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The 2006 the iPod, still the size of today’s cell phone, held 20,000 songs at its maximum, the CD was still a reliable listening medium, and vinyl was still fermenting its revival for a generation of listeners who were “jealous” of the way they listened. music their parents.
With Napster, the app that allowed users to share files directly with each other on a peer-to-peer basis, already a thing of the past by then, Apple’s mp3 player seemed like the biggest revolution in the way we’d listen to music since, as our entire CD library literally fit in our pocket. Except that at the same time two Swedes, the Daniel Ek and the Martin Lorenzón, were preparing the next revolution in listening: the Spotify.
The company started 20 years ago from Stockholm as a legal solution to the piracy that was rampant at the time, without yet a clear orientation towards music but as an application for streaming content. Today, Spotify is valued at $106 billion, hosts more than 100 million songs, 7 million podcast titles, 500,000 audiobooks and is used by more than 750 million users worldwide. So how in these two decades did Spotify become the king of the music industry (and beyond), often causing a strong backlash for its practices?
Infinite music – but who listens to it?
Within a few years the company Spotify took the decisive steps that established it in the streaming market. In 2008 it was rolled out to other neighboring countries, Finland, France, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the UK, and a year later it became available on mobiles, making mp3 player and phone conceivably one device. By 2010 it already had 10 million subscribers, while in 2011 with the introduction of USA makes the major shift towards its gradual world domination. In 2013, a free version of Spotify is also launched, thus putting ads into the game. Having since become the primary way we listen to music around the world, in 2018 the company also listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Naturally, a new market opened up, so competitors emerged, most notably Apple Music, which launched in 2015.
There’s more music than ever out there right now, most of it on Spotify, yet the vast majority of listeners rely on algorithmic suggestions derived from what they’re more or less listening to.
A fundamental difference that Spotify brought was that the music no longer needed to belong to the user to listen to it. A monthly subscription ensures access to “all the music out there”, at the touch of a button. And while, indeed, it is wonderful the ease and speed with which one can listen to an “unknown” artist from the other corner of the planet, does all this “immensity” ultimately negate itself to a large extent? There’s more music than ever out there right now, most of it on Spotify, yet the vast majority of listeners rely on algorithmic suggestions derived from what they’re more or less listening to. Something the platform heavily supports, with numerous personalized lists it builds for each listener, which can often just include five recurring brand names.
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Looking at the lists of the most listened to artists, albums and songs in the history of Spotify that the platform released on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, it is as if the music “sprouted” in the last fifteen years and only produces pop and r’n’b pop behemoths (mostly) from America. Taylor SwiftBad Bunny, Billie EilishWeeknd, Drake, among the names that dominate with a dizzying number of listens. Perhaps at the same time we have more music lovers buying less music than ever before. The steep decline in physical sales, with the exception of special, fanatical audiences such as Taylor Swift or k-popshows that it is increasingly difficult, even for the initiated listener, to buy a vinyl record, let alone a CD. In this climate, younger generations may find it increasingly difficult to understand what an album is. A few years ago in an interview, Noel Gallagher said with a laugh that in order to explain to his daughter what he meant when he said he wanted to work on the cover of his new record, he had to tell her he was referring to “that little icon” he sees when he streams music, so that she would understand.
Viral reviews
Spotify over time, in order to boost the much-desired “engagement” with its audience, has adopted various social media features. Until a few years ago, when opening its original application on a computer, the user would see on the right what the other users he was following were listening to live, like a music-loving “peek through the keyhole”.
Of course, its greatest communication success remains “Spotify Wrapped”, that is, the annual review that the platform prepares for each user at the end of the year. What began in 2015 as the ‘Year in Music’ has in recent years become the moment everyone waits for every December on Spotify to share the finds of ‘Wrapped’ with their friends on social media. Through cleverly staged videos, the review, in addition to presenting objective data such as total listening minutes, most played albums and songs, etc., finds various tricks that users are always excited about. For many years, he presented, as favorites, genres that basically… do not exist, such as “chamber psych”. In other years, the top artist himself would appear with a short video to the listener to thank them for their loyalty, while last year’s trick of calculating age based on musical preferences gave the whole game a surreal touch, if nothing else.
Boycott Spotify
Against all these cuties, there are those who opposed the streaming giant. Spotify may have paid out $11 billion in royalties to artists last year alone, and is estimated to have boosted the music industry by an estimated $60 billion in its total run to date, but it has been repeatedly criticized for its practices and the way it pays artists.
Essentially, the platform favors the “fat cows” of the music industry and is an insufficient source of income for medium and small-scale creators. The platform does not generate income in the way of traditional sales, but according to each artist’s share of the total market, making it almost impossible for a small artist to make a living from it. Over the years, many independent artists have thus preferred the Bandcamp platform as the fairest solution to promote their work.
Back in 2014, even Taylor Swift fought Spotify, showing her displeasure with the platform’s financial policy and downloading her music from it. For her, the question was not so much the democracy of the music but the omnipotence, since she returned stronger three years later and now holds the title of the most listened to musician in the history of the platform.
With 38 million new users last year alone, there’s no questioning Spotify’s global market power today. As with television and cinema and the apparent availability of everything there, eventually it becomes increasingly difficult for something that moves beyond the realm of the mainstream to rise to the surface. It is the new cultural reality that found its main expression in music in Spotify.
