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This can be either live performances (recorded or not) or pre-recorded music.

Why I Left Spotify

I have decided to leave Spotify after trying it for the last 8 months or so. Why? It wasn’t because of total dissatisfaction. Instead, a handful of irritants began to wear on me while using it.

What It Does Right

Before going into what I don’t like about Spotify, I do want to do go over two things that it does well. The first is volume levelling. This is something that is a bit annoying with Apple Music and their various apps (and no, “sound check” doesn’t work all that well). Spotify does a commendable job of ensuring that all songs in a playlist have similar volume levels.

I’ve only ever used it for playlists, so I can’t comment on how it might work or not work with an album. I know Apple’s “sound check” will mess up some albums, so I largely leave it off as a result. I’m still very much an album listener, not just a playlist shuffler.

The other thing I rather like is cross-device shuffle synchronization (at least when it works). It is nice that I can stop music on my desktop or an iPad, fire it up on my phone in the car, and take up where I left off. Mostly. The phone app doesn’t always get updated unless you remember to open it while still connected to wifi and before you get in the car.

The First Irritation: Bad Playlist Shuffling

My first, and probably biggest, complaint is with how it builds the playback order for shuffling. Frankly, it does an abysmal job of digging into the entire playlist. Instead, it seems to be biased toward playing the songs that are played most frequently.

But that means it seems to be working against itself: it assumes a song is preferred because it got played a lot. But it was the one deciding to play it. I’m convinced that if I shuffled one playlist long enough I’d end up hearing the same song over and over again (“oh, Geoff like this because he’s listened to it a lot, so I’ll play it again!”).

The supposed “random order” is also fixed for some period of time. This appears to hold even if I restart the app, but not always. I have some smaller playlists where, after the app reached the end, it played everything again in the exact same order. It isn’t clear what it takes to get it to rebuild the shuffle order with any certainty.

That’s not how I expect shuffle to work. I’m expecting that, once it’s played everything, it will build a new order and start to play that. It’s what I’ve experienced with the Music app on my Apple devices. And if I restart the app on a device, the next time I try that playlist, the shuffle order is different again.

The Second Irritation: When Sync Doesn’t Work

The Apple apps don’t seem to try to synchronize shuffling playlists across devices. The “bad”, if you will, is that you can’t take up where you left off on another device. But the “good” is that each device has its own playback order, so you aren’t re-listening to the same sequence of songs.

Spotify playback synchronization works, but only if all instances of the app are active and connected. This can be a problem on iOS and iPadOS, because not all apps get to work in the background, or work at all times in the background.

This leaves me, often, having to re-listen to the same sequence of songs in the car that I just listened to for however long in the office. I’d rather it not do that.

The Third Irritation: The Disappearing Content

Because there’s no option to buy content in Spotify, availability is at the mercy of whatever licence agreement Spotify has with the music distributor. It isn’t a widespread problem, but I have discovered songs on playlists that I could play previously grayed-out because they aren’t available in Canada anymore. On Apple Music, for anything I’ve bought off the store, I still have it, even if it disappears from sale on the store later.

Okay, I get it, they don’t get a licence with no time limit. But if I had a way to buy the song, and get my own irrevocable, perpetual, non-transferrable licence, that could be avoided. But there’s no way to do that as far as I know.

The Fourth Irritation: No Sync of Downloaded Content

If I add audio files to Spotify on one device, they are available on that device and nowhere else. If I do the same with Apple Music, as long as the file is under 5GB in size, it will sync to all my other devices.

So, if I rip a CD (because there’s no digital copy of the music) and add it to my Apple Music library, it’s on all my devices. If I do that on Spotify, they only appear on the device where I added them. It’s annoying.

It Was Interesting, But I’m Done

I’m glad I gave Spotify a shot, because it wasn’t all bad. And if I had to use it because I’ve moved away from the Apple universe, then I could live with it. But while I have something that works better for me, I’m sticking with that.

I am not saying people should avoid Spotify. How I use it, what I expect, will be different that what others do. For some, Spotify is a far superior service compared to Apple Music. But it isn’t working for me in a way that I would like.

Erased Vocals, Incorrect Lyrics, Music Brilliance

I stumbled up on this video on YouTube by the Professor of Rock, and learned something about one of my all-time favourite songs, California Dreamin’ by the Mommas & the Poppas. Watch the details about the history of the song, and the consequences first. Then come back and read my thoughts on the subject, because I have some opinions of my own. None of them, though, will necessary conflict or contrast with those in the video.

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The Beginnings of 80’s Music

Rick Beato recently released a video talking about some of the landmark albums that were released in 1978. He admits that the list is incomplete, but it features albums with songs that would come define a new era in music, what generally call “80’s music”.

Releases vs. Calendars

Music styles and genres don’t generally stick to formal calendar boundaries. Music is released when the artists and/or labels figure it’s ready. As such, there isn’t a clear delineation on a calendar when some “era” of music begins. But being who we are as humans, we will often describe something based on the decade we associate it with.

What we think of as “50’s music” didn’t really get started until 1954/1955, and lasted until around 1963/1964. There is “60’s music”, which didn’t get going until 1964 and transformed into “70’s music” closer to 1974. The disco era sort-of started in the mid-to-late 1970’s and by the early 1980’s it was pretty much gone. But in both these cases, there was overlap, there was a transition. There wasn’t a hard bright line that delineated these eras, and certainly not any that line up conveniently on decade boundaries.

A Defining Decade Personally

I turned 16 in 1980, so the 1980’s defined a lot for me personally. I finished high school, then university, and had my first full-time job. It was the decade that I moved out on my own. It was when I bought my first new car. We had the Winter Olympics in Calgary, and the Flames made two trips to the Stanley Cup final, winning in 1989. My brother and I attended Game 1 of the 1986 Cup finals, which was the only game the Flames won in that series.

Music has always been a big part of my life, if only as the ‘soundtrack’ to it. I spent 4 years at the University of Calgary with headphones on or nearby. My knock-off of a Walkman was eventually replaced by a real Sony Walkman for my last year of university, and it or a small boombox were ever-present from 1986 onward. I was always playing music somewhere: around the apartment, in the car, when coding. During university, most of that music was typical 80’s music: Billy Joel, Genesis, The Police, and a host of others. I also listened to a lot of ELO, and they became one of my favourite bands, along with The Moody Blues.

1978 Was A Watershed Year

When you listen to Rick’s list, you get the first or new albums from some quintessential 80’s music acts: Dire Straits, Billy Joel, The Police, Kate Bush, AC/DC, Van Halen, Bob Seger, Devo, Rush, Peter Gabriel. More would come in 1979 with acts that had debut or new albums such as Pat Benetar and Genesis. These groups and others began to transform the sound of popular music, and genres like New Wave would find their footing.

1978 was definitely a watershed year. It is, I would argue, the beginning of what we think of as “80’s music” in western culture.