I woke up one day last year and I realized I didn’t listen to music anymore. Instead, I just listened to sludge, a blur of indistinguishable songs that mimicked my musical taste. My addiction to slimes stemmed from Spotify’s algorithmically curated playlists, which promised to help me focus or find music tailored to my tastes. The app’s design always pushed me in that direction, so I dutifully followed. It was so easy! Searching for good music takes time. But with a twist, these playlists gave me endless mush that dissolved into the background. Often it was from artists I had never heard of before and once the playlist was updated I would never look again.
Sometime last year, I decided: enough is enough. I didn’t want mud to be the soundtrack to my life. Instead, I launched a one-woman backlash that has so far involved resisting Spotify’s call to “discover” new music on a weekly basis, following artists I like on smaller platforms like SoundCloud, and making the drastic decision to spend $ 50 on a vinyl album. It’s already saved on my phone.
I had been feeling pretty good kicking my slime habit. But last week I heard a clip of Ariana Grande singing Rihanna’s song “Diamonds.” It’s just that Grande wasn’t there. in fact singing. her voice had been AI generated. This is the new iteration of slime, I figured it out. And that got me thinking about the events of 20 years ago that led us to this point, where the sludge threatens to take over music streaming.
Two decades ago, two music platforms were launched on a rapidly growing and lawless internet. The first was The Pirate Bay, a torrent file-sharing site that allowed anyone to binge on music without spending a dime. the other was Apple iTunes Music Store— now iTunes Store only — which celebrates its 20th anniversary next week. Compared to The Pirate Bay, hoarding music on iTunes was expensive, with most songs costing around 99 cents.
The launch of these two platforms, less than a year apart, marked a crossroads in the way we consume music. The architects of each had a clear vision of the future of online music. When I spoke to Peter Sunde, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay, this week, he said the site set out to make music available to everyone, hoping (perhaps idealistically) that it would give artists a larger audience ready to purchase concert tickets or merchandise. Apple’s project, on the other hand, offered the music industry a way to maintain its footing in the scary new world created by the Internet, enriching Apple’s business while escaping the mania for free downloads epitomized by sites like napster.
iTunes survived the official Pirate Bay. The torrent site was demolished in 2014 and the Swedish founders, including Sunde, spent a short jail term for copyright infringement. But the dominant music streaming model turned out to be something in between: unlimited music for a subscription fee (Spotify) or your time watching ads (the free version of YouTube). However, one thing about the iTunes Music Store proliferated: Apple consolidated the songs as a separate product. “No one had ever sold a song for 99 cents”, Steve Jobs said WIRED’s Steven Levy, its regular host, in 2003, adding that he needed to reassure the record labels that this would not spell the death of the album.
The record labels were right to be concerned. Apple’s decision to release songs contributed to the death of the album. That, in turn, opened the doors to sludge, where playlists liberated tracks from albums and even artists entirely. My biggest problem with algorithmic control playlist culture This is how the format – endless streams of disparate tracks designed for background sound – made me feel like the music was disposable and the artists interchangeable.