I've seen Spotify's future
And it's an ugly, ugly thing
I got a glimpse of Spotify’s potential path, and you know what? It’s horrible enough that it’s hard to imagine the company being a media force for too much longer.
Readers, strap in, and prepare yourselves for a monster edition of The Rectangle. We’re going to dive into what’s going wrong with the Swedish streaming giant.
First though? The hook: over the weekend, my Spotify app bugged out. My old homescreen disappeared. Instead of looking like this:
It transformed into this monstrosity:
Everything useful evaporated. The homescreen transformed into a TikTok-ified version of Spotify. Nightmarish barely begins to do this vision justice — there’s no way any self-respecting music fan wants to interact with a library like this.
I was appalled. I messaged my group chats, incandescent with rage. “How,” I cried, “could this be allowed to happen? To Spotify? To music? To me?”
When I’d calmed down, I researched what had happened. Turns out I needn’t have been so enraged. It was a bug, something that’s now fixed. But while my homescreen is back to normal, all is not well. This change is a snapshot of what’s to come — but we’ll return to that later.
For now, this single bug inadvertently said a lot about Spotify and, with it, the position of music streaming today.
It’s been a long old while I’ve trusted music streamers. To this day, I still maintain a digital music library, something I’ve been building since I was a teen. And now, more than ever, I’d urge people to do the same.
For a while, I happily coexisted with music streaming apps. There was even a point where I briefly considered abandoning my digital library and going all in on streaming, but this fell apart for three main reasons. The first reason was that at that time, bad mobile network speeds and coverage made the process infuriating. The second was I had a deluge of albums that weren’t yet on the platforms.
And the third? That was down to Kanye West.
Way back in 2016, Ye was gearing up to release The Life Of Pablo (TLOP). It’s tough to overstate just how much hype there was around the album in those days. Kanye was at his artistic peak. His previous three major releases were My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the Watch The Throne collaboration with Jay-Z, and Yeezus — a hell of a run by anyone’s standards.
This turned the launch of TLOP into a cultural event. I mean, who can forget the Madison Square Garden listening party?
But the most interesting part of The Life Of Pablo isn’t the music itself, rather how it was released.
When the album was finally distributed, Kanye kept editing it. He changed tracks, altered the mastering, and generally tweaked and tinkered. Previous versions of the songs you listened to, and maybe preferred, vanished from streaming services. For all intents and purposes, they simply stopped existing.
You can view this as part of the creative process itself. In a press release, Kanye referred to The Life Of Pablo as “an innovative, continuous process … a living, evolving art project.” And you know what? That’s cool. An album in a constant state of flux is a badass idea.
But the other angle is less engaging: there’s nothing concrete on streaming services.
You own zilch. You have zero rights over the music you listen to or the movies you watched. It’s a loan. And if Kanye can change and edit his music on the fly, there’s little stopping the huge organisations behind streaming platforms chopping and changing the art themselves.
It made it crystal clear that if I wanted any control over my music collection, I had to operate outside the scope of streaming platforms.
Cheers, Kanye.
But here’s the thing: I never left Spotify. I still use it every day, specifically for background music. I don’t need to fill my digital library with rafts of calming, generic piano music or non-specific, jazzy lo-fi beats to work. Spotify has that. And does an excellent job at it. Maybe too good, in fact.
Until the “bug” that is.
When my homescreen changed, it was no longer easy to select the sort of relaxing, humdrum playlist I needed. Instead, I was shown these video tiles:
At this point, I’d like to return to my use of the word “bug.”
I firmly believe that what happened to Spotify’s homescreen wasn’t a random flaw, rather it was a feature rolled out before it’s fully ready. There are two main reasons for this.
The first is Spotify has already suggested it wants to make its homescreen more like TikTok. Secondly, other users who experienced the bug had it blended into the homescreen in a much more natural way than mine:
I’d be absolutely shocked if the image above isn’t close to what Spotify will look like in the coming months.
There’s one key and maliciously dull reason it’s going this route: money. And this could be the first steps on the company’s road to demise.
Let’s chop up some context and sprinkle it over this statement. First off, Spotify hasn’t traditionally been profitable:
These losses aren’t as bad as they appear on the surface, because the whole point of spending that money was to grow. Which it did. Magnificently to the tune of over 615 million active monthly users.
Following a raft of layoffs, the company even reached profitability this year.
As interest rates rose, and borrowing money got harder and more expensive, Spotify couldn’t focus on growth. It needed to make money. And as it’s a publicly traded company, it needs to channel this value back to its shareholders.
