Slopify Wrapped

In the future you'll know nothing and like it

In 2022, you may recall, Neil Young pulled all of his music from Spotify due to a dispute about Joe Rogan, staying away for more than two years before returning a few months ago. Young’s sudden absence wasn’t quite a dealbreaker for me as a Spotify user, but it did poke a new hole in the platform’s facade—a reminder that when you depend upon a single streaming service, it might turn out that only the music you don’t care about is infinite, while the specific stuff you like is subject to unexpected constraints.

There is plenty to criticize about Spotify—and much of it is fixable—but the core issue with any streaming service, so obvious but so easily papered over by the immense abundance they present, is the conditional nature of our access to music we rent instead of own. In contrast to physical media, or even downloaded MP3s, streamed data is inherently ephemeral, even if it rarely reveals itself as such. Again, this is well-trodden territory, so I won’t dwell on it, but what remains interesting to me here is that it’s still so hard to imagine our access to this massive quantity of music ever decreasing.

Looking backward rather than forward, however, it’s easier to imagine. How much of the internet from 20 years ago is available today? There were few moments of sudden loss, like an entire platform shutting down, amid a much broader process of incremental degradation, driven by feature changes (i.e. Facebook prioritizing the news feed and de-emphasizing everything else), shifting media preferences (like the decline of personal blogs), and users deleting their own posts. We often didn’t know what we were losing until much later, because we stopped paying attention first, and then eventually realized we’d failed to preserve something.

Music is different than a category like blog posts, because there are more enthusiasts paying close attention to it and the existing archive has survived many huge changes (music is “lindy”), but the present dominance of the streaming format has also undermined more of the infrastructure that would help that archive withstand the next phase change. For example, I got rid of my all my non-ephemeral physical media—my CD collection—nearly ten years ago, and so did many other people. When CDs were how I listened to Neil Young, my ability to listen to his music never suddenly changed overnight.

On the other hand, I used to spend all of my money on CDs when I was a teenager. Now I enjoy access to a month of virtually unlimited music for less than one CD used to cost. Music has become much less expensive—a classic case of consumer abundance paired with the declining fortunes of the good’s producers. Although I’m still using Spotify, I’m closer to bailing now than I was a couple of years ago, for a different, related reason: It’s changing my perception of music for the worse. Basically, it’s making me dumber.

PLATFORM AMNESIA

Today, the most realistic threat to the existing music archive as we know it is probably not a cataclysmic loss of data, but our own apathy and divided attention—changing preferences shaped by Spotify and other streaming platforms, which train us to accept whatever they offer instead of showing up with our own agenda. Streaming platforms reward a docile attitude. The ideal user is a clean slate, ready to be imprinted. To gripe about the absence of Neil Young, or any particular artist, is to go against the grain, to miss the point—to self-identify as a user in need of further behavioral conditioning.