Some thoughts on my relationship to music streaming:

These days, mornings start about the same: I wake up circa noon, semi-consciously groping for my iPhone from its bedside wireless charger as I engage in the groggy ritual of flashing blue light at my face. While I’m there on the home screen, my thumb grubs to find the goodie: that solid lime-green circle with black lines that could be Wi-Fi waves, or maybe heavily defined forehead furrows. I usually like blending back into waking life with musical accompaniment, and Spotify, paired with my auto-connecting Bose Revolve Bluetooth speaker, is ready to seamlessly supply this demand, butting in even before tasks like hitting the shower or making breakfast.

Today’s coffee + Facebook scroll + Spotify listening sesh spit me out in a 2022 Pitchfork op-ed titled, “The Woes of Being Addicted to Streaming.” The article tracks the burgeoning streaming industry, following its decade-long development, ballooning from start-up origins to the most accessible modern means for personal music listening. It’s an interesting take, written from the perspective of pro music journalist Jeremy Larson, who holds years of experience as an active listener, appreciator, and seeker of artists existing in the corner pockets of the cultural ecosystem. In it, Larson describes his particular relationship to streaming as characteristically unhealthy, not only for participants of the ecosystem, but also within the nature of the relationship itself—addictive, stimulating, dilutive, destructive, and habit-forming. Read the article to get the whole effect.

I’m not going to bite down too hard on the arguments; I thought the writer did a good job conveying his concerns or “woes” about the overlooked potential consequences of streaming. It’s an opinion that resonates with me, one which prompted me to reflect on the woes of my own relationship to streaming and questions about technology, dependence, access, privilege, and abundance. In this post, I want to examine the feelings underneath which drive me toward these questions.

I’ve had Spotify and other streaming options like YouTube for almost a decade. Before that, all my digital songs were stored as downloaded files on iTunes (~1,000 albums in total). Over the last three or four years, Spotify has gradually supplanted iTunes for its convenience and availability of content. At the same time, daily listening has gradually stretched to occupy more and more activities. No longer confined to study time, relaxing, or chores, earbuds will often accompany me on brief walks to the grocery store, shopping at grocery stores, reading, gaming, bike rides to work, working at work, and (it’s happened before) even listening to other music. According to my 2022 Wrapped, I listened to 99,310 minutes, or 68 days, worth of songs on Spotify for that year alone.

It might sound like I’m leaning into a diss, but it’s not my intent to say that listening to music more often or during other tasks is inherently negative. Especially if you enjoy it, there is no apparent reason not to continuously immerse yourself in vibes wherever you go or whatever you’re doing. However, it’s not really the effect of greater usage that’s under question here, but more so streaming’s effect on the relationship between listener and creator, community and industry, labor and leisure.

The article recognizes patterns in how folks nowadays tend to form their relationship to music in the world of streaming. Larson proposes three distinguishable categories of streaming audiences: Passive, Auxiliary, and Intentional listeners. Passive listeners are very casual, not minding what is on, as long as it is generally agreeable to mingle over. Auxiliary listeners play music mainly for utility, or as a conventional background stimulant for certain activities, there to dip into like a tasty party hummus—lo-fi beats and the like. Intentional listeners are the most devoted group, giving themselves up to the understanding of music intelligently, at a deep, personal, and emotional frequency. In streaming, Passive and Auxiliary types comprise the majority, those to whom the algorithm is primarily tailored for, while Intentional listeners tend to be reduced to more niche scraggly hipsters and prickly audiophiles.

I would describe myself as an Intentional listener (and part-time scraggly hipster). As a music creator, looking for inspiration by listening to an obscure vinyl in holistic abandon really helps for generating new ideas. However, with streaming, I feel differently. Rather than burrowing deep into the grooves of an underground artist, I see myself pulled into more Auxiliary and sometimes Passive roles. In fact, it is due to the format that discovery of new artists and interesting sounds comes with buttery ease. Most Mondays, I like to check out an updated Discover Weekly playlist to see what the Spotify fairy has selected for me, a basket of trailheads that I can pursue at my leisure. Sometimes I like to follow the rabbit hole of suggested artists until I slide into a group I could really dig, and then put them on repeat for the next week or so. And, to its credit, sifting and surfing this way has led me to some great artists who I really enjoy, prompting me to intentionally support them outside the platform. Yet at the same time, I feel something is missing, a kind of authentic connection, what was perhaps the prize of the iTunes days and prior.

To me, the issue is embedded somewhat in the merit of discovery, the journey versus the telos. We need to look at streaming as a shortcut which circumvents an analogue process, and ask if these shortcuts fundamentally undermine the merit altogether. Is surfing the algorithm to find unrecognized artists really a rewarding process? All it takes is skipping through songs that don’t present some immediate appeal, hopping from radio recs to song suggests, occasionally lingering on a bio to fill out context. There is so much content, I feel overwhelmed by the hunger to keep track, pick out, and recognize all the good work pouring through, in a way filtering the filter. But in that game, there’s not much of a story to tell. That’s a stark difference from going to look through crates of used vinyl with a friend for hidden gems, or more impactfully, talking with a member of a local band over a beer as they share personal histories from their experience—geographies, biographies, scenes.

It’s partly a problem of dilution. The seamless nature of auto-play can remove space needed for fully digesting a song, obtaining familiarity with the artist who made it, or opportunities to bond with friends and their developed feelings toward an artist’s work. Over time, filtered and curated streams water down the power of what music does best, which is to bring intimacy to the artist and to other appreciators. Instead, as we are increasingly bubbled by personalized algorithms, it becomes difficult to form genuine sensibilities at the individual level, or cultivate enduring followings at the scale of community.

I believe music has always held a sacred status in history. What do I mean by sacred? Something my Tai Chi instructor taught me is that the meaning of sacred is “to be set aside.” That is, something you devote space to without any distractions, so that when you reside there, you are capable of receiving the full raw spectrum of what it has to offer. I can see how streaming could be profane in this sense. Streaming music itself has become a distraction for many of us, preventing access to higher realities. Music is not meant to be used like a drug, but a mirror of the divine, and this is something we can only receive when lending our purest pair of ears.

I’m not sure how much I’ve already derailed this first blog post (since graduating college, I have a residual compulsion to elaborate at length), but I want to finish by saying that after tasting the abundance of its Babelesque catalogue, it is hard to imagine quitting Spotify. Then again, exposing the subtle effects through writing about it makes me long for what I’ve been missing since before that initial taste. If I end the subscription, cease renting massive libraries from the algorithm, what would I do then? Would I reclaim a sense of sincere devotion to the artists I’ve established connections with in years past, or would I contract some kind of FOMO and end up giving into the woes of my addiction? Is this all simply a practice in the lesson of impermanence, the fleeting, fluid reality of music itself being amplified to the level of a roaring river? Who knows, maybe a detox is the solution I need to refresh my long-diluted affections.

What do you think? What is your relationship to streaming and music accessibility like for you? How do you engage with it? Drop a reply below, I’d love to listen!