The inception of music streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, has made the initially strained relationship between the music industry and the internet navigable. These services are vital in enabling people to legally and legitimately listen to music in the online world. However, not only are such services vital for listening to music but they also act as a method of sharing music. Streaming giant, Spotify, have mastered this balance, and their functionality encourages a communal or shared interaction with music.
Playlists – Modern Day Mixtape or Group Project?
Expressing admiration for someone by sharing with them a collection of songs is not a new concept. Indeed, the creation of physical mixtapes as gifts is a practice of the not-so-distant past that was eclipsed by the development of an online music world. The essence of the concept endured, however, and has found new expression in streaming services like Spotify where carefully curated playlists made with a particular person in mind have become the modern day mixtape. This is a romantic example of the ways in which Spotify enables the sharing of music, but Spotify also recognises that not everyone will have playlists made specifically for one set of ears. It allows every user to follow the playlists of friends and fellow users, incorporating these playlists into their own music library. This is an albeit less romantic, but still effective method of sharing music between users.
Moreover, with the ‘Collaborative Playlist’ function, Spotify even further boosted the sharing potential of playlists, by allowing multiple Spotify users to determine the content of a single playlist. In this way, song recommendations can be inserted directly into a friend’s playlist and can be played by them with no extra effort on their behalf. Essentially, this function makes the sharing of music instantaneous (a necessary characteristic in the era of immediacy).
Friend Activity – the Music Equivalent of Cyber-Stalking
There was a brief period where the use of Spotify became slightly too immediate, with users broadcasting their listening activity on their Facebook profiles, spamming newsfeeds with live updates, and arguably generating more frustration than user interaction. Thankfully, this practice seems to have dissipated, and has been replaced with a more contained model of live listening updates: users can selectively follow friends and, within the desktop application, become privy to their live listening habits. While this function absolutely contributes to the vision of Spotify as a platform for spreading music, it is not necessarily a deliberate attempt by the listener to share a song. Rather, it relies on the curiosity of the listener’s followers to investigate their song choices.
Data Sharing – All Wrapped Up
Spotify makes excellent use of its users’ data in order to both enable the sharing of music and to cleverly market its service – the most recognisable example of this is its annual ‘Spotify Wrapped’ feature. Released every December, this feature calibrates user data and produces a visual and statistical narrative of each user’s most fundamental listening habits throughout that year. In 2019, for example, it presented each user with a breakdown of their favourite genres of music and a playlist containing their top songs of the year. Spotify has optimised the shareability of this function, and with great effect, as users flood their social media channels with their personalised data. Last year, the feature was at its most sophisticated yet, complete with an inbuilt story-like interface, resembling Instagram or Snapchat. This is one of the app’s most effective features, generating both user gratification and general curiosity about the music to which other people listen, thus creating the ideal environment for sharing.
Algorithmic Sharing – You Might Also Like…
The Spotify Wrapped feature exemplifies one of the ways in which Spotify puts its user generated data to use. However, data serves another very important function for Spotify, allowing the streaming service itself to actively recommend music to its users. Spotify relies on the data it gathers on its patrons’ usage and listening habits to compile individualised playlists, such as each user’s ‘Discover Weekly’ playlists, updated every week with a host of algorithmically curated songs. Spotify users are also treated to their own ‘Release Radar’, a playlist regularly updated with new songs from musicians in which the user has previously shown interest. And this is just the tip of the iceberg: the app contains a whole ‘Made For You’ section populated with such playlists, from daily mixes and daily podcasts, to a
collection of the songs the user has had on repeat. Spotify’s algorithmic music recommendations appear as if suggestions from real life friends. By taking advantage of this less traditional approach to music-sharing, Spotify are keeping up to date with the rapidly evolving music industry and technological climate. With thousands of new releases daily to the app, one doesn’t need to comb through them to find what they’d like – they do it for you!
Emerging from the above is an image of a streaming service that succeeds in providing novel ways in which its users can share music with each other, while also sharing music with its users by generating individualised music recommendations. The ability of Spotify to act as a music sharing platform is driven by the incorporation of social features that allow users to interact with each other in a streamlined fashion, such as collaborative playlists. Before Spotify, one of the predominant methods of sharing music on the internet was to trawl through YouTube videos and copy and paste their links to a friend. And, admittedly, while this was an effective method of passing on a great tune, it lacked the sociality that is now establishing itself as an inherent characteristic of sharing music online thanks to services like Spotify.
