I have used Spotify less and less over the years, generally leaning into wifi radio instead on dedicated devices. That’s how I have escaped it algorithmic clutches. I decided to check in anyway on this year’s “Wrapped” offering, and anxiously loaded it up while the shitty AI DJ voice you can’t change or turn off told me what my favorite song of the year was… literally a song I could barely recognize, by an artist whose name I had no idea. Clearly this was not my best song of the year… in fact, it turned out to be a song that I only barely minimally “liked” (more like tolerate), and which Spotify is literally the one who is always forcing me to listen to it. Which is more the primary function now of that app, as far as I can tell: connecting customers to the payola crap it needs to play to my demographic in order to satisfy its paying clients. That’s not a good model for success. After that, my top songs were all from Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, which I wrote about recently. Not very surprising or interesting. Yet another in the now sky-high pile of epic streaming app fails which have become the norm nowadays.

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