Algorithmic Alienation and the Freedom of Scarcity

Today I want to share some thoughts I have developed over the past six months on my music listening habits. Specifically, I wish to share some experiences that I have had now that I haven’t opened Spotify or Apple Music in half a year, and what I found out about why these algorithmic streaming services are actually doing us a disfavor.

The phenomenon I want to talk about is what one may describe as “algorithmic alienation,” or the fact that, by virtue of using a streaming service, we are losing the connection to the music we enjoy. And I want to demonstrate this by sharing some experiences after having used my own, very limited library for about half a year now.

To give you some context, earlier this year I got gifted an old computer which I promptly turned into a Network Attached Storage, or NAS. Then, after realizing how much free space I had, I remembered that I kept a copy of my own music library from back in the day when we all used to buy CDs, Vinyls, or digital copies of music – you know, from the days before Spotify. I set up an open source music streaming server – Navidrome – and installed clients on my computers and phone. Specifically, I installed Amperfy, which, sadly, is Mac-only, but which looks and feels essentially like Apple Music.¹

And then I stopped using Apple Music almost entirely.

At first, this was difficult, because my own music library consists exclusively of the music that I’ve bought across almost two decades. While the library still contains a moderate amount of artists and records, it is fundamentally limited, since it doesn’t have access to the vast collections of songs that Spotify or Apple Music can muscle. But after a few weeks, I discovered that, instead of making me feel restricted because I couldn’t listen to new recommendations, new releases, etc., it was giving me back two crucial cornerstones of enjoying music: freedom and a rekindled connection to the music. In short, the limitations and scarcity in my own library turned out to be extremely liberating. Implicitly, this has also given me some hints as to what exactly the problem with platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music are.

Issues with Music Streaming Services

To understand this, let us first think a bit about how we interact with Spotify et al., and compare this to how one’s own music library works.

Typically, when we open the app, we may have an idea about what we wish to listen to, perform a quick little search, and hit play. This is already where various services differ. While Spotify will probably start a random mix based on the one song you searched for, Apple is more likely to lead you to listening to the entire album instead of just the track. But in both cases, after the thing you wanted is over, new songs will play automagically. Based on sonic analysis, metadata crunching, and some other little statistical tricks, these platforms are good at figuring out what other songs they can put in the queue to provide you essentially with unlimited music, if you so wish.

So let’s talk about the issues with streaming services.

First, this type of autoplay muddles the experience of the song you wanted to listen to. By being grouped in with a huge bunch of similar songs, it becomes difficult to remember the song or artist you started with. And, because all subsequent songs sound at least somewhat similar, they essentially turn into elevator music. This also makes it hard to find songs again that the service has played in between. Try it yourself: Can you name two or three new artists that you listened to this week that you think are really great, and which you wish to listen to more? I bet that this will be at least somewhat difficult, simply because there is so much random music queued that it becomes difficult to remember those “unique” songs that did something to you, emotionally.

Second, infinite playlists make your day less plannable. This may sound odd, but one thing I realized with Navidrome and Amperfy is that I feel a much better connection to the time I have. Typically, an album is somewhere between 30 minutes and one hour in length, and once the music stops, you notice. This gives you an idea of how much time has passed. Music on streaming services typically doesn’t stop, because they have the same incentives as YouTube or any other platform: keep you on there for as long as possible. This means that, unless you actively stop the music, it won’t stop. I have recognized that I now act a bit more conscious with my day. Whenever I listen to music, my tasks typically last for about an hour, and then I stop – either entirely or for a short break – which serves as natural breaks in my work day. Compare this to YouTube, which I also still regularly consume, and where I can completely lose track of time, and suddenly five hours are gone.

Third, because you actually have to perform work to get the music into your library if you don’t use a streaming service – in my case, typically paying the artists for a digital download on Bandcamp – you automatically value the music you do have much more. And I feel this makes you “sit through” entire albums much more. Instead of just picking and mixing a bunch of great songs from various albums, it is much more likely for me to choose one album and listen to it from start to finish.

