Two Story Tuesday Written by Tom for March 3

Hello again.

My father-in-law (who reads these newsletters) sent me this article entitled "The Death of Spotify: Why Streaming is Minutes Away from Being Obsolete" last week. If you're going to take the time to read this email, you should first take the time to read that article. It will take you five minutes.

Done?

Sick. Here are my thoughts. I'd love to hear yours.

1. I'd never considered that music is a utility.

In the article, he makes this point under the headline "Music = Tap Water."

Every music streaming company provides the exact same product at the same price, and that product has become so widely adopted that its customer base has stopped attributing meaningful value to it. It feels the same to listen to Spotify as it feels to drink from your tap or turn on your lights. At least Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max have different shows and movies available; but all the music streamers offer essentially the same library of songs.

This is bad for everybody.

First, for customers. Feeling like something's free when it's not is obviously a slippery slope. But on a more personal level, when things are psychologically devalued, they lose their quality. This seems obvious to me lately. AI music (and music made by humans at the pace necessary to keep up with AI) is shit, but if we're trained to think of music as background noise, we'll have no problem subliminally spreading shit all over ourselves.

Second, for streaming services. Utilities are not designed to be competitive. In the longterm, this leaves all the streaming companies in this kind of scenario, surviving off slim margins and waiting for someone else to blink and raise their prices first. You can see this in the gimmicky ways they try to differentiate themselves. Apple Music comes with your iPhone. Spotify offers a radio DJ. TIDAL lets you listen to Wav files instead of Mp3s, something that only a small percentage of the population can reliably distinguish between.

Last, for artists. Slim margins and a devalued product mean that streaming companies can't pay artists much and can kinda get away with it, since we've all accidentally agreed that music isn't worth much. Longterm, this means that art will need to get made at a cheaper, faster rate to keep up. Without course correction, this sets us up for a future of AI music, because that way, Spotify could create and own it themselves and not have to worry about pesky human artists knocking on their door for pennies.

In short, I totally agree with this diagnosis. Music has mostly become a utility, and that sucks for everyone. Nobody wins Monopoly with just Electric Company and Water Works.

2. Streaming is a terrible endgame.

I've thought and had conversations about this recently, but this article gave me some helpful language for it.

I know, I know - you are reading this from someone who literally runs Meta ads for indie artists to get more Spotify streams. It's complicated, and I still believe that for some people, Spotify is an effective tool for getting your music heard by people. But that's the trick: what matters is not that it's getting streams, but that it's getting heard by real people. Like, people who actually will want to listen to it again.

Spotify is still young enough that it maintains some of the clout factor it did years ago. When I was in college in the late 2010s, if I saw that an artist had multiple songs over 10k streams, I assumed they were successful (as in, they made music for a living). It was actually a safe bet, because in the early days, Spotify was not a music discovery tool. It was a place to listen to the artists you had already been following before streaming became a thing. 10k streams meant 10k people who already knew who you were, and were searching your name on this bright shiny new app.

Now, though, the landscape is completely different. Songs can have high numbers on Spotify for like ten different reasons, and nine of them aren't attributed to real fans. High streaming numbers is a smokescreen that a lot of artists buy into these days; but what do they get you? Definitely not money, for starters. Not even necessarily (and I cannot stress this enough) real fans. A few months ago, I played a show in Portland, OR. Over the past year, I have roughly 1,500 Spotify listeners in Portland. Guess how many people were at the show?

Nine. And only four of those had ever heard my music before.

I wasn't hurt. I had a better time with those nine real people than I've ever had online with all 1,500 of the Portlanders who listen to me on Spotify. Most of the nine became real fans who I've heard from since.

But the point is this: Spotify is a music discovery tool now - and not just that, but it's a music discovery tool that naturally promotes a certain way of discovery, built for shallow listening and zero interaction.

Personally, the only remaining value I see in streaming numbers is merely psychological - it's cool to see that your art is getting out there - which isn't nothing. But if you're trying to make a living, it isn't much.

3. Spotify is not minutes away from being obsolete.

I wish I didn't believe this, because it's more than a little cynical.

Tech giants are different now than they were in the early 2000s. Blackberry Phones were complex machines built to help you, and they went out of business because they had their expectations set too high about what humans want. Today's tech giants stoop lower, as low as you can go, right down to the marrow. You know this already, but I'll remind you.

Today's tech giants are not optimized to help you. They're optimized to addict you.

And addictions don't just become obsolete - alcohol has been around for millennia, offering the same things it always has.

Face with the threat of being obsolete, any tech built with an algorithm - social media, streaming platforms, and the like - will go about as quietly as a drug lord. Every single one of them is larger than any company in history, because unlike all the tech that came and went, algorithms are designed to adapt.

All the reasons listed in the article are secondary to this unfortunate fact, I think. The money stuff doesn't matter. The loss of human-to-human connection doesn't matter. No matter what they take from us, they will give us precisely what we want.

And until what we want changes, they are not going anywhere.

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.