What does Spotify playlists mean for the future of music?

Some more posts will be coming soon (promise!), but in the meantime, I’ve been compiling a Spotify playlist of my favourite songs throughout…well, my whole life, actually. The playlist stretches through my whole life back to childhood.

It occurred to me while compiling the playlist that it’s the first time one has ever been able to do such a thing online on such a scale. Prior to the 21st century, the only way to compile a public playlist of your favourite tracks was to compile it on cassette tape, which I often did, adorned with lavishly detailed cover art, and with a strict 60 or 90-minute limit* - the literal end of the tape reel. Or you had the power to release your mix as a commercial release, often as a continuous mix, only really limited to established musicians and DJs. That meant doing the mix in real-time on a pair of decks. The modern online equivalent to this has been sites such as Mixcloud or NTS Radio.

At some point at the start of the millennium, the ordinary person on the street had the power to burn a playlist to CD-R, by which time iTunes/the iPod was in ascendant – along with YouTube and more illicit ways of acquiring music such as illegal downloading. But it’s with online streaming platforms such as Spotify – and with others such as Pandora too – that you can publicly compile a playlist of your favourite tunes for the first time that everyone can access to stream – including on their mobile phones. Furthermore, those playlists are dynamic, in that you can add and subtract tracks at will - my own playlist clocks in at a puny thirty-one hours and fifty-eight minutes at the time of writing this, but will be longer soon enough...

Coming from the pre-Internet generation that grew up with tapes and CDs, when musicians could actually make serious money from such things, the growth of platforms such as Spotify makes me think of David Byrne’s maxim that one day “music itself is going to become like running water or electricity”. The ease of accessing music now is extraordinary for those, such as me, who had to sit and listen to John Peel show all evening in the 90s in order to access exciting underground music, and then head to the record shop (or get the CDs/tapes that often came free on the front cover of music magazines).

The effect on the music industry of this has been that for most musicians not in the top echelons of the industry, the live sphere has become where the profit is really to be made. Even record shops have cottoned on to this, with Rough Trade astute enough to often combine their CD/vinyl sales with a ticket to see the band play live in their stores.

Could it be that a process that began with iTunes and Amazon offering the user the option to be able to buy individual tracks on an album as well as the album as a whole, rather than forcing the user to buy albums as a whole, and which ended up with Spotify playlists, has led to the demise of listening to albums in full? After all, in a strangely roundabout way, this is actually how listening to music started, with the phonograph and early gramophones only able to play individual songs due to their limitations (though I might be wrong on this!).
  
Well, not quite. Record shops have been doing a healthy trade in vinyl. Why this has happened is down to a number of reasons, ranging from nostalgia (the same thing that brought us Record Store Day and – oh yes – Cassette Store Day); the justifiable issue of sound quality; to the inescapable allure of a tangible object in your hands rather than a music file. All of those things are emotionally resonant, difficult to replicate and unlikely to go away, especially when there are people like me who remember the old days when you pretty much had to buy an album, or a single, or an EP. And if you loved a song in the middle of an album, even if you didn’t think so much of some of the other songs on that album, you were still duty bound to buy the album if that song wasn’t released as a single or EP (or, alternatively, you could tape it from the copy in the library, as I often did, or wait for radio to play it).

The differences in royalties for a musician between a download of an individual track and a stream of an individual track are likely to be the key issue in the next few years and beyond. Leaving aside whether you think purely streaming sites such as Spotify pay their artists enough for a single stream – something that remains difficult to ascertain – the fact is that streaming is likely to be the future of music until whatever bizarre idea comes along to replace it.

In the meantime, there is always hope with sites such as Bandcamp, my favourite streaming platform on the Internet, which combines listening to music with a brilliant aesthetic visual sense that makes up for the lack of a tangible object. The beauty of handmade CD-Rs and vinyl releases, with artistically interesting packing, have been preserved on Bandcamp far more than other online music sites, not to mention a genuinely independent commitment to their musicians (you can also pay to download the music, as well as subscribe, such as with the brilliant music that Richard Skelton has been producing under various aliases). 

Oh, and in a shameless act of promotion, I should add that my own music is up on Bandcamp too.

*Yes, there were 120-minute tapes too, but the sound quality apparently wasn’t as good, so I never bothered with them. If you did, please leave your thoughts in the comments.