The Sound of Spotify
U-M students love the music streaming service with a passion
—By Drew Tallquist
Now that spring has arrived in Ann Arbor, many University of Michigan students may find themselves cramming for midterms or enjoying the weather on the Diag (or even both); others might decide to update their music collection with fresh playlists or just spend some personal time with their jams. If you find yourself doing any of the latter, there is a good chance that you’re doing so on Spotify.
Spotify, the Sweden-based firm founded in 2006, has become the most widely-used music streaming provider in the market. With services spanning 93 countries (projected to be 178 by the end of 2021), it has accumulated over 345 million Monthly Active Users (MAU), with over 155 million having the paid premium subscription. Spotify has been praised by users for its massive library of music, sleek interface, personalized playlists, and more. Other music streaming services like Apple Music, Pandora, and Jay-Z’s TIDAL share the market, but the green circle is consistently increasing its market power.
With such a strong fanbase, it makes sense that Spotify is popular among the University of Michigan student body. In fact, in 2017, the company had U-M ranked fourth in quantity of party music (from a party-type playlist) played for that year. While this may not be as true four years later, Leaders and Best like Matt, Issy, Jasper, and Nathan continue to use Spotify throughout their college endeavors.
For Just About Everything
The life of a student at the University of Michigan is full of activities, including eating, traveling, academics, extracurriculars, and more. So, it should be no surprise that students, ranging from sophomores to seniors, tend to incorporate a little Spotify to their routines.
The range of college activities paired with Spotify varies from student to student, with a little similarity. Matt finds himself listening to music mostly while he completes homework, or casually hanging out with friends. “When I’m chilling with friends and we don’t want to have silence, we’ll put on Spotify,” he told me. Jasper, on the other hand, listens to music on his bus rides to and from class—significantly more prior to the COVID-19 pandemic—as well as working out and doing general chores. “If I’m putting away laundry or making my bed, I’m like, why don’t I flip on Spotify?” For Issy, music is used primarily for car rides, painting, and getting ready for the day, saying “Showering with Spotify is the best because you can queue up all your favorite songs first.” And Nathan, who estimates his listening time to be between 20 and 25 hours per week, plays 2000’s throwbacks on the app every day. “I’ll kind of just listen to it when I’m doing everything.”
“Everything” is an understatement of the progress that Spotify and other music streaming services have made in where, when, and for what music can be played. These streaming services are the latest products of the digital era in music-playing, an uplift from the MP3 player experience involving manually purchasing content and syncing it across devices. Of course, the MP3 was itself evolved from the Walkman cassette players, CD boomboxes, and other units that expanded the listening experience to outside the home and vehicle. Before then, music could only be heard live, on home and car radios, on home-centric vinyl or CD players, or in a televised program.
Now, as testimony sounds, many activities accompanied with a Spotify session use the application as a compliment, to set the tone of the experience. Activities like folding laundry or doing homework don’t require music (it may even be distracting with the latter for some), but having the music improved these experiences for Jasper and Matt. They do not particularly aim to listen to music — critically analyzing every decibel of sound and letting the music “wash over me,” as Matt phrased it — but are happy listening with a more casual intent. “The average music listener often uses music as a sort of aural wallpaper,” noted media-studies professor Robert Prey in an interview with The Atlantic. “It’s in the background and not important.” (We’ll return to this at a later point.) An audiophile may beg to differ, but for many U-M students, having the perfect vibe is better than the song itself, and Spotify helps accomplish this.
Using Spotify can affect a student’s taste in music and/or listening habits. Issy primarily enjoyed alternative-type music like Ripe, Lawrence, and Weezer, prior to her Spotify subscription; now, she jumps between different moods. “I have a playlist for ‘sad girl hours’ and one for upbeat painting music, among others,” said the senior, “and I’ve gotten into more artists like Travis Scott, Machine Gun Kelly, and Post Malone.” For Jasper, the service helped him develop an enjoyment of listening to full albums. “I’d listen to individual songs, but I never used to listen to albums,” he told me.
Yet Another Apple War
As a front-runner in the music-streaming industry, a discussion on Spotify would feel incomplete without mentioning their arch-nemesis, Apple Music. Launched in 2015, Apple Music joined the streaming bandwagon from which Spotify and other services were beginning to profit. The program initially incorporated iTunes, where pre-purchased downloadable music could be combined with those available through a paid subscription. Students at U-M overwhelmingly choose between Spotify and Apple Music compared to any other in the industry. Students who choose the latter might favor it for its seamless integration with Mac, iPhone, and other Apple products as well as its general similarity to Spotify.
Above the Rest
When considering the value of a music streaming service, there are many factors to potentially be considered, including pricing, data usage, and connectivity. Individuals may enjoy particular features, while others hate them. So, what makes Spotify so popular?
One of the more well-known innovations by Spotify is the algorithm incorporated into the user experience. The algorithm is arguably more intuitive than those rival providers in that it analyzes multiple aspects of a listener’s habits within the application, ranging from the tempo and length of songs they put on, to how they’ve interacted with songs in the past, to how others with similar music preferences listen to their music (for example, if you were to like the same specific type of song as another person, Spotify may suggest a song that the other person possibly likes). The result is a curated selection of songs designed to fit the user’s liking. Spotify uses this algorithm to create many personalized playlists, including their famous Discover Weekly. “The Discover Weekly,” Matt related, “has been good because I have an eclectic taste in music and it somehow seems to reflect that [my taste] is a lot of different stuff.” Thanks to such playlists, Matt can continue finding new music to enjoy from indie rock artists like Clairo and Video Age.
