Spotify adapts to users’ taste

My name is Daniel, and I’m a Spotify addict. I actually have been for quite some time, so perhaps it would be more accurate at this point to call me a Spotify abuser.

I love Spotify. Typically, a session starts with an artist I know, say The Tallest Man on Earth. When I’m ready to move on, I usually click on the related artists tab and select a new artist, perhaps someone I haven’t heard of before. And when I’m tired of my new selection, I move on again.

Before I know it, hours have passed and what began as a session of gentle folk has become Top 40-pop or country twang. That’s also the point at which I can recite all of the ads, many of which are disruptive and out of line with the genre I’ve been listening to (cough: Yeezus Tour ad).

My addiction to unfettered music listening didn’t begin with Spotify. There was Grooveshark before, which perhaps is where I first learned to break the chains of having to own music in order to listen to it. I began to explore and, as with Spotify, listen to different genres of music, which came with sampling a wider variety of songs than I would were I simply digging through my own music library.

But Spotify changed things. It happened first on Facebook. With the click of the Spotify play button, suddenly my “friends” could see what exactly I was listening to. More importantly, they could see everything I listened to from the Sweeney Todd soundtrack to Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam.

I never turned on the Spotify setting to share on Facebook, or perhaps I did and didn’t mean to. In any case, after a few thoroughly uncomfortable incidents when some of my more embarrassing listening was chronicled on my Facebook wall, I promptly shut off this feature.

Unfortunately, this did very little to correct the issue of my “friends” snooping on my listening history. It turns out that Spotify had its own ticker that showed exactly what I was listening to and when. This was eventually turned off and only my friends who “follow” me can see what I listen to.

But the fact that even some people can see what I’m listening to at any given moment, including my most embarrassing moments (cue that Backstreet Boys throwback), often makes me self-conscious about my Spotify activity. It’s for this reason that I’m pretty fast to turn on private browsing to hide the fact that I’m listening to an embarrassing artist or song.

And I’m not the only one. A friend uses the incognito mode when she feels like listening to the Les Miserables soundtrack (not that there actually is anything embarrassing about that, but it’s her call).

“I should really do that because I listen to a lot of embarrassing things on Spotify,” another friend told me while I was talking about writing this column.

Better late than never, I suppose. I’ll stop there for a moment.

I’m made slightly uncomfortable with the ease at which I wrote that last statement, “better late than never,” because of the ease at which I seem to be endorsing the use of Spotify’s private browsing.

At the end of the day, the question might be asked: Should turning on private browsing even be necessary? I’m thinking you can guess what my answer would be but, in case you’re missing it, my response would be a resounding no.

The fact that I’m uncomfortable — as are my friends — with other people seeing what I’m listening to for fear of embarrassment is indicative of a larger online fear. For many, there has emerged an added external pressure that comes with Internet activity: what people will think of you.

Many might claim to be immune to this, but it’s something that I think most of us think about when posting. I certainly do. It causes me to hold back and think twice about posting something that might be unpopular, esoteric or only applicable to a few of my friends. In many cases, a check such as this is a good thing. It’s prevented me, more often than not, from posting something that I could potentially regret down the line.

Still, it also prevents me from displaying my true personality online. Instead, all that comes through is a filtered projection of it. Of course, in the everyday, what comes through of our personality can vary vastly depending on time, setting and company. Yet, this is worsened online.

By displaying only filtered projections online, it’s easy to lose our personalities on the Internet, or worse, create different, false personalities online. There’s no easy fix to this and, as I mentioned before, self-censorship is not a wholly bad thing. I just might take an extra second to reconsider selecting private browsing on Spotify next time.

 

Daniel Rothberg is a junior majoring in political science. His column “21st Century Fears” runs Thursdays.

Follow Daniel on Twitter @danielrothberg