Is Spotify Wrapped cringe? Maybe. Probably! The “clubs” are pretty stupid. But it’s fun to talk about music, who likes what and why, what sucks and what doesn’t, and rappin’ Wrappeds with a pal sure gets the conversation cooking (take today’s longest-ever stoop chat as proof), so we say what’s the harm??
Many respond to that question by enumerating the evils of founder Daniel Ek personally and of Spotify generally, the ways they are cheapening art, devaluing artists, dumbing down listener taste and lobotomizing culture, and then say that to blithely disseminate the marketing imagery of an 800-pound societal antagonist like Spotify is at best complaisant and more likely nihilistic.
And yeah, there’s probably something there, but what if we promise to acknowledge those issues and poke fun at Wrapped’s risible inaccuracy plus question the methodology and balk at the conclusions? May we then talk about our Spotify Wrappeds for a breezy 102 minutes? Deal? Deal. 🤝
Artists, albums, and songs mentioned during the chat…
This list leaves out a number of artists that we kind of assume our readers are familiar with — Blood Orange, Wolf Alice, The Beatles, etc. The names below are either more niche, from a more distant genre, or we mentioned them too briefly to be sure you’d know what we were saying, especially once we started to get drunk.
Sombr, I Barely Know Her
Boy Brooks, “Your Touch”
Mechatok, Wide Awake
Saâda Bonaire, S/T
Toad the Wet Sprocket, Pale
Logic1000, DJ Kicks: Logic1000
Shallou, 25, Spring
Nala Sinephro, Endlessness
Fuubutsushi, Meridians
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Gift Songs
Jeff Parker, The Way Out of Easy
Forth Wanderers
Sir Chloe, Swallow the Knife
Hayley Williams, “Love Me Different”
Amore, Top Hits, Ballads, etc.…
Malibu, Vanities
DJ Python, i was put on this earth
DjRum, Under Tangled Silence
DJ Koze, Music Can Hear Us
Robyn, “Dopamine”
And here’s a Guardian article about the phenomenon of overcharging at dollar stores.
On the Wickedness of Spotify
In the chat, we touched on — maybe the better phrase is “gestured toward,” or even “punched at and whiffed past” — the trending notions that Spotify is especially bad compared to other streaming services; that the method all streamers use to distribute money is flawed; and, by implication, that there are better options readily available.
We started trying to write up a more complete picture of our thoughts on this, and realized that our thoughts aren’t particularly complete, and so we did some more reading, did some googling, asked ChatGPT some questions, asked Claude whether ChatGPT’s answers made any fucking sense, etc. — the upshot is that this deserves its own post, so that’s what it’s going to get. STAY TUNED. (IF YOU CARE.)
Love and extended play to you all,
Combo Stereo Club and Night Jazz Fountain Society
