Rants // The Overwhelming Ambience of Spotify

For all the time yours truly spent on talking downsides of streaming/Spotify, there’s one side of it I neglected that’s worth of being highlighted. I’m talking about Spotify being overwhelmingly ambient.

Between chill lo-fi beats and music in the background / wallpaperish nature of Spotify’s treatment of music, there’s an inevitable conclusion. This service runs on foundations created by Brian Eno and Erik Satie.

In theory ambient going mainstream certainly is not such a bad thing. After all, everything we do here at IHN is tied to ambient in one form or another. Perhaps the issue, then, is different – its that besides being ambient-centric, Spotify prefer things bland and generic. And if something isn’t generic enough there’s always another song to listen to or another playlist or something else to keep one away from paying too much attention to a single piece of music or an album. Streaming certainly offer a nice hamster wheel of neverending choices in return for money.

To make a musical analogy here – yes, there’s ambience and there’s drone and noise that prides itself on being unvaried and lacking any character. But it is my view that ambient is hardly limited to being just a wallpaper or nice background music. Contrary to Eno’s classic definition ambient doesn’t need to lack beat to be called such. Nor does it always needs to fade into background. And the beats don’t always need to be chill and lo-fi either. But I digress…

Spotify is hardly a singular villain when it comes to companies to turn already short average attention span into a shiny coin. With that said its still bothers how much effort it spends on trying to break the communal spirit of music and replace it with the endless scrolling and 2000-track long playlists.

There’s no reason to end this rant on a bleak note, however. There are listening bars in London and even outside of music you have old-fashioned rental video stores returning. Could it be that this kind of pushback, no matter how small, will still make a sizeable dent in the overwhelming domination of streaming and AI/algorithms driving our culture?  I certainly hope so – time will tell…