In a previous post, I mentioned listening to Imagine Gold by Frameworks. It's pretty typical of my musical experience these days; upbeat instrumentals help keep me focused. Songs with prominent lyrics scramble my brain when I'm trying to put words on a page. In some cases even an overly familiar instrumental snags my attention. So music discovery has become an obsession.
My search is equal parts methodical and chaotic. Each week, IFTTT transfers my full Discover Weekly list (which is curated by Spotify) to a work playlist I listen to every day. When I hear a song that fits, I add the artist's entire discography to the list. As I shuffle through, I remove songs that don't belong. Sometimes, if I come across something enjoyable but distracting, I'll add it to a different playlist.
This method has yielded almost too much music in the last few years. Even listening several hours per day, I'll never be able to traverse the collection I've amassed across several Spotify playlists. Several times, I've run into a 10,000-song limit on playlists. But I recently discovered that you can shuffle a playlist folder. My Work folder now has two full playlists and a third quickly growing.
Next I'll probably hit a limit on playlists. What a hassle.
Another gripe: Spotify won't do random ordering---only shuffle ordering---so I hear the same artists and songs with some regularity.
But these are petty complaints about user experience. More problematic is the moral dilemma of paying fractions of a penny per play. I've tried making a living as a musician and recording engineer. Streaming services are the worst in terms of paying artists a fair cut---I'm basically paying for the privilege to steal. But it's the only way I can possibly consume this much music.
What's the alternative? Buy all the tracks? I don't even know what price is fair.
When I was a teenager, a CD cost about $15. That's around $1.50 per song, assuming 10 songs per album. And there were really only 2-3 songs you were trying to buy. The cost structure didn't scale well. That's why piracy became all the rage. I went with Napster and never looked back.
I was also collecting music from everyone I knew, since the original run of iPod allowed it. Unlike my current collection, most of it was classic rock, indie, and alternative. At its height, that collection was around 20,000 songs. I felt like a demigod.
By the time Napster went out of vogue, I was buying music from a Russian website for 5-10 cents per track, about a dollar per album. That seemed pretty reasonable at the time. I probably bought a few thousand tracks that way.
But soon enough I heard about torrents, and all bets were off. It was like Napster, but better organized. I could download full, high quality albums with art and metadata included over a high-speed connection. My only limitation was the size of my hard drive. Honestly, I couldn't tell you how much music I had at that point. More than 200 GB, but less than a TB.
At some point, I got rid of most of it. Digital storage became more important for my own audio, video, and photo projects. Maybe I miss the quality a bit. My ears don't work as well as they used to anyway, so I try not to think about it too much.
Now I pay $16/mo for access to *checks Google* over 80 million tracks. My massive collection of playlists only covers .025% of it. The per-track breakdown is absurd. If I spend $200 per year and subscribe for 30 years, that's $6,000 for an eight-figure track count, or $.000075 per track. Realistically, you could only listen to around 5 million tracks in that time, which reduces the actual per-track cost to $.0012.
Personally, I've been on Spotify for a good decade. According to my last.fm stats, I've listened to about 42 tracks per day on average since 2019. At that rate, I've listened to about 150,000 tracks (with plenty of repeats, of course) since I joined Spotify. I wasn't paying $16/mo the whole time, but if I were, that would be about $.013 per track. That's not counting podcasts.
It seems unfair to everyone involved. But listening is a vice I'm not willing to abandon.
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