I’m just about to finish my bachelors in media and cultural studies and my dissertation (idk if it’s the same as a thesis) is on how streaming platforms mostly Spotify, have changed the way people listen to music and how it’s been individualised.
Theres a lot to it but I’m gonna try and break down how Spotify uses ai to personalise your experience with the app. Basically, you know cds and that? When you purchase a cd it’s the exact same cd as someone else who also owns that cd even if you listen to it in different settings on paper it’s the same experience. Streaming platforms like Spotify have changed that dynamic because now it’s a lot easier to seperate the music from its intended experience. Spotify then takes your experience with that song and makes a mental note of it and will recommend you music that sounds similar to that song using a ai algorithm that compares your playlists to every playlist on the app. This leads to features like discover weekly that are entirely personalised recommendations based on your own listening history, meaning that on paper your discover weekly and your friends discover weekly should be completely different even if you listen to the same music.
Theres a lot more to it then that, including how Spotify as a platform has sort of moved on from just being a music streaming service by including social media like content with a musical twist. The algorithm is also a lot more complicated than that but that’s how it works on a surface level. But my entire paper revolves around the idea that streaming services and by extension the internet are slowly killing communal music experiences like the radio and live music venues (in some extreme cases) because people like the unique experiences that platforms like Spotify provide due to how personalised they are. I’m not finished writing it yet (deadline is in a month), but all the research is done and I’ve had a lot of interesting interviews with people who use the app casually and others who are more involved in local music scenes to see how streaming platforms have affected them.
Apr 12, 2025
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This thing is my pride and joy 😭
The last few months I’ve been on a little journey to reconnect with myself. I’d killed too many months in the algorithmic voids of TikTok and Instagram. I accredited this (largely) to the accessibility of it all. I mean, why NOT scroll through your feed at every minor inconvenience when it’s right there in your pocket?
Part of this journey meant stripping back the technology I rely on, without compromising the things I enjoy. The only thing holding me back was my music.
I’m the breed of ‘insufferable man’ that has over 100k minutes streamed every year, and a budding vinyl collection on his wall. Losing the social media would be easy, but the music not so much 😂
I picked up this iPod about a month ago now, and it’s been a total game-changer. I love to critique the growth-through-consumerism mindset plaguing the self-help spheres of the internet, but picking this up genuinely changed my relationship with my phone.
I’m not looking down to skip a song every few minutes, which means less time to spot notifications, open apps, and mindlessly scroll. Having all of my music locally on this thing has cut my screen time while I’m out by half.
Buying shit won’t fix your problems, I attest, but sometimes it’s fun 😂 if you’re a big music listener and your screen time is through the roof, try putting your music on its own device. Listening this way makes me appreciate the music more. I listen to full albums, not hand-plucked singles. I’m conscious about what I choose without having a shuffle feature or a playlist do it for me. It’s changed my relationship with the art I loved, and helped make me a *little* more present in the moment.
Give it a try! And if you have, how have you liked it? Would love to hear your thoughts :))
Jan 27, 2025
💡
…but it’s gonna be quite a while so unfortunately I can’t rec using it yet.
Key things:
1. Real people sharing music with other real people in some fun ways!
2. Paying artists more than shavings of a penny for their work!
Right now the team is small and there’s a long winding road ahead but if anyone is interested, message/follow or whatever and eventually some more info will trickle out 👀
May 2, 2024
🎹
started in middle school wanting to be skrillex and made some heinous dubstep, got way too heady about music theory and wanted to be machinedrum for a bit to flex that I knew other time signatures than just 4/4, then i went to college to study music and realized music theory is actually dumb and 4/4 is sick and I wanted to be kaytranada and make the simplest lil house tunes to dance to, then a friend from college and I shared our love for 80s new wave music and John Hughes movies and we made some fun synthpop to play at an 80s prom night as our senior capstone project, then that friend and I graduated in the pandemic together and made depressed synthpop that we were way too heady about because we needed to prove that our music degrees were valuable and that we didn’t waste our time in undergrad and that we weren’t failures as artists, then I moved away because having a music degree in NYC in the pandemic got you no jobs and shelved music for a while because I felt like a failure, got into early digital production from the 80s and got sick of working with plug ins and switched to synths and drum machines instead, figured out what post-music degree life looked like for me and moved again for grad school to get an MBA so I could actually get jobs on the business side of music, then I covered a Todd Rundgren song with a friend that I met at grad school to represent establishing a healthier relationship to my music now that it wasn’t tied to my self worth/career and just generally being on a better path in life. now I just make weird synthy stuff for fun and only release music when I care enough about a song to finish it
TLDR I listened to skrillex once and now i’m studying finance because I’ll never live out my fantasy of actually being him
May 4, 2024
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😃
My school did a workshop about it when I was like 10 and I think the amount of care and dedication it takes to hand crafting each and every frame is so cool. When its done well you get a really stylised films, I’m thinking like Chicken Run, Wallace and Gromit, Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, ParaNorman and The Box Trolls all of which I loved as a kid and every time I rewatch them I get the same sense of childlike wonder I did when I watched them the first time. I know there’s a lot of crossover with CGI now when making them but just the concept of stop motion animation is really cool.
Apr 13, 2025
Bonus points if you send them to people with some message you thought was hilarious in the moment, but in all actuality it wasn’t you were just too drunk to read it properly.
Apr 14, 2025
