Spotify traps listeners in a vicious cycle. Here’s how to make streaming algorithms work in your favor.

SFCV’s weekly think piece on classical music today

By Jens Ibsen, composer

Like many people, I’ve moved on from Spotify. My decision was partially due to CEO Daniel Ek’s unsavory investments, underpayment of artists, and choice to crowd the platform with AI artists. But I confess, I am no perfect angel. I largely made the move for pragmatic reasons.

After purchasing a pair of audiophile headphones (yes, the Sennheiser HD 600s really are fantastic. And no, you don’t need the higher-priced variants), I desired a platform with genuine high-quality audio. While Spotify’s “lossless” option theoretically returns CD quality, in practice, platforms like Tidal and Apple Music boast higher-quality, uncompressed audio.

I chose Tidal as my Spotify replacement because it offers many of the features that made me love Spotify back in the day. Spotify used to suggest songs that were sufficiently orthogonal to my preexisting musical tastes, but usually different enough to be enticing and cultivate a sense of discovery. This exposed me to progressive metal, a chance encounter that would change my life and set me on the artistic path I walk today: synthesizing metal into music for the concert hall.

Chance musical encounters of this kind are becoming increasingly rare — Spotify changed its algorithm within the last few years (allegedly) to a classic payola model where artists (presumably) pay for their latest single to be queued up once you finish an album, exposing you repeatedly to a song that isn’t a reflection of your personal music tastes and artificially driving up the artist’s streaming numbers. Sure, in some cases I discovered great new tracks, but in most cases I felt like I was being overexposed to earworms I’d never signed up for.

Tidal’s algorithm is more expansive and sophisticated:

1) It exposes me to more music I have never heard of.

2) The music it offers is different enough from what I typically listen to, and functions to expand my musical tastes.

3) While on the platform, I often encounter music I genuinely love.

For example, I was listening to an album by avant-garde metallers Pyrrhon (whose guitarist, Dylan DiLella, played in my whale metal opera this January!) when Tidal’s album radio queued up a song from an absolutely wacky one-man band called Hoplites [Ὁπλίτης], an extreme black metal project featuring vocal recitation in Classical Greek above whining, rapid chromatic guitar riffs (and also saxophone?!) This is the sort of freaky stuff that should get more exposure.

I’d like to propose some simple ways out of the algorithmic rut, but first I need to talk about the slightly unorthodox way in which I use streaming apps, and the mechanics and real-world impact of algorithmic listening.

I’m old-fashioned: if I want to listen to music, I play an album in-full. When I finish an album, I am able to discover new artists through algorithmic matching — like album or artist radio. Tidal does this much better than Spotify nowadays. When algorithmic matching works well, it functions as an essential tool for musicians like myself. As a professional musician, listening to music is not often recreational. Rather, it is an act of research — I am always looking for new, captivating work, and keep a record of artists I plan to circle back to (like avid readers who maintain a “To Be Read” shelf). When I do return to an artist I’ve discovered through Tidal, the experience is often an intensely rewarding one.

Incidentally, my whale metal opera was deeply inspired by two bands I’d put off listening to for years: Germany’s The Ocean Collective, and France’s Hypno5e. But once I took the time to go through their discographies in full, I developed a deep relationship with their work. Now, they are both in my top 5 favorite bands ever. The lesson here is this: to grow as a musician it’s best to aim for depth, not just breadth, in a listening practice.

However, this is pretty antithetical to how streaming platforms target their users. Streaming apps assume that listeners have an instrumental relationship to music (pardon the pun.) Music exists to fulfill a function, like getting you out of bed, keeping your energy high for a workout, preparing you for a night on the town, or helping you grieve a breakup. The platforms are mostly right in their assumption, and science supports this. The problem is streaming platforms started reinforcing our preexisting listening behavior and tastes rather than opting to expand our musical horizons. Then, over time, in the pursuit of profit, they decided it was better business to make you listen to whomever paid them, or made them the most money (even if it’s a robot). This sort of manipulation is intended to keep users addicted to the platform, which is the entire problem with social media today.

I am no luddite. I will not tell you to delete all of your social media immediately, but I do think that technology can and should be engaged with as mindfully as possible in an era wherein our attention is a battleground for advertisers, politicians, and CEOs who financially benefit if we use chatbots as our therapists and partners, and if our favorite songs are AI music prompted by our own whims.

Indeed, Suno is an AI app that allows users to create any music they want through prompting. It is billed as The Next Big Thing in music; a bold claim for a plagiarism machine that was illegally trained on all the music on the internet. Suno’s CEO openly proclaims that learning an instrument nowadays is too boring for most people and that the solution is to gamify music-making to make it “as engaging as [the popular video game] Fortnite.” In Adam Neely’s fantastic documentary on the app, he posted an open question to Suno users about who their favorite AI artists were. Most of them answered: themselves. Suno is the natural end result of algorithmic listening; a world of solipsists creating their own endless AI playlists to tune out the rest of humanity.

So how do we escape this? Neely, I think rightly, predicts that as AI continues to create more convincingly serviceable music for the average utilitarian listener, live music will become more of a separate art form, continuing to innovate and attracting audiences who desire genuine artistic experiences. But in the meantime, there are ways to use streaming apps more effectively to expose ourselves to new, great music, written by humans:

1) Engage with music on an artist/album level. This will help you build a relationship with the music as art, not just a commodity.

2) Try listening to things that are not your usual jam. Branching out is a great way to get to know new artists, discover future faves, or fuel a cocktail party conversation.

3) Repeat, repeat, repeat. Being a fan of avant-garde metal (and certainly classical music) often means listening to music multiple times before fully forming an opinion. One of the bands I mentioned earlier, Hypno5e, I initially found to be intriguing but rather rough around the edges when I first heard them in 2018. Listening again in 2025, I could really appreciate their craft more fully after having heard more music in the interim.

4) Go out and see your favorite artists live. I literally started going to metal shows because of Spotify! It is increasingly common for young people to avoid concerts post-COVID; I am shocked by how many twentysomethings I’ve talked to at metal shows who’d never been to a single live show. Live music has its own pitfalls these days, but lesser-known artists need your patronage to keep working.

5) Maybe: write your own stuff. I got into prog metal through listening to anime theme songs, then Japanese metal more broadly, then progressive metal, and then the rest of metal. Now I write metal fusion music that’s performed around the country and abroad. Even if you never become a career musician, it is good for the world for more people to be making music for audiences of many, or just themselves.

I hope this provided you with some interesting ways to use streaming apps, which we take very much for granted these days. I also hope you find, watch, and make some incredible music. I’d love to hear if this resonated with you, and if you did end up finding some new music you like in the comments.

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