And if you do happen to have catholic taste, or fannish obsession, there are some very deep back catalogues to go down (even, should you so desire, Basshunter’s). But there are plenty more people who have relatively narrow taste, for whom – in a world where not everyone has the time or inclination to read up on new music – this kind of recommendation is really cherished. It is a badge of pride for musos to say that Spotify’s machine-learning algorithms – when you listen to a track and it recommends things you might also like – don’t cover their cosmopolitan taste. For many people, music is just for mood, something to work, exercise or have sex to – situations that Spotify usefully caters to with playlists such as Productive Morning, Extreme Metal Workout and 90s Baby Makers. Audiophiles, object fetishists, anti-capitalists, musicians – these groups noisily protest Spotify, but are marginal compared with the number of ordinary listeners, who never read the liner notes in the first place.
Spotify speaks to this silent majority of music fans. But its 320kbps “high quality” setting will satisfy all but the most sensitive listener. It can also be argued that Spotify’s quality is lower than that of a CD, which is true, and the muso in me trembles to think how many people are listening to Spotify on its low, data-preserving quality, which sounds as if the songs have been irradiated. As the parallel demise of Blockbuster Video and, er, print media shows, most people value convenience over physicality when it comes to film, news and music. Critics point out that you don’t own the music you pay Spotify for, but effectively rent it, although the “ownership” of digital files was always pretty illusory and underwhelming anyway – and, as anyone who has tried to copy a library of iTunes files from one device to another, a teeth-gnashing faff. The global profile of non-Anglophone pop has risen, from K-pop band BTS to Puerto Rican star Daddy Yankee, in part thanks to this levelled playing field the multicultural hybrid music of stars such as Stefflon Don feels like the natural result of a culture that can access anything, anytime. You can already hear the effects of this democracy on music itself. The Spotify logo on the facade of the New York Stock Exchange, as it celebrated its stock exchange listing in April 2018.
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