Spotify has released a function that has the potential to be totally awesome but ultimately ends up being fairly annoying and downright wasteful: "Serendipity."
Kudos to Kyle McDonald, the current artist-in-residence at Spotify who came up with the concept. But it needs more work to be relevant or fun to anyone. The concept is simple enough: With more than 40 million users across the world, there's a good chance that two are listening to the same song at almost the exact same time. Serendipity provides a map that shows where these people are. Sounds cool right?
Here are the problems:
A) You need to be listening at almost literally the exact. Same. Time. No doubt there are at least a thousand people simultaneously listening to Iggy Azalea's "Fancy" right now, as it's the biggest song of the summer. The problem is that Serendipity won't identify them as "at the same time" unless the tracks are started within milliseconds of each other. So you won't see everywhere the song is playing in general, just where those two freak occurences are happening.
B) Good luck finding something that's not from a Top 40 performer. Going along with our previous complaint, there's no way you're going to see someone listening to the same thing as you if you're jamming to something totally obscure, such as Zu's Carboniferous (guilty). We'd be surprised if anyone listens to that album the same day that we do, much less the same track within milliseconds.
C) Finding who has similar tastes to you is a moot point because you don't get to choose anything. Our biggest complaint about Serendipity is that it's just a display. You don't get to search for "All About That Bass" or "Anarchy in The UK" or anything. The map shows you what it wants. And then three seconds later it spins away to show you the newest syncs. It looks cool for a few seconds but the poison cherry on top is that every time the map shifts, it switches to the tune in question, which means constant, migraine-inducing changes in music.
D) We shouldn't hate on art EXCEPT...Spotify spent a lot of money on this. We have no idea what Mr. McDonald's salary is, but we know this took a ton of programming. For a project that, at its best, is just art. We appreciate the thought process but music streaming services can find better places for their extra cash. Like paying the performers we listen to. One song stream at Spotify is worth roughly $0.00521 to the label that released the track, which means the performer gets even less in the long run. It would take around 135 streams for the song to equal one iTunes download for bands such as Zu. The moral: We don't need Spotify's art projects. We need it to pay its performers so we can continue to enjoy both Spotify and recorded music well into the future.
