Ah, Spotify. The name sounds harmless, doesn’t it? “Spotify.” It seems like a place where you’d go for yoga or spiritual enlightenment. But no! It’s evil. It’s Satan streaming in high (!?) quality. Why am I so mad at Spotify? Because it’s the death of music. It’s like the McDonald’s of music: everything is accessible, but nothing has any real flavor.
When I was young… yes, I know, everyone starts with “when I was young,” but hear me out! When I was young, buying a record was a sacred ritual. You’d go to the store, spend hours flipping through covers, and inhale that smell of vinyl and dust—a smell that told you: “This is art, not an algorithm.” Then you’d carry the record home with the same care you’d use to transport a heart for a transplant. You’d place it on the turntable, lower the needle, and… magic!
Now? Now people discover music by pressing a button while ordering a cappuccino at the café. I mean, how can you even begin to grasp Leonard Cohen while sipping an oat milk latte? That’s not music; it’s background noise for your watered-down existential crises.
And then there are the algorithms. The algorithms! Do you have any idea how sneaky they are? They tell you what to listen to. “If you like Bob Dylan, you might enjoy this guy playing ukulele in a Norwegian basement.” But who are you, Spotify, to tell me what to listen to? It’s like a robot coming up to me and saying, “I know everything about you.” No, you don’t! You don’t know that I like listening to Carmen while eating cornflakes at 3 a.m.
And then the ultimate evil: playlists. Oh, the playlists! “Relax,” “Study,” “Workout.” But music isn’t a deodorant with different scents for every time of day! It’s an art form, not a fast-food menu. I want to listen to Beethoven during a panic attack, not a playlist called “Calm Vibes.”
And let’s not even talk about the musicians. Do you know how much they earn per stream on Spotify? A penny. A single penny! When I heard that, I thought, “Okay, this must be a joke.” But no, it’s real. Beethoven would earn more playing piano in a bar full of drunks than on Spotify. And then people complain that classical music is dying. Of course, it’s dying! How can it compete with the techno remix of a meowing cat?
Spotify has taken music—something that’s passion, effort, tears, sweat—and turned it into an all-you-can-eat buffet of mediocrity. And us? We’re complicit. Because it’s convenient. It’s all there, instantly, no effort required. But do you know what happens when everything becomes easy? We become lazy. And when we become lazy, we stop seeking beauty.
And if that weren’t enough, here’s the latest masterpiece: fake songs. Yes, you heard that right: fake. Tracks created specifically to fill playlists, with no real artist behind them. No, I’m not kidding. They’ve found a way to monetize nothingness. It’s like selling canned air, but with a little reverb and a title like “Ocean Serenity.”
They create tracks made up of a few generic chords—a melody that might as well have been played by some guy with a guitar at a highway rest stop at 3 a.m.—and slap them into a playlist called “Focus Time” or “Cozy Winter Vibes.” And people listen to it, unaware that it’s not even real music. It’s synthetic music. It’s like eating a veggie burger and thinking it’s Argentine filet mignon.
And the “artists” behind these tracks… what artists? They don’t exist! They’re pseudonyms invented by Spotify or third-party companies to save on royalties. It’s an economy of emptiness, an endless loop of deception. They’ve taken the idea of the “musician” and reduced it to a computer-generated avatar. No one suffers to write these songs. No one pours their heart out. No one lives the inner turmoil that creates a masterpiece. It’s all just copy-paste emotions.
The best part—if we can call it that—is that this is all designed to fool us. Because the more Spotify fills playlists with fake music, the less they pay real artists. It’s a system built to squeeze maximum profit out of every note. They’ve literally industrialized the absence of inspiration.
And you might say: “But who notices?” Of course, no one notices! Because these tracks aren’t meant to be memorable; they’re just there, in the background, like elevator music in an empty shopping mall. Their only purpose is to keep the stream running, like a car left idling at a red light.
So now, not only is Spotify the McDonald’s of music, it’s also like a Truman Show for our ears. It makes us believe we’re listening to art when, in reality, we’re just listening to an algorithm softly whispering: “Don’t think, don’t search, just keep pressing play.”
Do you know what really worries me? That one day we’ll get used to all this. That we’ll no longer be able to tell the difference between a real song and a fake one. And at that point, music as we know it—the real kind, the kind that tears your heart out and flips it upside down—will truly be dead.
And me? I keep using it, of course. It’s convenient. But I hate it. I hate it with the same passion I love… Oh look, my playlist “Woody’s Neurotic Jazz Favorites” just ended. Time to find something else.