That's weird, Spotify, real weird

Or how not hosting music videos until now is strange, strange behaviour

It’s strange how your brain blanks sometimes.

We spend a huge portion of our day enveloped in complexity; whether that’s solving tricky tasks at work, pondering a movie we just saw, or playing infuriatingly difficult video games.

Yet alongside completing these intellectually stimulated activities, I’ll also misplace my vape and search wildly for it only to discover that it’s already in my hand.

This is what I call a sober blackout.

In those moments, I’m barely human, I’m running on autopilot. It’s like when you’re driving or riding a bike and, before you even know it, you just kinda… arrive. Zero decisions, zero thoughts — you simply had a sober blackout.

I experienced this feeling, or lack thereof, when I read that Spotify will now host music videos.

“Hold on a second here,” I said to myself, continuing my slow descent into a sort of mediocre madness from working alone and rarely interacting with humans, “why is this a story? Spotify plays music videos already, right? RIGHT?”

Well it didn’t. I just kinda thought it probably did? And should? But alas, all the streaming platform showed were these little looped clips, but not full music videos.

This situation led me to a transcendental, pure, and insightful question: Spotify, what the fuck?

As anyone who has had the misfortune to spend any time near me can attest to, I love music videos. If I’m near a TV and single drop of alcohol passes my lips, all must suffer the fate of watching an endless stream of them.

And for good reason: music videos may be the most underappreciated art form in the modern world.

When they’re done right, they’re these perfect bite-sized combination of audio, visuals, and aesthetics that can add so much to a song.

They can recontextualise and make political points:

They can be funny:

Surprising:

Make you want to learn how to dance:

They’re also one of the few ways to communally share music in in the modern world.

As nice as it would be to sit down and say, “hey, shut up a minute, yeah, I mean it, really, can you shut up? a bit? please? just be quiet, for a little bit. a little bit, that’s all? i want to show you a song. shut up, please, i’m trying to — what did you say? no, fuck you, just… what? WHAT?” and then play some fire tune, frankly, most people don’t take kindly to that.

Yet there’s enough stimulation in a music video that it’s a perfect way of sharing a banging song.

Spotify, it seems, ignored this — and it’s hard to see why. Surely music streaming goes hand-in-hand with music video streaming?

It’s even stranger when you think about Spotify’s recent trajectory. It decided to focus on podcasts and a godforsaken ‘feed’ to get people spending more time on the app instead. It’s baffling how it didn’t put music videos into this equation. It’s a market that’s begging for a new entrant.

Imagine a feed that showed you new videos from artists you like? Recommended up-and-coming musicians? Showed you and endless stream of Cool Ass Shit™ to get drunk to?

Spotify could become a modern day MTV. In a good way.

Yet from all I know about the company, that probably won’t happen. It’ll share a few videos from already huge artists, provide no integration into the rest of its services, and it’ll become a sad little side note.

But I hope. I have dreams. Music videos are the best and deserve to be treated as such — and I’m off to watch some right now.