What with the emerging aftermaths of controversy after controversy, it’s become somewhat en vogue to bemoan social media as the cause of modern society’s every ill. Yet, I still find the thought of adding myself to its ever-expanding horde of detractors rather unfortunate – after all, where would we be without Ed Balls Day, #susanalbumparty, or an 11,000-strong Jason Derulo fan club?
That said, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that only one social network in my life – Spotify – actually tells me anything about the people I call acquaintances. Instead, the desktop app’s Friend Activity sidebar serves as a radical counterpoint to well-worn conventions of more explicitly social platforms, offering real-time streams of consciousness as its core attraction.
The result is one of almost disturbing simplicity for the product of a £20 billion tech company: a reverse chronological list of the last songs played by the people you’ve chosen to follow for whatever reason, updating by the second and linking off to full playlists and top artist summaries for when you’re feeling particularly intrigued and/or nosy. What this allows is a genuinely fascinating glance into the minds of your nearest and dearest at any hour, more than what they might actively share ever could, like exposing a certain indie evangelist from The Edge’s editorial team as a raving fan of Shawn Mendes, ancient graduates adjusting to adulthood with the exact same sort of thirst for tacky EDM that I suffered a few years back, or realising that long-lost school friends might be over 5,000 miles away but that they still start the day with the same Tom Misch records as you do.
In five-ish years as a Premium subscriber, I’ve only ended up following 220-odd profiles, which may seem diminutive compared to every comparable online community, but perhaps that’s its strength. I’d hazard a guess that the feed that follows is split fairly equally between two camps: people with exceptional taste, who’ll often find the next great things yonks before I’d stumble into them otherwise, and those still followed out of morbid curiosity, as I see them fill their afternoons with copious Death Grips, Hamilton, Yxng Bane, or Ed Sheeran. Such is Spotify’s near-ubiquity when it comes to music consumption that everyone from your closest friends to your GCSE Physics teacher gets chucked onto this same playing field, with refusal to participate in the mass soul-bearing reserved only for those who refuse to commit to streaming, those so ashamed of their music tastes they listen in private mode, and those on Apple Music – who are not to be trusted.
Despite Spotify’s apparently unquenchable urge to hack mercilessly away at its product to make actually using it for music listening a dash more convoluted with each update, the one element of the experience that seems largely intact since I’ve been a customer is what keeps me locked in month after month, even if I dread to think what version of me my 87 followers would manage to put together from my listening habits. (With my manic array of playlists marked private to maintain some mystique for prying eyes, I imagine it’s likely an incomprehensible blur of Carly Rae Jepsen, PC Music, and Bloc Party’s first album.)
However, it’s exactly this raw, unfiltered antithesis to social media’s typical tropes that makes my Spotify profile easily the most honest and intimate portrait of myself to exist online, caring purely for bloody good music and the quest to find more of it, rather than the vicious old hunt one can get trapped in elsewhere pursuing likes, clout, or the illusion of success. For all the pitfalls and increasingly evident impacts of streaming and social platforms on culture and society, the character found in Spotify’s clunky old sidebar – however (un)intentionally – can be a refreshing and wholesome contrast to the rest of what modern life has to throw at us. More than a £20 machine-flattened blob of PVC, at least.