Prolific and casual music-listeners alike have been plagued by the turmoil of music apps, and a common consensus in the community is that they are just simply not working for us anymore. The evolution of how we listen to music has been drastic; from gramophones, to vinyls, to compact discs, the handy MP3 and finally the digital music app – the way in which we enjoy our favourite tunes is a matter of technology. The modern era of music has its benefits, of course. Having access to nearly every artist and discography that you can imagine at the figurative tap of a finger is fascinating, and a wholly altered experience to previous ways of listening. Past methods relied on physical media, and limited you to burning your music onto a CD mixtape so you could indulge while using your Walkman. It’s also the most popular method of streaming music, with Spotify boasting over ‘678 million active listeners’ every month. This large user-base facilitates the intimate act of sharing favoured music, indulging in playlists made by other users, or creating another way to keep in touch and get to know friends and family a little better – it supports a tangible community.
However, as aforementioned, digital music simply isn’t working anymore. The common culprits are large conglomerates (notably with the funds to fix these issues, but remain stagnant in doing so), like Spotify, Apple Music, or Prime Music. The complaints are widespread for the issues these apps proffer. Notably, app crashes are frequent – as any Google search will tell you. Thousands of online guides offer easy solutions to app crashes, such as ‘Is Your Spotify App Down? Blame Podcasts. Here’s How To Fix It.’, or ‘Apple Music Keeps Closing or Crashing? 7 Reasons (Solved)’, but the issue remains ever-present. Hearing news of ‘widespread outages’ on apps is hardly uncommon, and they arguably appear to be getting more frequent as time progresses. Having to hotwire a solution to be able to listen to your morning podcast, or sing in the shower shouldn’t be the case when we know companies have the technology, time and funds to fix the same issues that keep cropping up. The idea becomes even more ludicrous when you take into account that many of these apps require a paywall to use even the most basic functions, which is another key issue.
When you download an app that markets itself as a ‘music app’, the common presumption would be that it allows you to play music, but all too frequently, this isn’t the case. Spotify has only just recently allowed non-paying users to choose what songs they want to listen to, and Apple refuses to let you listen to songs you haven’t paid for or if you don’t have an Apple Music subscription. The price point for these subscriptions averages out to around £11 a month on an individual plan with no discounts. Over the year, this means we could be paying up to £132 every year, which is largely unaffordable (even at a reduced price point for student accounts, which is £84 a year). Furthermore, lots of these profits aren’t even reflected back to the artists that make the music. The disparity between executive take-homes and music artists on Spotify has been the subject of critical acclaim. The ‘streamshare model’ means artists with ‘[roughly] 8,000-80,000 monthly streams … [average an income of] $24-$400 per month’, with a ‘rate of $0.003-$0.005 per stream’, which makes it a lot harder to earn a liveable wage. For comparison, Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, has a net worth of ‘$4.8 billion’, which supposes an unequal profit margin.
In a broader critique, I personally have found the ever-changing user interface of music apps to be a problem of its own, making site navigation and personalisation troublesome, or even confusing. As a Spotify user myself, the frequent small changes to familiar buttons has made even playlist creation a more frustrating experience as the designers of the app toy with muscle memory, a sentiment that may be shared by the broader public.
In conclusion, as it would be near-impossible to part with these apps for frequent listeners like myself, it is evident the change needs to come from those in control of our listening experience. By making apps more user and artist-friendly, I am sure the user-base of digital streaming apps will find a noticeable difference in the pleasure of listening and steer themselves away from a negative user-experience.