What Spotify took from us by giving us everything - The Verge

This article is a deep review of Mood Machine by Liz Pelly. We've had an Apple Music Family subscription for a long time. In the last few months I actually decided to give Spotify a try and we added a Family subscription to that. I've also subscribed to Sonos Radio in the past. Spotify is well known for great playlists and I thought Christmas would be great for it.

However, the more I read about Spotify the more I raise an eyebrow and think "yuck". Fake artists names, AI generated music, royalty free stuff slotted into your playlists. This article is an interesting read and this line hit me in a big way. Bolding added.

Instead, Spotify hit on the idea of playlists, a way of curating songs to be background music in life, just as they were in movies and commercials. Pelly quotes a former Spotify employee saying its main competition wasn't iTunes, but silence.

They just need to fill the silence. And the playlists are a great way to do that since you hand the steering wheel over to the algorithm and they can optimize for cost. Not as bad as handing your news to an algorithm, but still not great.

After reading this I was thinking about recent articles I've seen about Facebook using AI agents to create completely generated content on your timeline. It dawned on me that these companies are just following the same playbook Spotify has used.

The competition isn't silence, it is solitude. And solitude is something a lot of people are sadly uncomfortable with.

Will your timeline on social media be filled with generated AI content? Yes it will. They will be better than a bunch of random people (aka, your friends) at providing engaging content.

Back to Spotify though, I feel like I’m in a game where they are trying to trick me at times.