Other streaming services also use custom (though inefficient) algorithms, with Apple Music’s being the most similar to Spotify. However, industry reports indicate that Apple’s music recommendation is somewhat efficient in its human-curated artist radio stations, ranking below Spotify’s curated playlists.
U-M students also enjoy Spotify’s massive library of over 60 million songs, with music from the most popular artists today in addition to smaller, lesser-known performers on YouTube like Yungblud and Olivia O’Brien. “It’s very versatile in that aspect,” Issy said regarding the scope of Spotify’s library.
Wrapping Up the Year
When it comes to Spotify, the end of the year brings excitement to Spotify users in the form of Spotify Wrapped. Since 2015, the streaming service has established a program of analyzing all listening habits and music preferences of an active user throughout the year, and compiles the information into an interactive, personalized media experience. Spotify users can see their most-listened-to artists and songs, their top genres, and even how much time they spent listening to music and podcasts during that year. Each unique presentation (now in a format similar to an Instagram story) is delivered within Spotify, with the functionality for users to share individual snippets of their own “Wrapped” year on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and other social media applications.
Students at the University of Michigan, it seems, enjoy the analysis that Spotify provides with Wrapped.
Of course, with any technological feature, Spotify Wrapped has its drawbacks, though mostly from the user’s perspective. Spotify has to gather and analyze every ounce of a user’s listening data to make their report, but that’s as far as they go. All unusual periods of listening and all counts of individual songs are factored into a user’s report; therefore, a person who accidentally falls asleep listening to an album might see that album rank in their Wrapped presentation, or one who doesn’t use Spotify too often might see random tracks on their charts based on the music that was played, however limited that might be. Several users had these issues in 2018, expressing their disdain on Twitter.
The disappointment of finding undesired music on one’s Spotify Wrapped has actually lead Matt to be more mindful on what music he turns on. “I like seeing all the data and I wouldn’t want it to be skewed by listening to something over and over, just in the background,” he said. “If I’m listening to music, about to go to sleep, I’ll stop it [the music] very consciously.” By doing this, he seems to save himself the frustration of an unexpected Spotify Wrapped.
HiFi(ve) Spotify
Spotify has some new updates planned for 2021. In January, they announced the plan to release a HiFi (or High Fidelity) subscription this year, where subscribers would have access to remastered tracks with “lossless” audio quality, much compared to that of listening to a physical CD or vinyl record. HiFi audio was made popular in the 1980s, with stores selling specialized stereos, headphones, and other listening paraphernalia to improve the listening experience for listeners. Regardless, if you’ve never heard the term “HiFi” before, you’re not alone. Lossless audio is not very common in the music streaming industry today; TIDAL, Amazon Music HD, and Deezer essentially comprise this sector.
Spotify’s HiFi subscription is expected to cost users more than the standard premium plan. The Swedish enterprise has not released any information about such, but services like TIDAL and Amazon Music HD have set precedent by adding a few dollars to their standard price. TIDAL’s HiFi plan costs $19.99 compared to their standard subscription priced at $9.99, and Amazon Music Unlimited HD sells at $12.99, only $5 more than their standard. It can be assumed that Spotify will make a similar pricing decision as their launch date draws nearer.
As it turns out, there are some mixed feelings about whether students would want to use a HiFi subscription. Some students, like Nathan, may consider it based on what the price ends up totaling. “If it’s a couple dollars more, I’d use it,” he told me. Others, like Matt, don’t feel compelled to use this option based on how he listens to music. “I don’t listen to music just to have it wash over me and have the sound quality be perfect,” the senior said. “The sound quality of [the standard subscription] sounds pretty good.”
Matt and others aren’t the only people who feel this way; in 2015, a group of ten individuals completed a survey from NPR, where they were instructed to individually determine six “lossless” song files from their 128-kbps and 320-kbps (equivalent to Spotify’s “Very high” audio quality option) counterparts. Out of the sixty individual rounds, the group was correct 48% of the time. Some experts in audio and streaming technology list this result as an effect of a lack of conditioning to distinguish differences. “Somebody who has ears that are developed [to differentiate audio quality], they probably can hear a big difference, and it is a meaningful difference,” says Erin Barra, a producer, composer, and songwriter. “But to most people, they’re just not able to really hear that, or they’re not even listening in that way.” Being able to differentiate between a lossless and more-standard variant comes with practice and experience, just as any activity is learned. At the same time, though, Robert Prey’s statement on music’s use as an “aural wallpaper” suggests that the average listener, especially U-M students, would likely not benefit by paying a higher price for music quality that is not heavily valued. Regardless, if Spotify’s HiFi subscription sounds interesting to you, you may benefit from testing your skills before the plan rolls out.
The Spotify experience is shared every day by a portion of University of Michigan students, and creates a culture of music-listening that has spanned classes of Wolverines. While Apple Music and other competing services have their fair share of support, the green circle has made an overwhelming impact in a typical college experience. “It was something missing from my life, just an easy way to listen to music,” Jasper said.
Featured Photo by Drew Tallquist