As Spotify Wrapped implores us to look back on our 2024 musical insights, we reflect on the ethics of music streaming during an era of algorithms and AI.
82,293 minutes.
This is how much time I spent listening to music on Spotify in 2024 according to the streaming platform’s yearly report on my data.
The ingenious marketing campaign, crunching a user’s unique music habits into a personalised and interactive retrospective of the past year, means that Spotify Wrapped has become quite the annual cultural phenomenon.
In the few weeks leading up to a loosely predicted Wednesday in late November or early December, the internet is inundated with posts and memes in anticipation of Spotify’s viral end-of-year review.
As a music fiend, and therefore, chronic Spotify user myself, I am one of many who look forward to receiving their Wrap as the year comes to a close – to some, ‘Spotify Wrapped Day’ now feels closer to an annual holiday than say Halloween, or Bonfire Night.
For someone who listens to music every day, being able to understand my personal Spotify usage with statistics, eye-catching graphics, and data visualisations is fascinating. But unbeknownst to Spotify, it also urges me to reflect on my usage of a service that takes up such a huge chunk of my life – 57 days to be exact; almost two months.
Amongst the fad diets, dry Januaries, and run clubs, my New Year’s resolution looks quite different. I’m not cutting down on sugar, or alcohol, or screen time – for 2025 I am cutting down on Spotify.
It feels counterintuitive as someone who loves and listens to music as much as I do, to then turn critical of the very thing that brings me so much joy.
But as Spotify Wrapped comes around every year, I become aware of how much time I have spent mindlessly listening to music, an experience that, thanks to Spotify’s algorithm and use of AI technology, now lacks natural curiosity about new genres and artists, and one that also bypasses the act of intentional listening.
So as I look upon my data, which Spotify has so lovingly curated and glamorised with flashy colours and animations, I can’t help but feel a sense of dread.
How much out of those 57 days of music did I actually engage with, like I would playing a vinyl record, or a CD, or even buying a concert ticket? Have I really supported the artists, big and small, who I claim to adore?
Am I even diversifying my music tastes if everything is served up to me on an algorithmic plate? Should I really have the entire history of music at my fingertips for as little as £11.99 per month, and has the desire for accessibility tipped the scale too far?
Clearly, Spotify’s position and stake in the music industry as a whole is not one to be underestimated or ignored. And seeing as the streaming giant is so intent on reflection, it is only fair that I reflect on my own use of those services, as well as the murky ethics that have been normalised by the provider.
Currently reporting 626 million active users, Spotify is currently the biggest music streaming platform in the world, making up more than 30% of the music streaming market.
On the whole, streaming has become the latest means of music listening – beating out era-defining formats such as vinyl, CD, radio, and even Apple’s iTunes.
According to the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) more than 80% of music sales in the UK are linked to streaming, while physical sales only make up 13% of revenue.
These statistics show that streaming isn’t just a mere sector of the industry anymore but could be on its way to dominating and becoming the industry in its entirety – as suggested by Intelligencer writer John Herrman in an article headlined ‘Spotify Is Eating the Entire Music Business’.
However, Spotify wasn’t always the big fish in the small pond.
Founded in 2006 in Stockholm, by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, Spotify was created to provide “a viable alternative to music piracy” according to their marketing director Andres Sehr in 2009.
This was a considerable challenge due to the explosion of online music piracy in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the emergence of MP3 sharing site Napster, along with numerous other file-sharing sites such as Pirate Bay, Bit Torrent and Limewire.
During my childhood in the early to mid 2000s, media piracy was considered the norm. I specifically remember receiving ripped CDs of popular albums, watching bootlegged DVDs, and even using a ‘Youtube to MP3 converter’ site to download songs onto my iPod.
While I don’t believe any of these actions were comparable to stealing a car, as inferred by the iconic “Piracy. It’s a crime.” anti-copyright infringement campaign, I can see why Spotify was the perfect respite during the piracy storm of the digital age and has therefore continued to grow into the music streaming giant that exists today.
“The problem was to get artists’ music out there. The problem was not to pay people money.”
Jim Anderson, former Spotify executive
However, as the default music streaming provider, Spotify doesn’t go amiss with its critics. One of the most common critiques of music streaming, and of Spotify in particular, is what many artists call its ‘unfair’ royalty payment model.
Spotify on average pays out $0.004 (0.32p) per stream, meaning one million streams equals just $4,000 (£3,200). In comparison, Spotify’s rival, Apple Music, pays around $0.01 (0.81p) per stream, so one million streams make $10,000 (£8,100). With a 150% increase, Spotify’s payment figures wither in the shadow of its rivals.
Bear in mind that signed recording artists only see a fraction of these numbers due to separate payment agreements with their record labels. In addition, this is without considering the most recent changes Spotify has made towards how their royalties are paid and distributed.
As of April 2024, Spotify introduced a minimum threshold of 1,000 streams per song per year before artists can receive any compensation for their work. This was and remains detrimental to the unsigned independents of the music industry, and of those smaller artists who fall just short of the new requirements.