But this is when things get sticky for Spotify.
Its major competitors in music streaming are Apple, Google, and Amazon. Big Tech with an almost endless supply of cash. None of them rely on music streaming as a revenue source. Instead, their services are a way of hooking users into their ecosystem, before funnelling them into more lucrative channels.
It’s an old school loss leader approach. Apple can, technically, lose money on Apple Music, but make that back elsewhere from other products and services.
Spotify doesn’t have this option. Yes, it has more users than any other music streaming service, but it also needs to show growth in a way the others don’t.
Spotify can signal this potential growth to investors and shareholders by increasing the amount of time users spend on the app. Attention is money, after all.
This is why Spotify focused on podcasts and audiobooks. These are both longform media that require users to be on the platform for lengthy amounts of time. That’s worth something to advertisers and anyone who has a vested interest in the company making money.
It’s also why the redesigned, TikTok-ified homescreen we’ve glimpsed from the “bug” will come to pass. Spotify wants to ape that social network’s ability to keep people hooked and engaged.
Yet what it has also done is encourage me to look at the streamer with fresh eyes.
As I mentioned, I have my own digital music library. So if I want to flick through all my tracks and albums, I can. My data is there, and I can order it in any way I choose. As I use Spotify for only background music, it’s been a long time since I’ve tried using the app as an actual music library.
And when I did? I was appalled at how much has changed. It might be stating the obvious to many of you, but Spotify is now deliberately antagonistic to anyone who wants a classic music library. It’s now a glorified playlist producer. Slam your peepers on what my macOS homescreen looks like:
It’s resolutely anti-user. If I was going to design an app that makes it easy for people to listen to the music they love, it’d look nothing like Spotify. The company is clearly pushing you towards what it wants you to hear.
Look at artist pages:
This user interface (UI) is neither smooth nor intuitive. It seems like Spotify has zero interest in providing easy access to artists’ discographies. It wants you mindlessly listening.
And, once again, this is a deliberate strategy.
So why? Why has Spotify directed users away from artists? From treating it like an online music library? And into a playlist machine?
Well, it tracks back to that need for money and growth.
Running a profitable media company is hard. Running a profitable music streaming one is harder. Running a profitable music streaming company with no Big Tech backing or original content is even harder than that.
The closest comparison to Spotify in the streaming world is Netflix, but the latter company has been more effective in cementing its place in the industry. When Netflix saw gigantic legacy media and tech companies moving into TV and film streaming, it began producing its own content. Now, it has a media library that, on its own merits, encourages people to sign up and stay signed up. It has a point of difference.
Spotify does not.
Besides a largely abandoned push for original podcast content, the streamer has effectively the same library as Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music. The reason people are on Spotify is because, mainly, they already are. There’s little reason for someone to choose a specific platform besides convenience.
This makes Spotify uniquely vulnerable.
Let’s say record labels decide they want more money from their catalogues, so they raise the licensing cost. Spotify has to pass this onto users in order to keep its profits high enough for stakeholders. Apple, on the other hand, can absorb that cost and continue with its loss leader. What real reason is there for users to stay on Spotify in this instance?
But it must keep those users. It can’t lose subscribers to other platforms. Otherwise its stock price falls and its house of cards come tumbling down. So, instead of increasing costs, maybe, just maybe, Spotify doesn’t renew some of those licensing deals and certain musicians vanish.
This is what the company’s playlist-centric UI is preparing users for.
Spotify’s homescreen is set up so you don’t engage with specific artists. Instead you’re pushed into algorithmically generated playlists, many of which contain music made by “fake artists.”
It’s getting us ready for that Kanye-style moment where certain albums and artists quietly disappear, for a time where Spotify is no longer a library, but just an audio vibes machine.
In many ways, I’m the perfect Spotify user. I pay a premium each month specifically for forgettable, generic music. But will someone who doesn’t have their own digital library do the same?
Spotify, to my estimation, thinks it can redesign the app and train them to do so — yet this is hubris incarnate.
The company’s need to grow, to make money at the expense of its users, will be the thing that kills it. This won’t happen with a new homescreen alone, but this “bug” is a compass pointing us towards an inevitable truth: in its current state, Spotify’s days are numbered.
And, once the music streaming wars conclude, there’s no guarantee any other platforms will be either. Money is king, and as soon as users are settled, companies will squeeze as much cash from them as possible.
The only constant is change. And, for something you love as much as music, that’s unacceptable.
Maybe it’s time to start your own library.