Spotify, famously, sucks. But Spotify is also, famously, very popular.  

Despite a year of bad press and calls for a mass boycott, Spotify still claims close to a third of the streaming market, which is roughly the equivalent of Apple Music, YouTube Music and Amazon combined.

There’s no ambiguity about why people like music streaming services. You pay a reasonable monthly fee and get access to more music than you could ever feasibly listen to. Spotify’s market dominance is, you assume, also influenced by various in-app and UX features that people like.

There are features that foster engagement, like track credits and lyrics, and the annual Spotify wrapped, which has become so pervasively influential that even my banking app have started sending out “fun” shareable year in review data. (I didn’t need to be reminded how many individual transactions I made at Cheaper Buy Miles, but cheers.)

And there are also features that foster passivity. A couple of years ago, Spotify introduced an AI DJ that knew you so well it could transport you back to your high school disco days, play a bit of Jagged Edge, and commend you on your always excellent taste.

Spotify’s latest update, the prompted playlist, is also AI-generated. You tell the AI what you want from a playlist, and it’ll make it for you. No further effort necessary. I am not oblivious to the appeal of a feature like this. Like other Spotify features, such as discover weekly and radio, the prompted playlist probably responds to a persistent problem for some music listeners – that is, despite the aforementioned access to more music than you could ever listen to, no one knows what to put on.

But I certainly don’t like it. It reminds me of something Liz Pelly, author of the Spotify exposé Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, said when she was in Melbourne last year.

“There’s this former employee who I interviewed who told me that the whole goal of the Spotify recommendation apparatus is to help reduce the cognitive work that someone has to do when they open this app,” Pelly said. “And when I hear the phrase ‘reduce cognitive work,’ it just sounds like saying, ‘help people think less about music.’

“It seems like at some point there was some sort of convention where a lot of these music tech start-up guys decided that deciding what music you want to listen to is the worst thing you could possibly ever do.”

It sounds unequivocally gross, right? Well, there are plenty of Australian music media pundits who seem to agree with this Spotify ethos.

In response to the launch of prompted playlist, Airing Your Dirty Laundry’s Daphne Berry has said, “I get given this really sick playlist that I don’t have to think about”. Former Rolling Stone Australia editor Poppy Reid has said, “They just rolled out this feature for making a playlist that has changed the game”. Ex-triple j presenter Ash McGregor has said, “They’ve kind of nailed it”.

Yikes.

The Music’s Tyler Jenke, presumably paraphrasing Spotify’s official PR, has said, “The idea behind Prompted Playlist is that all playlists are only as good as the humans behind it.” Call me old fashioned, but I’m actually so fine with humans. They might even be my favourite thing in the world.

Obviously, these outlets were all paid to make these posts. I know as well as anyone that it’s difficult to make a living off covering music in Australia in the mid-2020s. But just to recap: Spotify founder Daniel Ek sent AUD $1bn of his Spotify fortune into AI military tech company Helsing last year. Spotify is letting AI run rampant and making it extremely difficult for artists to remove fraudulent AI uploads from their artist accounts. The platform has defended its decision to run ICE recruitment ads. And they’ve been paying independent artists poverty wages since day dot.

And all these media outlets went, yep, that’s our guy!!

Any brand partnership is a deal with the devil. And you can always convince yourself that, despite the ethical red flags, this particular deal with this particular devil is justified because it will enable you to spend more time working on things you love. But at least if these outlets had taken money from big alcohol or big aviation, it wouldn’t completely contradict their supposed passion for music.

I don’t doubt the authenticity of these media personalities’ interest in music. But, well, everyone likes music – just as everyone likes animals, and yet, plenty of people are chill about animals being force fed and mass slaughtered so that we can get them on our plates.

I don’t have an easy solution for Spotify’s ruinous impact on music and culture. Is it legislative? More arts funding; grants that aren’t centred on economic performance; community service working the door at a local music venue. Or is it cultural? Deindustrialisation of the music industry; hyper localism; CD wallets and sharing earbuds on the bus ride home.

I don’t even really have a comprehensive analysis of why independent creators are so willing to give up their independence as soon the right offer comes along. But I have been thinking about something Michael Kucyk, founder of indie label Efficient Space, said to me a few years ago. Before launching Efficient Space, Kucyk worked at Modular, which was owned by Universal. When I asked him what turned him off working for a major, this is what he said:

“Being made coldly redundant. And feeling like you were a pawn in a large legal battle. Basically, feeling totally dispensable and of no value whatsoever by people who might as well be bankers.”

I guess what I’m saying is, there are other jobs.

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