Spotify: handle with care

Written byColin Bartley

Apr 09 2013

Spotify founders Daniel Ek & Martin Lorentzon

Spotify is a god damn blessing — and it’s the best present I ever gave myself. For lovers of music and even those who pertain to show more than a passing interest in the stuff, this is manna.

We took pride in our vinyl, cassette and CD collection, and even when Apple or Creative or whoever decided to stick a headphone jack in a hard-drive and stick a screen on the front, it was still hard to imagine music in a magnificent bundle of form like this. Spotify, and doffed caps all-round, has given us music Nirvana, headphone Utopia, and song searching Shangri-La. The days of arguing the aesthetics of vinyl over CD are irrelevant and bygone. This is the music galaxy at your fingertips.

Granted it’s not perfect. Spotify gives the punter so much it is sometimes a disappointment when a specific live version of a tune recorded in Montreux or Newport or SxSW is not there. Then there are times the 1970s original album is usurped by a 2011 digitally re-mastered version. But these tiny imperfections should not matter in the grander scheme of things. Musos should revel in this compendium of tunes and easy access to it all.

Never before has so much been given to so many by so few…

It has its detractors. These are mainly musicians who say it is not the saviour of illegal downloading they thought it would be. They still receive a relative pittance, so we are led to believe. These musicians did sign up to it, however, and the guilt of illegality has been wrestled from our shoulders.

But the inevitable had to happen at some point. Spotify is now a social network – and that brings its own baggage.

Now that users can follow people, musicians, bands and genres on Spotify, the music carrier has officially gone into the realms of a Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and co. It now has decisions to make.

To an extent, until now, social mediums have been a glass maze not too difficult to traverse. Far flung connections were embraced. The world became a couple of degrees of separation less. Tolerance levels towards banality dropped. In the world of virtual interaction, people were happy to be hippies of HTML, loving and embracing all, far removed from their daily real-life interactions. For many, online was a different world. How you acted and reacted had little resemblance to real-life.

Spotify, I fear, will bring this software of love to a shuddering halt.

When it comes to music that’s where the buck stops with most people. Like it or love it, the human race can gauge more from peoples’ tastes in music than possibly anything else. Music gives people an insight into another person’s character, social ability, social standing, creativity and dare say it… intelligence.

Some would argue that’s unfair but others would say a person’s musical tastes reflects their intellectual prowess. Right or wrong, music snobbery exists.

Spotify will show this snobbery in action. Friends, supposed friends, or worse – soon-to-be former friends, will get dropped or unfollowed quicker than an X-factor finalist after a failed first album. The reason for this slight on someone’s personality? Bad taste in music.

People will lose patience quickly if their news feed is full of what is, in their view, sub-par choices of music.

For the first time ever in the short history of social media, individuals will sit back and think carefully about who they choose to follow. Cyber bullying is a big problem, but cyber-snobbery may be the new catchword created by the Spotify users.

More embarrassing than being unfollowed is not being followed at all, snobbery at its pinnacle… Here is where Spotify will truly differ from other social networks. Users will think long and hard about following friends on it. If they feel their friends have bad tastes, they will simply ignore the fact they exist on Spotify. This is a fact too hard to hide and many a friendship is likely to crumble.

People have become too used to the idea of accepting friendships in the virtual world and many will not see how Spotify differs. The simple answer is Spotify is music! For many it’s a refuge, essential for existence and something that defines them. If these people don’t recognise the difference, herein lies the issue.

As with every trend, cyber-snobbery could catch on and transfer into the etiquette and accepted fabric of other social mediums. And here is where the breakdown of relations could be truly seen.

So tread carefully in the Spotify world. If you are a person who takes offence easily, i.e. if you take the hump after some virtual friends unfollow you, steer clear of Spotify. Either that, or make sure your taste in music is impeccable. After all, Spotify is music, it’s not drama.