It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I’m both my own worst enemy as well as my own worst influence. The whole trope about all of us having an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other? Well, I have two devils and no angels. But that’s a story for another today. Instead, I’m going to focus on someone else’s case of being a bad influence on me, or at least that’s how I’m going to frame it. Of course, the bad influence in question is a woman. 

Don’t get consumed by the algorithm, man.(Image retrieved fromhere and comes courtesy of Markus Spiske.)

Back in 2019, I was still buying and listening to CDs. I listened to a lot of music on YouTube as well, and previously had an iTunes account, where years earlier, I’d taken great pains to upload all of my CDs onto it only to have it crash at some point and ultimately be rendered inaccessible to me. I know I spent some money buying songs and albums as well, but I no longer recall which ones. This was some time ago, pre-2010, I believe, long before I’d gotten a “smartphone” (that was in 2014, also under the assault of peer pressure; more on that another day, maybe) and where it was still acceptable to be mostly analog with media and certainly way before it has more recently come back in vogue. 

Anyway, this gal I met, we’ll call her “Jean,” she was/is super-hot, super smart, totally her own person, and a nice mixture of bitchiness, humor, and insight, all wrapped in an anti-convention, always against-the-grain bow. Well, we started sharing music and she did so via Spotify, sending me playlists, and through a sense of obligation, I did the same. This caused me to have to set up a Spotify account, and as these things go, the platform quickly displaced my other modes of listening to music. The thing about the free Spotify account that anyone whose had one knows is that it can be really annoying when it comes time to pay the corporate overlords: the commercials pop in at the most inopportune times and they’re always louder than the music that was interrupted. And Spotify knows this. They want to frustrate you completely and then they dangle an offer you can’t refuse in front of your face: three months of unlimited access to their “premium” service (no commercials) for .99¢ – and of course nobody wants to go back after a taste of the good life. So, I didn’t. More than six years later, I’m still on the hook for $12.99/mo. 

We’re all aware of how much Spotify exploits the artists they host on their platform. That’s no secret, so any true fan of music (who remains crippled by the convenience that the service provides) should continue to support artists through buying their merch, including CDs/vinyl and official downloads straight from the band. But I’m going to go one further and say that you should get rid of your (paid) Spotify account outright. It’s time to despotify. 

Looking at my “liked” songs, I have 797 in my queue. Now, admittedly, there’s a healthy chunk of those that I only liked on a whim and don’t really care if I ever hear again, so let’s just say conservatively that number is 97, leaving me 700 songs I truly like and would like to maintain constant, easy access to. If I were to buy all of those on iTunes at $1 a piece, that would be a large payment, but at least a one-time payment, but I don’t think it would seriously improve the bottom lines of the artists. To do that, I would need to buy the physical copy, which would be cost prohibitive if I’m largely buying singles with no interest in other songs on the album. So, despotification may not help the artist that much, but it would help to break this cycle of streaming life which is taking over more and more of our world. I recently heard that car companies will be offering previously free services, like heated seats, in a streaming capacity. Ridiculous. The more people accept this model, the more it will consume us. 

Another related concern with Spotify is its simple role in the algorithm universe. Platforms like it soften us up to being spoon-fed an ever-blander diet of more-of-the-same and do so in a way that is pleasing; it’s a little like turning the heat up slowly on the frog in the pot of water. Before you know it, we’ll be completely detached from any version of our self-curated selves and have devolved into a living Hallmark special. I’m sure there is some apt reference from The Truman Show here, but I haven’t seen the movie recently enough to conjure one up astutely. 

What I’ve written here is also nothing new or insightful, as Tim Wu voiced similar concerns in his NYT op-ed in 2018 titled, “The Tyranny of Convenience.” In it, he said that to “resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.” He said of convenience that it is “understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation”; that it “has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.” Spotify, over the six years I’ve subscribed to it, has cost me roughly $1,000, and if I continue to accept it as a fixed expense in my life, it’ll get me for another $5-10K over the duration, still charging me after I’ve died, and no one will be the wiser. 

Spotify has “enslaved” me in other ways, too, baking in shortcuts around the hard-earned fun of finding music on my own, and the aforementioned hollowing out of the music industry. That they now host AI musicians is just another form of corporate servitude to watch over us as we continue to feed at the trough of convenience and mass-production. Regarding the latter, Wu said:

The paradoxical truth I’m driving at is that today’s technologies of individualization are technologies of mass individualization. Customization can be surprisingly homogenizing. Everyone, or nearly everyone, is on Facebook: It is the most convenient way to keep track of your friends and family, who in theory should represent what is unique about you and your life. Yet Facebook seems to make us all the same. Its format and conventions strip us of all but the most superficial expressions of individuality, such as which particular photo of a beach or mountain range we select as our background image.

This is what Spotify ultimately does; it takes a mass of individuals and attempts to homogenize us all into an easy-to-sort collection of predetermined groups with all novelty shaved off at the sides until all that remains is a picture-perfect model of the consumer in streamlined fashion, those who also foot the bill at a nominal and ever-increasing fee in perpetuity. We haven’t quite surrendered our consumer role entirely; simply that what we now consume doesn’t quite taste the way we remembered it, nor feel as special as it once did. We’re certainly not producers either; we’re more aptly understood as tech support. Only it comes with a monthly charge to remain on hold. 

#despotification, #despotify 

Marco Esquandoles
Swimming Downstream