One of the big takeaways from me from this year’s IASPM Conference, the biggest meeting of the top academics in popular music studies, was that Spotify sucks. The really interesting thing about Spotify, is that almost everyone who uses it seems to dislike it in some way. I’ve seen numerous complaints about their renumeration to artists; the way its shuffle algorithms work; the social integrations it offers; a variety of app bugs; the addition of audiobooks to the platform; and of course, their exclusive podcast deal with Joe Rogan, who endorsed Donald Trump for president. Needless to say, there’s a lot of issues with Spotify.

Why do we continue to use Spotify then? One simple, all-encompassing answer: it’s really, really, convenient. For the average price of one new album of music on iTunes each month, you can get access to basically any song ever made. The streaming age was such good value, us consumers couldn’t resist. If you listen to one (new) album’s worth of music in a month, you’re ahead. Of course, most people aren’t necessarily listening to new music on there, but even still – you don’t have to buy individual tracks, and you never have to worry about buying a whole album just for one song, or even worse, buying an album to find out you actually dislike most of it.

The problem with this is, though, that we became complacent. Spotify is now running rampant with AI-generated playlists based on its algorithm: the TikTok-ification of your music listening habits. Now you’ll only ever be presented with things a machine thought you’d like – no more interacting with real people to find out about new music. Each day your daylist will update with music just for you, based on Spotify’s enormous list of (partially AI-generated and utterly nonsense) genre tags, which include things like bubblegum. Huh? Can you describe what bubblegum music sounds like? I’ve never seen that in the local JB Hi-Fi.

To resist this, I’ve started rejecting Spotify’s algorithm-based playlists. This is actually incredibly easy to do; if a playlist says “made for you” or “by Spotify”, I ignore it. I’ve also returned to listening to albums in their entirety again. I actually find this a really elegant way to fight against the algorithm, as albums are and will continue to be how artists sell their products, and it provides a much deeper listening experience than playlists based around mood or genre. By listening to an album, you are taken on a journey by the artist, who debated for hours about where each song should go, and what the overall narrative of the album should be. You can also turn off autoplay in your spotify settings, so you won’t get slammed with algorithmically generated content after the album finishes – just the silence, that encourages you to sit with what you’ve heard, before you move on to another one. It’s also, funnily enough, really easy to make sure you get your money’s worth this way – just listen to one new album each month and you break even. I also think playlists by other people are OK – they have been human-curated, after all. It’s fighting against the insidious nature of having AI tell us what to listen to when it doesn’t even comprehend what it’s talking about that is the problem.

Any other tips? Leave them below.