This has reminded me of something else: music is first and foremost an acquired taste. Music is not something universally good or bad, but rather something that you have to discover by actively engaging with it. My colleagues Matthew Salganik et al. and, later on, Arnout van de Rijt have shown that taste is not objective – in a randomized experiment, any given song can rise to the top of the popularity chart, depending on how you manipulate the experimental conditions. This means that there are two ways to acquire music: by trusting others (via advertisements or reviews, or general visibility of the record in everyday media), or by trusting yourself (by listening to a record multiple times until you can say for sure whether you like it or not).

By sitting down and actively deciding to listen to an album that you may have not listened to in years, you are automatically more attentive. Instead of forming just background noise, the music becomes an experience. Indeed – and that is going to be the last observation in this regard – I have not really extended my musical taste during the ten years or so in which I relied on streaming services, because their algorithms tend to give you more of the same rather than fundamentally new and unexpected music. (Apple Music is better in this respect than Spotify in that they do give you actual discovery queues that may contain a bunch of tracks you absolutely despise. In other words, they give you a choice.)

Fourth, using streaming services means that you lose much more time with them than with your own library. This is the “freedom” I alluded to earlier: both on Spotify and Apple Music, I tended to skip quite a lot of music without noticing. Since I am back to my own library, I have rarely skipped songs. This is why I believe the scarcity of one’s personal music library to be liberating. On a platform, you always have the potential to find the right song for your current mood, so you keep skipping, sometimes for fifteen minutes, carefully examining each song whether it fits right now. But in your own bought music library, you know that you will simply not have “the” perfect song, and so you are much more likely to stop skipping once you have a song or album that is “close enough” to your desired emotional state.

It definitely took me a few months to rediscover what music I actually owned, but once I had a rough overview, I was able to much faster find records for various emotional states I was in. Deep focus work? Either Plini or I Built The Sky, maybe some Between the Buried And Me. The weekend is near, and I have ten pages to finish? Something like Loviet, maybe Porcupine Tree, or Robots with Rayguns. Monday morning, and I am the opposite of awake? Deafheaven or Alcest can help with that. I am pretty sure that I didn’t have such a precise mental map over my own musical taste while using a streaming service.

Fifth, and lastly, streaming services tend to make you stop looking for new music around you. We tended to find new music primarily via three avenues: recommendations from friends, supporting acts on concerts and festivals, or random finds at a record store. But music streaming services have quickly adopted billboard-style recommendations for new music. Labels promote their latest releases via these platforms, and discovery queues promise to give you new music to explore. But because of the other issues with these services, it is hard to actually keep track of which new releases you like and wish to retain. Sure, you can create playlists, star songs or albums, but the next recommendation will be waiting for you tomorrow morning.

You drown in an influx of new music, and it becomes harder and harder to focus on certain albums. Since I have switched to my own library, I am paying much more attention to the music my friends play. For example, I recently purchased a record because I heard it when I was visiting a colleague for a board game evening. I actually did discover the album via Apple Music, but it was too quickly drowned out by new music, and so I forgot about it until I heard it again at her place. And so I went ahead and bought the record, and it has been playing several times already. Again, I believe developing musical taste requires work, and this includes focusing on one thing before switching to the next thing.

Defining Algorithmic Alienation and Freedom of Scarcity

These paragraphs were mostly a loose enumeration of observations I made over the past months in rediscovering my own music library. So, let me attempt to formalize them a bit. I feel there are two phenomena emerging that give me confidence that using my own library over streaming services is a good thing.

The first phenomenon I would describe as “algorithmic alienation.” Music streaming services make no money from people with very specific musical tastes, because if the music listening experience comes to the forefront, there is the chance that, at certain times, you just don’t want to listen to music at all. This is bad for the services, because you don’t spend time on their platforms, and as such they can’t make money from ads. In order to keep you on their platforms, they have to constantly overload you with new songs, endless playback, and a never-ending flood of sensory experiences. This leads to something I’d call alienation – instead of developing a specific musical taste and digging into genres as you experience them, you listen to whatever the service is shoving into your ears. The artist and the artistic expression that is a record moves to the background. Albums are ripped apart, and only those songs the algorithm believes you will like will be selected and played without end. This also means that your own musical taste comes to a standstill. Instead of working to discover new music, you simply get more of the same. Music becomes an addition to your work-day, rather than an active choice.

