Are people taking Spotify for granted?

Every year, like clockwork, Reddit fills up with complaints about Spotify. “It’s too expensive!” “My Wrapped wasn’t cool enough!” Really? Are you serious? Do you have any idea what it was like back in the day? Let me paint you a picture:

You’d shell out $15-$20 for an album—often just to hear one good song. The rest? Absolute filler garbage. And when you wanted to hear that one song while driving, you’d have to dig through a giant CD case on the passenger seat (a totally safe activity, by the way), praying you didn’t crash. Hey, at least we had front bench seats back in those days and those big honkin’ cases had their own spot in the middle. Don’t even get me started on the radio, where you’d endure hours of commercials and overplayed nonsense just hoping your favorite song might come on.

Also, CDs fucking sucked. The slightest scratch and the thing would be ruined and you’d need to buy an album all over again. And don’t get me started on Cassette tapes. Vinyl is great and I collect it, you do have to keep it clean and everything… but I thought we were talking about portability here. Records clearly aren’t portable.

And now people have access to practically every song ever recorded, at their fingertips, for the price of a fancy coffee per month—and they’re complaining? Give me a break.

My Foray Into the Spotify Alternatives

Fine, you don’t like Spotify. Maybe you’re considering Tidal, Apple Music, or YouTube Music. I tried that experiment about a year ago, and spoiler: it did not go well. Here’s the tea:

Tidal: Sure, it’s hyped as the audiophile’s dream. But guess what? It sounds exactly the same as Spotify. Unless you have magical golden ears—or you’ve convinced yourself you do—you’re not going to notice a difference. Also, Tidal’s device-switching is a trainwreck. Picture this: I left music running in my office, hopped in the car, and… nothing. Tidal didn’t even ask if I wanted to transfer playback to my phone. Spotify, on the other hand, makes this seamless. It’ll politely ask, “Hey, still grooving in the office, or are we moving this party to the car?” That’s a user experience win.

Apple Music: Where do I even begin? The app was buggy as hell, with missing album covers and broken metadata. When I reached out to support, they told me, “Maybe your work network is blocking the content.” Sure, Jan. Funny how Spotify never had that problem on the exact same network.

YouTube Music: Look, it’s fine if you’re nostalgic for the Wild West of pirated MP3s circa 2004. But if you value an organized library, it’s a nightmare.

If You Must Switch…

Look, I’m not here to sell you on Spotify. If you live on a single device and don’t care about Spotify Connect, maybe you’ll be fine switching to something else. But for me, Spotify’s ease of use, seamless integration across devices, and simple reliability are unbeatable.

And for the Tidal evangelists: stop telling me it’s “more pure” or “analog-sounding.” It’s not. It reminds me of when I worked at a pro audio company. Big wig audio engineers would swear up and down they could hear “compression artifacts” in a file I uploaded. Fun fact: I never changed the file. It was the very same file they gave me. Then when they asked me to change the file, I’d reload the exact same thing they just heard, and magically, they’d decide it sounded “better.” Yeah, okay. Magic ears my ass. More like magic egos.

As for Spotify Wrapped…

So, your Spotify Wrapped wasn’t “good enough” this year? Who cares! If you’re such a data nerd that this actually ruins your day, let me clue you in on a little secret: you don’t have to wait until Thanksgiving every year to see your stats.

Head over to Stats for Spotify anytime you want, and you’ll get pretty much the same info—without the dramatic video template everyone else saw basically the same. In fact, considering Spotify skimped on genre insights this year, you’ll actually get more data there. Problem solved.

Final Thought

We live in a world where the entirety of music history fits in your pocket, and people are still mad. Maybe we’re all just spoiled. Or maybe some of us just don’t want to admit how good we’ve got it.

Be sure to check out this Logie Bogie comic, inspired by this post: