Like most of the big music streaming platforms, Apple Music, Tidal, and YouTube Music among them, Spotify offers access to a collection of tens of millions of songs via its app for a monthly subscription fee.
For musical magpies like myself, it represents incredibly good value. Never buy a CD again, just add the latest album or single release to your playlist and delve into new music to your heart’s content. Find endless selections of classical music, workout beats, or even white noise to help you sleep. It’s all there on Spotify (individual, ad-free plan from $16.99 a month).
But something has changed in the Spotify app, in part due to a recent interface upgrade that introduces TikTok and Instagram-like features to it. While you can still roam as far and as wide as ever through musical genres, the way you are presented with new music via the app has altered - and not for the better, according to many Spotify users.
“With the upgrade, it became clearer than ever what the app has been pushing me to do: listen to what it suggests, not choose music on my own,” Kyle Chayka wrote last month in The New Yorker. “In 2012, Spotify launched its slogan, ‘Music for everyone’. Now it may as well be ‘Be grateful for whatever music we give you’,” he added.
Payola or gaming the algorithms?
So what exactly has changed?
Spotify has always been obsessed with introducing new and trending music. After all, if you are tapping into new music on a regular basis, your engagement with the Spotify app is likely to be higher, which will increase the likelihood of you staying put as a paying subscriber - and stomaching subscription price increases.
But changes to the app, and the bundling in of podcasts and audiobooks as Spotify seeks to become the go-to audio streamer, have cluttered is and made the experience of finding music joyless. This is a common trend in apps and online services, often referred to as “enshittification”. As apps become more complex and heavy-handed in their efforts to capture your attention, the user experience degrades.
“For months, one question has been plaguing pop fans: why is Spotify playing me the same songs over and over again?” the Guardian’s Shaad D’Souza also wrote last month.
I’d argue that it’s the enshittification of pop music itself that’s the real problem. A tiny number of artists, Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran presiding over them, seem to dominate music charts and that in turn feeds the algorithms, which spit out more of the same.
But there are also dark rumours of payola, which D’Souza describes as “the term for when a record label pays a radio station to play its music”. This was a big thing in the US as far back as the 1950s. The more plays a song received, the more likely it was to catch on with the record-buying public. It’s an illegal practice in the US, but Spotify’s Discovery mode, introduced in 2020, seems to replicate aspects of it.
“That allows artists to forgo a portion of their royalties to receive a boost in algorithm-led zones of the app, such as the autoplay queue, radio and mixes,” D’Souza explains. “It’s not strictly payola, but certainly feels to users like its 21st-century equivalent.”
Popping off to You Tube
I bailed on Spotify years ago at the start of this trend. I’m not a pop music listener, and while Spotify does a good job of predicting my tastes and serving up classic rock, alt rock, and progressive rock artists, the hijacking of the home screen by new music I wasn’t interested in became too much. Nor do I want to be scrolling past audiobook and podcast options - there are other apps (Audible and Pocket Casts respectively) better at delivering both.
After examining the alternatives, I landed on YouTube Music and have happily been streaming music via the platform ever since. In my book, there are three key reasons why YouTube Music is better:
Video and music combination: YouTube Music allows users to seamlessly switch between audio tracks and music videos, providing a more versatile listening experience. This feature is particularly useful if, as I do, you like watching music videos or live performances alongside your music. It’s endlessly entertaining.
Access to YouTube’s vast library: YouTube Music benefits from YouTube’s extensive library, including live performances, covers, remixes and rare tracks that may not be available on Spotify. This is increasingly useful as videos of live concert footage are added to YouTube at an accelerating pace. Spotify just can’t match that diversity of unofficial content.
Ad-free YouTube: If you are a major user of the video platform YouTube and, with more than one billion users there’s a good chance that you watch at least a few videos each month, you can opt for YouTube Premium ($17.99 for an individual plan), which strips all of the adverts from YouTube and includes YouTube Music.
Every now and then I’ll watch a YouTube video on someone’s else’s TV screen. The experience is unbearable with constant advert interruptions. So YouTube Premium, with the addition of YouTube Music, is well worth the price of admission.
There are lesser benefits too. YouTube’s music shuffle feature is far better than Spotify’s, which continues to repeat songs on an annoyingly regular basis. YouTube Music’s free, ad-supported version also allows unlimited skips and the ability to skip ads after five seconds. This is a significant advantage over Spotify’s free tier, which limits users to six skips per hour and does not allow on-demand playback.
Ultimately, YouTube Music’s interface isn’t as slickly designed as Spotify’s but that actually works in its favour if you are resisting being sucked into the pop music discovery machine. It might not be as finely tuned to discovering music, but it’s easier to curate what you want to listen to. If YouTube is smart, it will resist the forces that have led to Spotify becoming increasingly frustrating to use.