The second phenomenon, which is connected to this, is the “freedom of scarcity.” Because streaming services are maximalist in that they offer almost every song in existence, you actually get limited in your auditory experience. Conversely, if you have only a limited supply of music because you actually have to pay for them, you tend to be more attentive in your choices. Because you don’t own every song in existence, you are aware that you will never find “the” perfect song for your current situation. So instead of endlessly skipping, you search for a few minutes, and then just pick one. Because there is no “right” choice, there suddenly are multiple fine choices. Music should not just adjust to your emotional state, but your emotional state should also adjust to the music. Lastly, because playback typically stops after the last song of an album, you suddenly gain a choice: play the same album again? Play a different one? Or just play nothing and enjoy the silence? This may sound ridiculous, but I regularly get this feeling of freedom, because I interact so much less with my music app, and instead focus on the music and the work at hand, except when I just bought a new record and want to experience this to the fullest extent and do nothing but listen.

Why You May Be Locked Into Spotify (For Now)

All of this sounds fine and good, but how are you supposed to take advantage of this? Well, here’s the awkward part where I need to acknowledge that I’m a paradise bird. I did have the time to collect a music collection before the rise of streaming services that I could simply re-activate. Building a musical library is an inherently expensive and time-consuming cultural activity. I believe that I’ve spent upwards of $3,000 over my lifetime in building this collection. It is, indeed, expensive. And difficult, because it takes time. Even now that I’ve gone back to owning my own music, I don’t buy more than 2–3 albums per month at the absolute maximum – both because I need to discover them, and because I want to spend time with them before moving on. This amounts to 20–30 bucks a month — three times as much as a Spotify subscription costs. And when I did move from Apple Music to my own library, the mere fact that I had a few hundred records to choose from at the start has made the switch much more palpable. Imagine not being able to listen to anything but a single record for two weeks straight!

In addition, having one’s own music library does not end with having the library. If you have a bunch of MP3s on your computer, you can listen to them there, but how do you put them onto your phone? That’s something that has become technically more difficult over time, because it has fallen out of favor with the rise of music streaming. My solution was to set up quite literally my own streaming service, and that is just unrealistic for most people. Imagine the required equipment and expertise: I have a computer running 24/7, on which a service runs that needs access to the internet via a proxy server relay, which all requires configuration, DNS records, security measurements, a good internet connection, etc. Getting new music onto the server requires me to use the command line to download a newly purchased album on there. For me, this is simple, and I get essentially the full Apple Music experience without the commercial aspect. But I have to recognize that this is simply unattainable for the vast majority of people.

Essentially, what I’m doing is unattainable to most people either because of prohibitive costs or lack of skills. So what can I suggest to you who may not have all the necessary technical infrastructure, money, and skills? I mean, you can start as I did: with an external drive (which have become much more handleable than twenty years ago) on which to store the library. There are still ways to move music onto your phone, too, and with current, bigger storage capacities, you should be able to get more than 100 songs onto your phone (which was always a crucial threshold for us back in the day).

If you wish to switch away from commercial streaming platforms, I want to be frank: It’s going to be a decade-long journey. You won’t be able to cancel your Spotify subscription tomorrow. And so, for many years, you will have this Frankensteinian contraption of slowly building your own music library while switching to Spotify every other day. It is certainly possible, and with my new-found experience, I would say it’s worth it. But I don’t want to sugarcoat it – it is going to be hard. However, if you do decide to do it, please feel free to reach out. I’m happy to give advice wherever I can.

Because what’s worse than a difficult journey is to remain forever locked in algorithmic alienation and not being able to fully appreciate the music that other people are spending many weeks to produce.

Artists deserve both our money and our attention. With streaming services, they get neither.