Why I Won't Use Spotify

I listen to music, a lot, I love it. In fact, one of the things I like most about my job is that I am justified in putting on headphones and blocking out everyone else in the office and listening to the music I want in isolation as I work.

I love discovering new music, and I also like indulging myself in an excessive repetition of the same song over and over again – to the point where even my exasperated five-year-old asks, “Daddy, please can you change this song now?” Fair enough I suppose, it had been on for three hours straight.

But even as a certified musofile and self-confessed technogeek, I still can’t get onboard with Spotify. That’s not to say I still buy CDs, I wish I did; the photo above is of a friend’s CD collection and I’m incredibly envious. The truth is I went digital and stopped buying CDs about ten years ago, and while paying for a digital product doesn’t bring the same sense of tactile joy actually holding a CD does, paying for anything does bring a sense of propriety and appreciation which a subscription service like Spotify just can’t provide.

One of the things that disappoints me with digital music is that it won’t be there for my kids to discover. Now it’s quite possible that when my kids are old enough, they’ll think, just as I did, “I’m not going to listen to dad’s old crappy music”. But that phase didn’t last forever for us, and after a few years, I remember, my friends and I discovered great music while rummaging through our parents’ music collections. It wasn’t all great, but that was how we found things like the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Cream. With a digital collection that just won’t be possible, my daughter will never have the same opportunity we did. I can’t imagine her coming to me one day and asking for my laptop or access to my Google account so as she can see what music I have on it.

But the lack of a physical product isn’t my main gripe with Spotify. It wasn’t streaming services that stopped us forming a tactile connection with music, that happened a long time ago when people stopped buying vinyl. While CDs are still a physical product, they are too sterile, and they ruined that touchy-feely connection we once had with our music by being just too perfect. CDs took away that feeling of commencement that came with resting the needle in the groove and waiting for the inevitable crackle before the first song began.

What really gets my purist goat with Spotify is the Playlists.

Playlists destroy our appreciation of albums the same way social media and smartphones cause our appreciation of books and novels to deteriorate. A Spotify playlist allows people to cut up and paste together albums which musicians spent time crafting and putting together. They are symptomatic of the instant gratification we demand more and more in today’s quick-fix society. No longer do we put on an album and appreciate its highs and lows, sitting through a song you like less while savouring the anticipation of your favourite one coming up next. Now, we cut up other people’s artwork and paste together the sugary highlights into one cloying playlist of instant pleasure.

In making playlists we cut out the songs which don’t have immediate appeal and risk never noticing them or getting the chance to appreciate them at all. An example of this was on one of my favourite ever albums, Solid Air by John Martyn. When I first heard this masterpiece, I thought it was terrible, the only track I liked was track 3, “I Don’t Want to Know”. But then, after listening to this song about a hundred times on repeat (yeah, really), I started to let it run onto the next track, “I’d Rather Be the Devil” and after a while, I saw how great that was too.

That’s how I discovered one of the most incredible albums I’ve ever heard; my appreciation for one track grew and spread to the others. Had I put “I Don’t Want to Know” into a playlist, I would never have discovered the rest of that album.

Musicians don’t simply get drunk and throw their songs together – well maybe some of them do – but generally, an album represents the creative phase a person or group is in at that moment. They compose their songs and place them together in a particular order. One song leads to the next, they create highs and lows, happy songs sit side-by-side with sad songs as the album takes the listener on an emotional journey. It’s a chance to experience the artist’s creative process and not just cherry pick the most accessible parts. To see songs in isolation is to trivialise a musicians art, to think that they just play instruments together in three-minute bursts is to ignore the greater creative energy that they set down when making an album.

Take “Abbey Road” by “The Beatles”, for example. Track five, “I Want You” culminates in about three minutes of terribly dark, repetitive droning, this makes the light and happy guitar picking of the next track, “Here Comes the Sun” a liberating break as it alleviates the sense of doom which had been building. Due to its upbeat catchy vibe, Here Comes the Sun is often played in isolation, but its true beauty can only really be felt when it follows its sombre and dreary neighbour.

This effect would have been all the more prominent when Abbey Road was released on vinyl back in 1969. “I Want You” is the last track on side one, so as it came to an end, a room full of stoned hippies would have been listening to this oppressive drone for a few minutes, sinking into an introspective analysis of the futility of life and the universe, when finally it came to an end, someone would get up and flip over the disc, filling the room with the inherent joy of “Here Comes the Sun”. The lucky flares-wearer would have immediately been met with smiles of glee and probably offers to “roll up another one, man and use my stash”.

Maybe I’m just an old git (not old enough to have seen the Summer of Love, though), who misses the days of discovering a well-crafted concept album where all the tracks had a tie and relevance to each other and weren’t just a collection of twelve songs placed together to justify selling another album.