1.

One of my fondest memories in my (even) younger age was receiving permission to purchase a whole album on iTunes. Back when a song would be around 1.99 each, these gifts from parents/siblings/grandmothers would genuinely have such a wonderful effect on me. I powerfully received the permission to spend digital money! On something that meant so much to me, a song, a song for me, playable anytime of my choosing on my handed-down iPod Nano, and later my deceased grandfather’s iPhone 3G (My first ever iPhone!! Thanks Gramps!). Digital currency which felt so much more expensive than physical currency back then. Or maybe my rose-tinted glasses with their prescription of youth are what makes me feel that way. It definitely plays a part, no matter what disclaimer I seek to write in. But with their permission, I would then browse the iTunes catalogue for artists I liked, songs that I was sick of using YouTube to listen to. Too young to know what torrenting is, I was the ideal user of iTunes to profit off of—I don’t need a Light et al. Walkthrough Method to understand how I got hilariously scammed via their lucrative pricing model.

But iTunes’s clunkiness and customizability felt more physical if that makes sense. It was clunky and cumbersome, a right click would lead to 20 different selection bars, each with their own drop-down menus of possible query. Spotify on the other hand, feels like an attack on the intelligence of anyone who uses it. The least afforded (STS definition of afforded) app in my eyes, such a miserable existence I get to lead where this is the dominating platform for music. God forbid I return to Apple Music, who has done to iTunes (which already had numerous amounts of issues, like the insanely expensive pricing I described) what Brian Herbet has done to his father’s work.

2.

There are so many damning things about Spotify that I just can’t understand. I mean, I do understand why, the role of profit, their pursuit and—to an extent—achievement of a certain monopolization/foothold in the music streaming industry, no need to actually care about providing a quality product. But it pisses me off. Exploit me! Sell my data! Harvest my information! Just make your product better! I genuinely can’t say I care where my data goes, I get around 3-5 spam messages and 2 spam phone calls a day, I just want to listen to music while I turn my phone ringer off, so no notification telling me my PayPal was hacked for the 6th time this week can disturb me. I exist in our digital space in a post-disturbed manner.

How is it that almost every time I check the lyrics to a song, the Spotify music lyric service Musixmatch manages to screw it up? How hard can this be? What a deeply ambivalently harmful effect on the way people consume and interact with music. Such lack of care for the role of lyricism, such lack of care for the spoken sung word.

Why can’t I change the colour of the app? How come when I add a photo to my playlists, suddenly the small banner near the photo will adjust to one of the random colours of the photo, but I have no say in what shade or the extent to which that coloured banner gets displayed on the page? And that AI DJ oh man, I welcome its soy-milk stared defenders. I can’t imagine anyone using this feature, apart from the initial novel look into this new addition to an app which gets more regressions than additions.

I hope the person who made the decision on the integration of Smart Shuffle has the light snuffed out of their eyes. I already have a problem with auto-generated playlists, as I feel it promotes ambivalence and a lack of care towards what we consume. But smart shuffle annoys me to an extent similar to a rash that no steroid cream can deflame. Now, of course, I don’t have to turn this feature on. But every time I rotate between shuffle and don’t shuffle; smart shuffle intrudes on what was once a button that meant on and off. Smart Shuffle is like adding the yellow light to the green and red traffic light. Except this yellow will just gesture and articulate a vague “I don’t know, but I guess you could go this way or stop if you want'. “ It’s meaningless, devoid of choice. Forcing it upon the user, breaking the instinct of the shuffle button that has so long been ingrained since the early days of music streaming.

3.

Every month I am greeted by a new, increasingly worse UI. On desktop and IOS. Everything degrades, everything rots and aims to trap you with not just their algorithms, but their technological infrastructure simultaneously. A casino will design their space like a cage, every disguised exit, carpeted walkway, staff member, all function to make the exit of the casino as hard to find as possible. Trapping those inside, making it hard to navigate, hard to leave. The result is more bets. Here, the result is more use, so they can package off our data with the tenderness a Starbucks closer has for the pastries in the display case.

This is no crazy revelation, Nick Seaver has a wonderful article that I was introduced to via Dr. Stephanie Dick’s class about how algorithms function as traps. But, it is this failure of UI/UX design that infuriates me the most, and I have no idea whether it just comes down to their designers’ lack of taste, or some justification of the maintenance of their job by making the design worse, so they can swoop in and fix the problems that they themselves helped implement.

4.

If there’s anything to take away from my incessant whining, just please turn off the Normalize Volume button in your Spotify settings. The sound quality is already poor compared to what it could be, but this at least had a night and day difference. As long as I don’t visibly see how the app looks by shutting my not-shut-enough eyelids, operating it with the skill and finesse only someone who’s performed using their phone at the level of an addicted habitual user can, and just let the music affect me and not the visual aspect (which is honestly, for lack of a better word, healthy), I just might be able to get through this year.

Or I’ll go to YouTube Music, what a miserable existence.