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This weekend, Spotify blanketed its app in Drake. The streaming giant “recommended” his new album, Scorpion, to each one of us, regardless of our usual taste in streaming music, by putting his face on the cover of every playlist—even those not featuring his songs. Perhaps this decision was driven by profit, or they just thought it was funny, seeing Drake gamely play the poster child for “Ambient Chill.” Or maybe they realized that they could, so they did.
The gesture reminded me of nothing so much as when Apple, in September 2014, deposited a free download of U2’s then-new album, Songs of Innocence, in everyone’s iTunes folder, whether we wanted it there or not. “This is incredible for us, and incredible for all of our customers—I can’t think of anyone they would like to have music from more,” enthused Apple’s Tim Cook at the launch. Of course that wasn’t true. Eventually, both Apple and U2 ended up apologizing in the face of substantial pushback; Apple even launched a site to help users remove Songs of Innocence from their libraries.
But the problem with both of these gestures isn’t really the music, per se. Drake and U2 are the type of bland that is not only hugely popular but largely inoffensive; in 2014, Tim Cook’s statement about his customers and U2 was probably more accurate if you recast it as, “I can’t think of anyone they would object to having music from less.” It’s easy to imagine Spotify figuring that they are on similarly safe ground today with Drake, someone so concerned with being everything to everyone, his new album is comprised of two different LPs (a jaded rap record and a collection of vulnerable R&B-pop).
Rather, the problem lies in what these gestures reveal about the corporation’s relationship to its customers. In Apple’s case, the shock expressed by many was that they had no say over what landed in their iTunes folder—Apple could just reach in and put something there. To those who saw their networked devices and hard drives as private, this came as an unpleasant surprise. Even to many who fully understood the terms and conditions that tied their computers and devices to Apple, it seemed like a breach of an unspoken agreement: We accept that Apple has an uncomfortable amount of access to our files, and Apple agrees not to rub our faces in it. Finding a U2 album inside your personal iTunes folder was like finding a note from your landlord inside the refrigerator.
For Spotify, the reveal is that what their playlists and recommendations are really about is not, lo and behold, you. It’s about them, and the power they gain from our data and wield through their algorithms. (It’s not even really about Drake, who—despite breaking single-day streaming records with the strategy—could be swapped with any number of palatable superstars.) Again, even for those who may already feel aware of the streaming service’s primary interests, putting Drake everywhere seems like a violation of a tacit agreement. We allow Spotify to mine our personal data, so long as Spotify pretends to care about our individual taste.
The risk to Spotify from breaking that contract with its users is, I would think, very real. Look at how easily, in the wake of the U2 debacle, iTunes yielded to streaming. Rumor has it that the media player will be discontinued completely next year, and its phase-out in favor of Apple Music began as early as 2016—not two years after iTunes’ marketplace dominance was great enough to facilitate what was touted by Apple as the “Biggest Album Release Ever in History — Gifted to Over Half a Billion Music Fans.” Could Spotify end up similarly in need of a radical makeover, just because of a silly overuse of Drake’s face?
I actually believe that’s possible, because recommending Drake to all of us wasn’t just silly, it redefined the meaning of the word “recommend.” Or rather, it revealed the very different meaning of the word for Spotify, at least from the way its customers have been understanding it. We might have assumed that music recommended by the service is there for each of us to accept or reject, according to our whim. But what if Spotify is actually using “recommend” as an imperative, not a choice, as in “I recommend that you stop at red lights”? Spotify’s “recommended for you” may not be intended to invite an individual response at all, but simply compliance. And as this weekend’s use of Drake revealed, the “you” in that phrase may not even be singular, but plural.
Apple’s treatment of the U2 album similarly hinged on its use of language. “Never before have so many people owned one album, let alone on the day of its release,” crowed Apple’s website at the time. But by delivering U2 to all our devices without permission, what Apple demonstrated was that none of us “owned” our music in iTunes the way we thought we did. Those mp3s we collect, no matter how much we may value them, are not materially ours. We can’t re-sell them, and we can’t even (legally) give them away. “Owned” in Apple’s usage is a provisional status granted to us by the company, subject to its terms and conditions.
Can it be that the power of corporations like Apple and Spotify has become so great, these companies believe they can bend the meaning of words themselves? We see the reach for that kind of power in politics all the time: the meaning of words like “choice,” “freedom,” and above all “America” are wrestled over, as if determining their interpretation will determine our behaviors. Spotify can push Scorpion on its listeners, but I would venture that no one will like it any more than they did before it became so “recommended.” The use of power to warp language might fool some of us, some of the time. But in the end, that power crumbles surprisingly fast when we assert the truth of words—and own them.
Damon Krukowski is a musician (Damon & Naomi, Galaxie 500), publisher (Exact Change), and writer known for challenging the streaming industry. His most recent book, The New Analog, examines what we’ve lost as listeners in the digital age, while his latest Pitchfork feature navigates the paradox of ethical consumption via streaming services.
