in december of 2023, spotify announced it would be laying off 1,500 workers, following two smaller rounds of layoffs earlier in the year (600 poor souls cut in january and 200 in june). they justified firing 17% of their total workforce via email by citing the need to become a more efficient and productive company. this announcement came after a total of 1,193 tech companies had laid off 264,220 people in 2023. it was not a great year for workers in tech, to say the least. far gone are the days of tech as the ostensible saviour of humanity - i am especially sorry to all the teslaheads impacted!!

in an analysis of memos announcing layoffs sent by meta, google, and microsoft, a corporate communications researcher from the city university of new york found that the biggest reason cited for layoffs was to build a "leaner and more efficient company". luckily, this cherry-picked study validates my personal life philosophy that optimizing for 'efficiency' is perhaps the single most useless end goal for its own sake out of all the modern economic pursuits (ie. maximizing profitability, consolidating corporate power) and, unfortunately, the most prevalent one in our global hyper-capitalist economy today.

something i've noticed recently while scrolling through the newly-optimized-for-efficiency spotify app is a lack of human-curated editorial playlists. wherever i click, the playlist dons 'made for firuza' instead of 'made by Spotify'. Indie Frequency - made for me. Hyperpop Classics - made for me. even the aptly-named lowercase-on-purpose anti pop - somehow still made just for me.

my gut thought upon seeing one of these playlists is 'i will never purposefully listen to this'. it's not that i don't think i'll be able to find good songs on there - i'm sure i will, because i love listening to music. no - the icky thing about 'made for me' playlists is that music discovery via algorithmic curation is just optimizing one's music taste for efficiency, which feels like the equivalent of 1000 simultaneous 9/11s for my soul. call me a luddite (as i often do), but i think there's a certain sanctity in listening to a playlist that was curated by a human taste-maker, even if there are commercial interests involved in the placement of songs in any editorial playlists. i understand that some people aren't so anal about their music-listening habits and don't mind discovering artists through algorithms - i can't judge, since i found some of my favourite artists through spotify autoplay back in the day (shoutout zack villere iykyk). and i do think some algorithmic curation can be a good thing [1] as long as it leads to talented artists finding fans they otherwise wouldn't have. but with 'made for me' playlists, on an individual taste-making level, you're just getting all the prior commercial interests combined with mathematically-calculated song selection based on all the intrusive metadata spotify has on your digital double, packaged into a beautiful, grotesquely-convenient, individually-designated, efficient playlist made Special for You.

'made for me' playlists follow in a long line of ai-enabled features spotify has been trying to roll out this year, including daylists, DJ, and absurdly niche mixes. these updates are no doubt an attempt to compensate for the lack of human editorial staff after the last wave of layoffs. meanwhile, spotify is burning money on audiobook acquisition after having spent the last 2 years burning money on podcast acquisition. it's safe to say that spotify is experiencing enshittification, a concept coined by cory doctorow to explain the process by which tech platforms initially offer high-quality services to attract individual users, then shift to favour business customers in order to increase profitability, and finally abandon both individual users and business customers in place of pursuing goals that keep shareholders happy. The Shareholders (apart from being an epic name for a band) value lean operations because it means more organizational efficiency (read: lower costs). and if there's anything i learned in business school, it's that profit = revenue - expense. more profit good and less profit bad.

spotify seems to be in the final stages of enshittification now. as a publicly-traded company that IPO'd (Initial Poopoo Offering) in 2018, they have a fiduciary duty to increase profits for shareholders. these profits need to grow and grow and grow indefinitely, otherwise The Shareholders might get weary and pull their money out, meaning top execs at spotify might not be able to vacation in cabo next year. luckily, spotify CEO daniel ek has already triple-downed on his enthusiasm for efficiency-boosting generative ai, stating he won't ban ai-generated music on the platform and positively remarking that the cost of creating content to post on spotify is now 'close to zero'. he's one step away from joining all his venture capitalist friends in endorsing trump for president.

so, what can you do if you care about building high-quality music discovery habits? well, the biggest university in your city probably has a 24/7 FM radio station that you can listen to live, online, for free. you can also dive deeper into your favourite artists' discographies and watch interviews with them to see who their influences are - then, listen to those artists' discographies. if you have cool friends, ask them to make you a playlist. if you don't have any cool friends, you can listen to quirky user-generated lists on rateyourmusic and then talk to your betterhelp ai therapist about not having any cool friends.

bottom line is, we need not be the pawns in every tech platform's perpetual race to the bottom, all in the abstract pursuit of efficiency!!!!!! would you want your partner to love you efficiently? would you want your blanket to hold you efficiently? would you want your mother to care for you efficiently? no!!!! not every domain should progress [2] to be as convenient and frictionless as possible!!!! all hail inefficiency!!!!!

august 4 2024

[1] although we should keep in mind that spotify is famously terrible for compensating emerging artists and we should probably shift to bandcamp or soundcloud or, even better - support an artist via physical album sales, merch, and concert tickets like in the ancient days.

[2] here, i use 'progress' in the neutral, literal sense. to move forward in space or time. not in the value-laden way techno-optimist have co-opted the term to justify pursuing 'innovations' that leads us closer to their growth-oriented profit-maximizing mars-living fantasies.