After the rise of music piracy, two Swedish businessmen, Daniel Ek, and Martin Lorentzon, proposed the idea of a music platform with a “freemium” model—a platform that allows individuals to stream music for free with limited accessibility but offers a paid subscription for more unrestricted access.
Released in Sweden in 2008, the platform immediately bursts with users, and eventually, in 2011, they expanded their accessibility to the United States, which also received lots of praise and appreciation. In 2024, Spotify had over 640 million active users, making it one of the most used music apps on the App Store. However, as the app grew in popularity and began to change, people criticized the app for many reasons. One reason that always seemed to be an issue was the algorithm of how songs are recommended. Throughout the community pages of Spotify, many users complained that the app repeats recommended songs too many times, and they usually don’t fit what the user is looking for.
At Spotify, musicologists, who are music experts academically, and A.I. work together to attribute traits to different songs, such as their beats per minute, danceability, genre, mood, or even key signature, then are placed in a library of similar songs. Spotify then looks at the music history of the user to find what niches they fit into. A.I. programs then collect songs from these niches and place them into personalized playlists for the user. However, one big issue with this is that there is no room for risk. Everything is a mathematically programmed statistic to find what type of music you listen to the most and continue feeding just that one thing in personalized playlists and recommended songs.
Another big issue with the recommendations is the loophole of paying Spotify to get a higher guarantee of a song being played or recommended more. Artists or labels can turn on “Discovery Mode,” a program that pushes a song out more, but Spotify takes 30% of the profits from the song. This, however, pushes up-and-coming artists from having their voices heard unless they find other ways to promote and push their songs.
In the summer of 2024, Sabrina Carpenter released the song Espresso. During this time frame, many users reported that after every song that they played, even when they switched genres, Espresso would usually always follow it. Many people conspired that the reason for this was because of the Discovery Mode, but Spotify states that Discovery Mode only pushes to people that they think will enjoy the song.
This follows the flop that was Spotify Wrapped in 2024. In previous years, Spotify has gone all out in terms of its Spotify Wrapped, as it celebrates the year through a look back at your music history in fun and eye-catching ways. This year, however, it was so riddled with A.I. that it wasn’t enjoyable, was too short, and took the fun away from the whole event, especially considering how long they made people wait for it.
Users took to X to express their frustrations, especially in terms of how lackluster it was in comparison to the Wrapped from the previous year. However, others noted that their information was incorrect, and artists they don’t listen to or have only listened to once or twice appeared as one of their top 5 artists or top 5 songs. This is likely attributed to the algorithm and its problem with repeating the same songs when recommending music.
There is a way to break free of the algorithm; however, it may take a bit. Spotify notes that the biggest way to make the algorithm more accurate to your taste is by doing these two things: “Exclude from taste profile: When you exclude a playlist from your taste profile, that playlist will have less influence on your future recommendations. Giving feedback on recommendations: When you tap [not interested/thumbs down] for a recommendation on Spotify, you’ll be given fewer recommendations that are similar to it.”
Although it may take a while to take back your listening, you can also go out and try to find artists on social media sites like Instagram to discover new music or even look at recommended artists on an artist’s profile. As a user, although it is tedious, you have to continue to mold Spotify to give you what you truly want. As of now, Spotify has gotten better with the way it pushes music; however, there is still a long way to go in terms of AI and its use for apps like Spotify.
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