it would be if I remembered how to pay attention to it.

That’s why I got off Spotify—to force myself to pay attention again. For what I was paying for a streaming subscription, I can buy an album or two per month from iTunes. That forces me to make choices, and it also better supports the artists I’m listening to. For trying out new things before I commit, there’s YouTube. For discovering more of what I’m interested in, there’s radio with expert DJs. (How did I forget about radio, especially now that so many wonderful, invaluable stations are available online?) At this point I haven’t switched to another streaming service, because I didn’t have any Spotify playlists I wanted to save, and I think I’d have the same issues with any of them. Basically, I’ve returned my music consumption habits to 2005. It’s definitely more work than letting myself fall under Spotify’s trance—but that’s the exactly the point.