Can’t get no satisfaction

In the age of streaming platforms, what is the relationship between music accessibility and appreciation of what we hear?

Illustration by Natalie McNulty

Written by Jason Upton

It’s an unusually sunny March afternoon in Bellingham, and before I back my car out of Pizza Hut’s crowded parking lot for the first delivery of my shift, I begin my ritual of scrolling through Spotify to select the mood of the day.

Decisions, decisions.

I consider checking my Discover Weekly playlist but decide it’s not worth the risk of disappointment. While searching my playlists, I pass several intriguing classic rock radios that Spotify has so generously created for me.

Interesting, but no.

I skip over so many iconic projects that it looks like I could be flipping through an old issue of Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Albums of All Time. The Beatles’ “Revolver”, Talking Heads’ “Talking Heads ‘77” and Jefferson Airplane’s “Surrealistic Pillow” all catch my eye as I scroll through Spotify’s main page.

Finally, after scrolling through my boring old playlists with no success, I succumb to the inevitable ol’ faithful of music streaming: shuffle all liked songs. There’s plenty of duds to skip through, but at least The Algorithm will make my decisions for me.

Whether it’s listening while on the commute to work or school, doing chores around the house or solely for pleasure, music plays an important role in all our lives, and to a lesser extent, music selection does as well. If you’re like me, you’ve noticed peers on social media asking for song or artist recommendations.

This has to strike you as ironic, right? We’ve grown up in the age of information. We keep virtually every artist’s music in our back pocket, along with countless algorithms that detect our listening habits and recommend us music based on ourselves. Yet, how is it that we’re still finding ourselves in constant listening ruts? It’s almost comical.

Unfortunately, it’s still a problem that most of us are facing. When the beginning of a song doesn’t meet our expectations, it’s too easy to press the skip button and go on to what’s next. Take Jimi Hendrix’s debut album “Are You Experienced.” I heard great things about the album, but when I played it for the first time on Spotify, the rough guitar, messy drums and off-beat lyrics caught me off guard. I flipped through the songs, waiting until I heard something that lived up to the hype that I had created for the album, but it never came.

A while after this, I was on a long car ride and popped a gift my dad gave me into the CD player: “Jimi Hendrix Live at Monterey.” I didn’t have the option of easily switching it out, so I had no choice but to give every track a listen. Hearing everything in its entirety gave me a different perspective on Hendrix’s music. It made me appreciate the off-beat nature of his songs.

I know, listening to an album in full makes you better appreciate what the artist is trying to do, what a crazy notion. What I’m trying to get at is how this leap of faith — that unspoken agreement with an artist that you’re fully committing to their music for an extended period of time — is harder to take when you’re presented with the alternate option to listen to literally anything else in the world.

There’s a feeling of helplessness I get when a record’s spinning on the player. No, not the sort of helplessness that makes me feel captive to the album that’s on, but the kind that forces me to learn to appreciate what I’m hearing. Too many times have I skimmed songs on Spotify, waiting for the one that feels right, when in fact it should be the other way around.

In a 2018 study examining the ways in which music digitization has affected the aesthetic experience, sociologist Nancy Hanrahan noted how music searching via streaming platforms is oriented towards our own moods and activities instead of what is surprising or different.

“The expectation that this is possible, that music can be tailored to our immediate needs, produces impatience with anything that doesn’t ‘fit’ and accounts for the inevitable disappointment so many of our respondents expressed,” Hanrahan wrote. “In these circumstances, difference is experienced not as a possibility but as a problem or a discrepancy, a failure to conform to the self.”

Adapting to the music that’s playing is a more effective approach than trying to fit the music to what I think I want. I guess sometimes the best control we can have over music is no control at all.

When you have a record or CD player, your only option to get new music is to go out and buy a new album. This requires you to explore music stores and sift through artists and albums you may have never heard of. The difference with streaming platforms is they do this for you. Listeners now play a passive role in finding new music. Instead of taking it upon ourselves to branch out our library, Spotify and other platforms relieve us of this duty.

This isn’t to say it restricts us from discovering new music. These algorithms are great ways to listen to songs we otherwise might never have found. The point is, we’re no longer the vehicle driving this exploration. We are passive listeners whose tastes are reaffirmed by what streaming platforms deliver to us.

Much of this need to skip songs can be attributed to our increasingly poor attention spans. It’s the era of having options, not restrictions, and this doesn’t just apply to music. There’s always something seemingly better than the movie you’re thinking of streaming. It’s hard to lock in on one show, because there’s 10 other shows that look just as good, if not better.

Streaming services for entertainment products like music, television and films have oversaturated the market for consumers, and it’s taken a toll on our ability to appreciate the product. Now, how can we fix this?

Don’t look for ways for music to accommodate your tastes, see if you can find appreciation in whatever you’re listening to. Go out and discover new options for yourself. Instead of having Spotify tell you what they’ve found just for you, take it upon yourself to explore. In finding new music, a lot of the time the path to finding it is just as rewarding as listening to it.

If you see something that looks interesting while browsing social media or reading an online article, do some research and read into it. Make the trip down to a record store and browse the covers, even if you intend to stream an interesting album you find. The key is to take chances and keep an open mind towards any new music you can come up with.

And for future generations? Can their attention spans support such a self-reliant way of discovering new music? How will they deal with the ever-changing landscape of streaming platforms, personalized playlists and skips? As the great Bob Dylan sings: The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.