There are clearly more pressing issues in the world right now than not being able to access your favourite Chill Vibes playlist, but it didn’t stop Spotify’s temporary outage causing quite the palaver . “Something’s not quite right,” the official Spotify Status account rather nonchalantly tweeted at 6.22pm on Tuesday evening, as a significant portion of its 400-million-strong user base tried and failed to log in or, in some cases, were told that their accounts had ceased to exist. “Thanks for your reports!”
And the fact that, at the last count, the tweet had generated more than 11,000 replies and 9,000 quote-tweets — the tones of which ranged from meme-fuelled sass to frantically typed anxiety — shows just how much we’ve come to rely on the tech giant.
This is nothing new. A huge portion of our lives — sending work emails, finding out whether it’s going to rain later, ordering a takeaway burrito, reading the awful news, paying for the Tube, scrolling through the endless stream of TikTok, and all the rest — now relies on a handful of tech companies who will inevitably have the occasional hiccup and, as a result, bring our lives to a deadening halt. We’re beholden to the inner workings of a server in some undisclosed location, hanging onto the promise of the coding that’s tasked with keeping the lights on, and we don’t really have a choice in the matter.
Or maybe not. Things haven’t always been this way. Historians tell us that, a very long time ago, our personal music libraries weren’t pixels on a screen, but instead consisted of small, round discs of polycarbonate plastic, with a shiny metallic layer on top. These were placed in monstrously large machines, from which a noise emerged. Some have even posited — with the help of hieroglyphics, or something — that aeons before then, an early form of human listeners relied on slightly larger, flat objects, often darker in colour, sometimes referred to as (and forgive me if I’m spelling this wrong) “vinyl”.
Ok, I’m being facetious. But the point remains that times have changed dramatically. Despite its problems (of which there are some quite fundamental ones), streaming has plenty of benefits compared to CDs and vinyl; the unfettered access it gives us to the world’s music, far greater (and cheaper) than those discs, is chief among them. It’s been enough to convince us to give up on music in the physical realm and dive into digital.
And now that streaming has come along and changed the face of music, we find ourselves in a mind-boggling state of affairs, with our listening habits more or less dictated by the whims of a Swedish billionaire who could, feasibly, decide to call it a day and take our entire libraries with him. It seems an unlikely scenario (said billionaire presumably likes the billions Spotify makes him), but no longer do we rely on physical things, pieces of music that, bar a ransacking, house fire or flash flood, were ours to clutch onto for the rest of time. Instead, we depend on something that is out of our control, and could disappear at the flick of a switch.
Or, as last night’s outage proved, whenever an unexpected gremlin appears in the system. And for something as important as music — the stuff that uplifts, consoles, motivates, enlivens us — surely we need to safeguard ourselves against the inevitable. Spotify won’t always be here, but music will.
Admittedly, we’re in a bit of a bind. If you’re the kind of person who has hundreds and hundreds of albums downloaded on your Spotify account, you’d need to take out a small mortgage to start buying all those albums back in physical form. But maybe now’s the time to start, especially with the music that means the most to you. The next time you’re hit with a bump in the streaming road, you’ll be pleased you did.
