Two Story Tuesday Written by Tom for March 10

Hello again.

Last night, at dinner with a few folks, the conversation found its way, as often happens these days, to AI and Spotify.

Two clarifications (inspired by Jon's most recent email) first:

1. I'm using "Spotify" mostly as a stand in for all music streaming services. It might seem unfair, but in my defense, Spotify is probably the worst one, because it's also the best and the biggest - its algorithm is still the most effective music discovery tool the world has ever seen, its UI is incredible, and it enjoys more than twice the market share of any other major company. But its decisions as a public company have been, of all the DSPs, the most ethically questionable. I feel comfortable using it as a blanket term (read: throwing it under the bus) because of all these reasons, and because it, more than any other company, has been the lead innovator at the vanguard of streaming culture as a whole.
2. I'm using "AI" to refer to all of it: AI music creation tools like Suno, AI artists like I'm not going to give them the dignity of naming any, AI music discovery tools like Spotify's DJ, and also non-music instances like chatbots, Google's AI overview, Gmail's relentless integration of Gemini, Apple Intelligence, and all the others in what is quickly becoming every company ever's only marketing strategy.

There were six of us talking about these things last night:

4 artists (me, my wife, my father-in-law, and my sister-in-law)
1 music producer (me brother-in-law)
1 casual listener (my mother-in-law)

Here are some of the highlights from our conversation.

1. For the first time, my producer brother-in-law was in the room when Suno was being used.

He was part of a session with an older, bigger producer whose name, if I said it, you might recognize. That producer prompted Suno to generate some possible instrument parts in the style of some famous artist, then chose the most compelling ones and downloaded the stems. The plan, as far as my brother-in-law could tell, was to have actual musicians go back and track the parts that Suno came up with.

My brother-in-law kept quiet, but he was squirming in his seat, and lost a lot of respect for the older, bigger producer. The message was clear: this is something even the top guys are using to generate ideas now.

My brother-in-law ended by saying the incident made him consider instituting a no-phones policy in his own studio.

2. Gmail's integration of Gemini (their built-in AI) keeps getting worse.

I talked about this myself, since a lot of my job regrettably revolves around email. Here are two anecdotes:

First, last week, I noticed for the first time that, after I had typed out an email to an ads client, Google had underlined three or four sections in purple. Normally, when I see a block of text underlined, I assume I made a grammar or spelling mistake. But this wasn't the case. I hovered over one of the sections, and it gave an option to "improve word choice." It took what I had written (very clearly in my voice, with a phrase that I use all the time) and suggested I say it completely differently, less like a meaningful connection and more like a salesman trying to win a client with over-exact business-talk.

Second (this one's way creepier), I had a client (shoutout David if you're reading this) reach out a few weeks ago after Jon outed my artist project in one of his emails. David had listened to some of my music thanks to Jon, and wrote me a nice email complimenting me on it. He mentioned that he, an artist himself, knows what it feels like to get specific compliments from strangers - how it can be proof that your music is reaching real people - and wanted to pay it forward.

But this is where it gets creepy.

A few months before that, in a completely different email thread, David had emailed Jon and I telling how a stranger in a cafe had recognized him and complimented his music. It was a small, encouraging moment, proof that his music was reaching real people. We were pumped for him.

When I went to reply to David's nice email complimenting my music, Gmail's generative AI suggested a reply. And that suggested reply referenced David's moment in the cafe that he had written about in the other email from months ago.

The implications are that 1) Gmail's AI is trained on every email you send and receive. I have checked, and you cannot turn this off. And 2) their language ("improve word choice") is designed to make you think that its style is not just different from your natural style; it's actually better.

F that so hard.

3. Our days of using Spotify might be coming to an end.

I'll recap our conversation, then end things on a personal note, and ask your thoughts.

If you read last week's newsletter, you know that more and more people are calling for the downfall of Spotify - with some claiming that it's on the edge of obsoletion.

We were discussing all this last night, and I shared most of the same thoughts I wrote in last week's newsletter. I don't think Spotify is going anywhere, because it's not a mere technology waiting to be replaced by a better one; it's an addiction, and addictions will always have paying customers. There might be more potent forms of music listening on the horizon... but fentanyl didn't put morphine out of business. It just created a funnel. Spotify has made music discovery and listening a drug-like experience, and there is no going back from that.

The clear way forward from Spotify's side of things is AI music. Most (and I'd argue all) real artists simply can't keep up with the pace of music creation that the streaming revolution has kickstarted - releasing a song a week is a normal thing these days, and that pace will only get faster. It's too expensive, it incentivizes shallowness and trend-hopping, and it trains audiences to expect a moving target of "more." So if artists can't keep up - and if they keep asking to be paid - Spotify's solution is obvious: seize the means of production. Create the music themselves as quickly and cheaply as possible, the two things at which AI excels.

But, like cigarettes in the 70s, the tide is clearly changing, because more and more people are aware of how bad this would be for everybody. Artists have to choose between AI or losing their job. Labels serve no purpose. Listeners get a worse product. Not to mention how devastating AI is, physically, to the planet.

My mother-in-law, the only casual listener among us last night, a happy Spotify user, didn't know any of this. Even my wife, an artist herself, didn't know a lot of it. And now that they do, the question becomes: what do we all do?

Answer that my wife - as black-and-white a thinker as they come - came to me with today:

"Tom, let's stop using Spotify."

I looked at her, paused, and said "Really?"

"Yeah. They suck. We have records. We have CDs. Why not?"

"Because," I said. "What about when Foy Vance and Stephen Wilson Jr. release records this year? What about Release Radar and New Music Friday? How will we hear new releases from artists we like?"

"We buy them," she said, simply and with a smile. "That's what people used to do."

"But what about when I want to listen to something older, something specific?" I said. "What about when I'm in the mood for The 1975, or Mumford, or Switchfoot? What about when we're cleaning the kitchen?"

"We buy those, too," she said. "Or we don't, and we listen to something else. Or we just get used to silence. Wouldn't all of those things be better for us?"

"But how will we discover new music?" I said. "I first heard so many of my favorite artists on Spotify."

"We have friends. Friends share music with each other," she said. "If someone thinks you'd like something, go out and buy it. Once you're invested, once you own it, you'll be more likely to enjoy it, anyway."

I was defeated.

"Well," I said... "Let me think about it..."

I am thinking about it. Seriously. At least as a listener, I might stop using Spotify.

What do you think?

Peace,

-Tom

Tom Anderson Artist & Strategist @ Two Story Media Jon's (Taller) Brother

P.S. – I love getting responses to this email. I read them all. I reply to some of them. If you have thoughts to share, questions to ask, or bones to pick, fire away.