Spotify sent me an email to say the monthly cost of my Premium subscription would increase from $10.99 to $12.69. I could do nothing and accept the extra charge, or I could explore one of their other plans. But I’ve decided I’m going to cancel my subscription.

In the grand scheme of things, it must be noted that a little over 12 bucks a month is an astonishingly low price to pay for access to virtually all the music ever commercially released. We used to pay the same or more for an individual CD, which can hold up to 74 minutes of music but would often have closer to 45. Today, an album on vinyl costs at least $30, often a lot more. Buying just one album a month would mean paying more than double what it costs for a subscription that includes more music than you could ever listen to in a lifetime.

So the extra dollar and a half is inconsequential, especially when you consider that the artists who supply the music available on Spotify only get paid a fraction of a cent per stream ($0.00318 according to this source). I would gladly pay more if it meant that musicians would be compensated fairly, but unfortunately that’s not where the extra money will be flowing. As Spotify stated in their email: “We are increasing the price… so that we can continue to innovate on our product offerings and features.”

Innovate. How I have grown to hate that word. With each new innovative feature, Spotify becomes less focused on music. Their increasingly bloated app already includes podcasts and audio books, and their playlists are now getting clogged with AI-generated slop.

A recent headline stated that Spotify is now “on track for [its] first full year of profitability.” The fact that this company, which has completely disrupted the music business, has never made a profit is alarming. Is operating at a loss and not paying artists an innovative business model, or is it a scam?

Back to physical media

I have a decent record collection at home, but it’s an expensive hobby that I’ve had to cut significantly when I lost my corporate job last year. I’m now starting to investigate other alternatives, like hunting down second-hand cassette tapes and CD’s from thrift stores.

In an essay titled “For the Love of Single Use Devices,” Angelina Ruiz reminisces about the days when we used to physically own the music we listened to, as opposed to just licensing the right to stream it. She notes a growing fascination among young people who grew up in the digital age for single use devices like iPods and portable CD players, as evidenced by trending videos on TikTok.

It would be easy to dismiss this desire to return to physical media as pure nostalgia, but I think it signals a profound dissatisfaction with streaming platforms and their algorithms, and perhaps also a desire to liberate ourselves from our dependence on our phones. Opting out of streaming services, though, can be daunting when we’ve been trained to expect instant access to an endless catalogue at our fingertips.

The true cost of Spotify

Disruptive startups entice us with convenience at an unreasonably low cost. They operate in the red during the growth phase, and by the time investors start to demand profits, the more traditional businesses in the category have been disrupted out of existence and consumers are out of options. An Uber now costs more or less the same as a cab. Subscribing to all the video streamers adds up to about the same price we used to pay for cable TV.

But the true cost of Spotify is not just the money we spend for the service, or even the disastrous impact it’s having on the whole industry. This is also changing the way we experience music. People now have favourite playlists rather than favourite artists, and the music we listen to is increasingly divorced from context.

(Music journalist Liz Pelly has a book coming out in January called Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. It’s my most anticipated book of next year.)

Cancelling my Spotify subscription means I won’t be able to deep dive into an artist’s discography or sample the new releases that Pitchfork reviews each week. But maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it. Limiting the amount of music I have access to might also deepen my relationship to it. It’ll force me to make more deliberate choices about what I listen to. It’ll remove the temptation to judge an album after giving it a single cursory listen.

The only thing I haven’t figured out yet is how I’m going to listen to music in my car.

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This week’s recommendations

• The Wonder of Stevie is a six-part audio series by Wesley Morris, on Stevie Wonder’s incredible streak of albums from 1972’s Music of My Mind to 1976’s Songs in the Key of Life. Whether you already know and love these albums or are ready to go on a journey of discovery, this is a fantastic long-form essay that will deepen your appreciation of Stevie Wonder’s music. (Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.)
• A Thousand Cuts is a documentary from 2020 about Duterte’s so-called war on drugs in the Philippines, his crackdown on the press and especially his attacks on journalist Maria Ressa (who later won a Nobel Peace Prize). If you’re not familiar with that recent history, this is a great place to start. You can stream the full film on YouTube.
• If you’re in Canada, the excellent documentary about Aubrey Gordon, Your Fat Friend, is now streaming on CBC Gem. It’s both informative and deeply moving. Aubrey Gordon is an author and the co-host of Maintenance Phase.