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Archives
The Spotify Trap and Why I Had to Delete the App to Actually Hear Music
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Posted by Dez Fontaine Filed in Arts & Culture #spotify #Authenticity #indie music #music discovery #streaming culture 71 views
So I deleted Spotify last month and honestly it felt like cutting off my own arm at first. But here's the thing nobody talks about - streaming services got us thinking we're discovering music when we're really just scrolling through what the algorithm thinks we should want. It's wild how much freedom you lose when you got unlimited access to everything.
I started going back to how my older cousins used to find music. You know, actually asking people what they were listening to. Hitting up record stores and just picking up random vinyl because the cover looked interesting. Sliding into DMs of people whose taste I respected and asking for recommendations straight up. Sounds basic but it changed everything for me. There's something about human curation that the algorithm will never replicate no matter how smart it gets.
What I realized is that discovery used to mean something. You had to work for it. You had to take a chance on something that might be terrible or might become your favorite thing ever. Now the algorithm is so good at predicting what you'll like that you never really discover anything - you just consume what matches your profile. It's the difference between stumbling into a jazz club and being served jazz because your data suggests you like jazz.
I spent two weeks just listening to recommendations from people in my community. Some stuff was mid, straight up. But I found this underground producer from Toronto whose sound literally changed how I think about production. Would I have ever found them on Spotify? Absolutely not. They got like 47 monthly listeners. The algorithm would never serve that to me because the data says I won't stream it enough to matter.
The real discovery isn't about how many songs you can access. It's about the conversations. It's about trusting other people's ears instead of trusting a machine that's only trying to keep you scrolling. Music becomes real again when it comes from real people who actually give a damn about what they're sharing with you.
What's the last song someone personally told you about that you actually fell in love with?