Stop Posting Your ‘Spotify Wrapped’
Spotify has made (almost) the entire history of recorded music available to a majority of the globe for £/$10 a month. On the face of it, access to all your favourite music at the touch of a button sounds fantastic and, taken on those terms, it is. If you love music, as I assuredly do, this was always the dream. Since my first years in secondary school I have lived by my portable music player, be that on cassette, CD, mini-disc or mp3, so the idea of having an object that can play anything, anywhere, at all times is something of a miracle. Unfortunately Spotify’s dominance in this field and their methods with which they accomplish this leaves a lot to be desired.
The reason I am writing this piece is due to an Instagram story I put up the other day in response to everyone I knew posting their ‘Spotify Wrapped’ information. For those of you who are somehow online but haven’t seen this, Spotify Wrapped is a powerpoint presentation Spotify sends their users at the end of every year encouraging you to show everyone how much and what music you have listened to over the last 12 months. Despite the fact my feed was spammed with all of this, it was nice to see how much music people enjoy and made me feel better about dismissing the much whispered myth by people-who-should-know-better saying “No one listens to music anymore”. However, it also depressed the hell out of me. To explain why I…
