Music streaming streaming seems like a sweet pudding. First, it’s really hot when when it’s new to you, and there seems to be a perfect pudding for every taste. Are you still excited about Spotify’s Wrapped or Discover Weekly or has the Spotify pudding become too cool for you? The Pudding.Cool is also a satirical publication, and their alternative wrapped music taste analysis mocks “cool music taste” in an ironic way that still goes viral somehow, years after I allowed it to mock my own musical taste. Statistics can lie especially when you hobby DJ for guests and family frequently, but still sometimes you might feel caught, so why not give The Pudding’s cool sound check a try?
How bad is my Spotify?
Actually, don’t ask “how bad is my Spotify?” but “how bad is Spotify?” As the world’s most popular music streaming service, Spotify is facing growing criticism for pushing AI music, not paying artists fairly and for their managers’ political activities and investment decisions. Spotify alternatives like Qobuz or Tidal are similar to use and we can migrate existing Spotify playlists to the new streaming services than often even offer free trials in the first month.
However, in this article I want to focus on other aspects of music streaming, especially how using it can change our musical taste.
Is a Profitable Industry shaping our Music Taste?
How bad is our musical taste and who’s to blame for it? Seriously, some see music streaming as a substitute for the lack of concerts, good albums and radio stations. Record companies seemed to have obsoleted themselves by inventing digital music, but there are still is a music industry and it’s making more money than ever (according to RIAA, The Recording Industry Association of America’s annual report 2024) with music streaming accounting for the vast majority of recorded music revenues in 2024.
So, the music industry made more money than ever before, while laying of their the staff, and public radio stations also reduced jobs for experiecned DJs and educated music journalists. Most bands can’t make a living anymore, partially because of AI-generated kitsch, so we might wonder: is this another wrong turn technology took in recent years? I think it’s not technology to blame but the way that we use it in our commercialized society.
People Love Music
Why do people listen to pre-recorded music in the first place? Many people don’t sing or play an instrument but they still love music. Everyone has certain songs that we can hear again and again and those songs keep sparking joy in our hearts. But these are not the same songs for every single one of us. This is known as musical taste. Unfortunately, even the most beloved song gets boring or annoying over time so we need to mix taste with discovery. The concept of taste and genres can help us discover new music that we will probably appreaciate. However, the music scene got quite diverse and fragementet besides the mainstream top pop artists.
Genre-ification: how can I analyse my Music Taste?
Do musical genres even exist and do they matter? How userful are arbitrary genre lists like the classic MP3 metadata including musical genres like “Acid Punk”, “Lo-Fi” and “Oldies” or Spotify’s constantly changing micro-genres trying to reflect and shape emerging trends using machine learning and human curation? Who decides what genres are called which artists represent them? Record sales, numbers of listeners, educated experts or algorithms? And if algorithms rule, can I tune and train them?
How can I make streaming platforms respect my Music Preferences?
Strategies:
- Follow every artist that you love.
- Prefer human-made curated playlists,
- use the play related radio function.
- Create your own short and concise playlists,
- play them often
- make them available offline to save energy, and
- avoid so-called “smart shuffle” to prevent commercial promotions.
But even the best strategies to tune your algorithmic music recommendations can’t prevent that it usually gets boring or annoyingly repetitive eventually, and despite striving for independence, streaming services will still try to sell you the same “Radio Gaga” that’s on air already.
Taste-Related vs. Curated Radio Playlists
Mentioning radio: I have been listening to BBC DJs and there are still personalities on air these days like the sound check quartet on radio eins (Soundcheck – das musikalische Quartett), while other long-running radio shows like “Happy Sad” will sadly be discontinued in 2026. The soundcheck stands out from most other programmes in that it presents different views and tastes in the same show, discussing a diverse range of musical albums from the most obscure experiemental artists to top selliing pop stars.
It does make sense to listen to all tracks of an album in the order intended by an artist, and check out other people’s playlists and play those in their original order without shuffling or applying your algorithmic filter bubble. But maybe I just say this, because I’m old and I’ve grown up recording music on tapes where shuffle wasn’t even an option. Honestly, I have to admit that I rarely listen to albums in the old-fashioned way anymore. It seems like streaming music has manipulated my musical age already.
What’s my Musical Listeting Age?
Do you know your musical listening age? Mine was twenty this year, according to Spotify Wrapped, but comparing Spotify’s annuals statistics and Pudding Cool analysis over a period of several years shows that my musical taste seems to very completely every two years. A radio DJ reported his Spotify listening age to be 85, probably because he loves Delta Blues music. The conceptual flaw seems obvious. Most people above 80, at least those that I know, don’t listen to streaming services at all, but many young people do it a lot.
Age is just a number? Musical listening age vs. medical hearing audiogram
Spotify’s made up metric may be a creative word-play, but there is actually a medical listening age, used to describe the development of children’s listening skills and measure age-related hearing loss. Spotify’s listening age makes not much sence and seems to polarize towards either a very young or very old musical taste cliché, according to a non-representative survey among my party guests.
Does Spotify worsen my Music Taste?
So, does Spotify amplify bad music taste? would it be better if I only listen to Bandcamp and buy selected vinyl in a record shop? I guess it’s not about the medium but about how we use it. Yes we should follow bands on Bandcamp and in real life, support local record shops and go to concerts. We should hire bands and DJs for significant events. However, for everyday listening I wouldn’t recommends repeating the same few albums over and over. At the end of the day, there is no objective measurement of a “good musical taste”. That concept just doesn’t exist, and services like The Pudding’s cool Spotify analysis can remind us that listening to the right bands and the right kind of music does not make us better people. It can also encourage us to broaden our horizon and look for new music with an open mind. But, just like Spotify’s yearly wrapped report, any kind of statistics about musical taste or a muscial listening age are mostly entertaining and must taken with a grain of salt.
How to Support Artists and make Musical Streaming less Toxic
Streaming services like Spotify can inspire and help us find new music within our previous music taste, but they can also manipulate our musical taste and make it worse in the sense of preferring those artists that a lobby wants to push, including fake bands generated by AI that don’ need fair pay to make a living, like real musicians do. Let’s never forget that!
