Spotify did not save you from bad taste. It just made sure you’d never find out you had it.
The algorithm isn’t a curator, it’s a mirror that only shows you the parts of yourself you’ve already approved. Here’s the actual mechanism, because it matters: the recommendation engine optimizes for the next thing you’ll definitely like, which means it can only ever hand you more of what you already are. You like one techno track, it gives you forty more that sound exactly like it, each one sanded down to the same 128 BPM, the same filtered build, the same drop that resolves so politely it apologizes on the way out. Discover Weekly is not discovery. It’s a vending machine that learned your order and stopped asking.
I’m not pretending 2009 was paradise
Half of crate-digging was standing in a basement record shop next to a guy who would not stop telling you about the Detroit pressing while your feet went numb. Forums were 80% drama, 20% somebody’s broken Mediafire link. Most of the music you found was bad. That was the point.
Because you had to choose. You read a blog where some maniac with actual opinions wrote three paragraphs about why a record mattered, and you either trusted him or you didn’t. You followed a label because they’d earned it, not because a recommendation engine A/B-tested the cover art on you. You dug through a Discogs rabbit hole, a friend’s burned CD with no tracklist, somebody’s 200-comment thread arguing about a single edit — and the friction was the whole experience. You earned the music. You remembered where you got it. Taste was something you built, with effort, out of a thousand small bets, half of which were wrong, all of which were yours.
Why streaming makes everyone’s taste converge
The algorithm took the wrong bets away, and we cheered, because the wrong bets felt like wasted time. But the wrong bets were the only thing that ever moved your taste somewhere new. It will never hand you the thing you’ll hate for six months and then play at every function for the next decade. Burial doesn’t test well. Neither did anything that ever mattered to you. The stuff that rewires you always sounds wrong first.
So everyone’s taste converged. Go look at the “top tracks” of any genre on any platform and watch the same forty songs show up like a chain restaurant menu. Obscurity didn’t get democratized — it got treated as a UX problem to solve. We didn’t get a million niches. We got one big middle, infinitely refilled.
And there’s a second engine driving the homogenization, downstream of the payouts. Spotify pays roughly $0.003 to $0.005 per stream, which treats a real artist and a guy uploading forty-second functional loops named after kitchen appliances as the same line item. That’s not a hypothetical — the fake-artist and functional-playlist farming is documented. When the money rewards filler that disappears into the background, the platform fills with filler that disappears into the background, and the slider just feeds it back to you.
And the part that actually gets me: nobody’s mad about it. We traded scenes, gatekeepers worth arguing with, physical objects, the act of pressing play on something a stranger swore by — all of it — for a slider that says “more like this,” and we called it progress. Convenience in, surprise out. A terrible trade, made gratefully, one autoplay at a time, never once choosing the next song.
How to actually find new music again
You want to know if you have taste or if Spotify just has yours on file? Easy test:
- Turn off autoplay.
- Sit in the silence at the end of an album instead of letting the next thing slide in.
- Go find the next thing yourself — a blog, a label’s Bandcamp page, an NTS show, a friend who’s insufferable about music. Anywhere a human with a pulse made an actual choice.
It’ll be slower. You’ll waste time. You’ll hate some of it.
That’s discovery. Everything else is just a playlist that learned your name.