In a corporate blog post the company insisted that these changes were made to better support those “dependent on streaming revenues”, as well as an attempt to fight artificial activity and streaming numbers that may have taken hard-earned money away from small artists.
Speaking of ‘artificial activity’, Spotify’s use of AI has additionally been called into question.
Spotify’s implementation of artificial intelligence was accelerated in 2023 which saw the introduction of numerous new features: an AI DJ personality guiding you through the artists you love equipped with an artificially generated voice for running commentary; and the Daylist, an ever-changing playlist that is constantly adapting itself to your listening habits.
Coincidentally, the company’s decision to lean into the whole AI ‘thing’ seemed to correspond with the layoff of 17% of its staff in December 2023.
While a line can’t be directly made between these two things, it is clear that the downsizing of the company by 1,500 workers and the incorporation of AI into the structure of its services, has led to a general disapproval amongst its users and dedicated music listeners.
This was made apparent during the release of this past year’s Spotify Wrapped, which saw many users take to online discourse on how weak the annual recap was compared to the previous year’s.
One user @GloriaAlamrew, took to X (formerly Twitter) to say “Spotify wrapped has lost what made it so dynamic in the first place. (…) This is really to say that PEOPLE make things better. Those layoffs are showing. And so is the AI.”
Consequently, this spurred users to question the very function and quality of Spotify as a service that many users used to discover new genres and artists. One user Emily (23) told us that her experience with Spotify has completely changed, alongside her underlying feelings towards the service.
“The app nowadays feels quite akin to any social media on my phone. Similarly to the cheap dopamine rush of TikTok, or the mind-numbing endless scroll of Instagram – I don’t feel particularly engaged with the service as I would have even a couple of years ago,” she explained.
“I think Spotify as a business model is more interested in keeping you streaming, rather than the quality of the service it provides, or the quality of how you listen via their app. I don’t find myself wanting to listen to new artists but I think Spotify makes it very easy to stay within what the algorithm has estimated as your ‘taste’.”
Whereas previously music recommendations made by Spotify had a more editorial and hand-selected touch to them, the plethora of ‘personalised’ Daily Mixes and other playlists catered to users nowadays feel cold and distant from any personal engagement. A huge reason for this lies with the AI that Spotify now relies on.
The reaction to 2024’s Spotify Wrapped speaks to the bigger issues at hand with Spotify and the mass accessibility of music in the streaming era. However there are some individuals refraining from using Spotify altogether, and who have taken a more traditional approach to discovering new music.
After using Spotify for many years, Amber (22) decided to go ‘cold turkey’ after receiving a handful of CDs at a gig, and seeing how lifeless her use of Spotify had become: “It made me realise that CDs were my preferred way of listening to music.”
Amber also reiterates Spotify’s poor payment rate and how that impacts smaller artists: “Up until the mid- to late-00s artists were paid based off of music sales (…) and they could make a decent living from that. Whereas now it’s so so difficult to make a living off of music alone that, in my opinion, a lot of small artists just will never get the chance,” she said
“Artists don’t really get paid for specifically making music anymore. They get paid for tours, or they get money from selling merch, but not for the actual music itself.”
Amber points out a real issue with streaming’s lack of good compensation for artists: If there is no real money in streaming and there’s more emphasis on other avenues of income in order to make a living, does that mean that the art itself suffers? As the amount of musical content being uploaded increases every year, are we also seeing a decline in the quality of the music itself? Is the art suffering under streaming’s fist?
It seems Amber’s decision to quit Spotify is reflective of a bigger movement which is seeing music lovers reverting to more traditional forms of music listening, as argued by Kyle Chayka in a recent New Yorker piece, and by Liz Kelly in an article for The Guardian.
Amber, a lover of all things noughties alt-rock, can’t help but agree, and with physical sales increasing as reported last year, there seems to be momentum behind such sentiments.
“The main way I find new music is by buying CDs from charity shops, and I’ve found a huge amount of artists that I now listen to regularly from doing this. I’ll still support artists where I can by buying CDs at gigs,” she told us. “For smaller bands, I use BandCamp, and just decide what to listen to based on genre.”
Bandcamp is an online music distributor typically considered better for artists compared to other streaming platforms due to a higher revenue share and focus on independent music.
For Amber it also means supporting artists directly and expanding her discovery of music: “I like that it opens up my music taste to more DIY and less commercial artists.”
For many music fans, the downsides to Spotify are clear. Yet, it still seems to be playing God in an industry that it doesn’t seem to truly care for – in 2019, then Spotify executive Jim Anderson told independent artist Ashley Jana that her questioning to increase royalties was so-called ‘entitlement’: “The problem was to get artists’ music out there. The problem was not to pay people money.”
Ironically, Spotify has paid people money, just not the ones bringing in the streams, and by people I mean the executives and shareholders at the very top, some of which, interestingly, include major labels like Sony and Universal Music Group.
That’s all to say, if Anderson’s voice was a reflection of the company as a whole, it seems to be clear where Spotify’s priorities lie.
Featured image by Reet Talreja via Unsplash.