At long last, I’m back on Tinder.
For various reasons too depressing and trauma-laden to get into in such a venue as this, I vacated the app, at least functionally, for a period of roughly a year. I have, at various times in the intervening period, opened the app only to be seized with such a debilitating wave of anxiety that I close it and force it out of my mind for a period of several months.
Yet, when it comes to dating in [current year], Tinder seems, to many, a necessary evil. It’s to this end that I—and many others my age—when single, find themselves inevitably drawn back into the beckoning glow of that insipid little fire icon.
I, like many people, hate Tinder.
Though I, like many people, I hate Tinder, I do not hate it for any of the reasons most commonly cited. It’s not for its enforcement of a binary gendered division, it’s not for its incessant attempts to get you to spend a frankly extortionate amount of money on it, it’s not even for the fact that I possess the specific combination of neurodivergence and social anxiety which crosses the threshold of “quirky” into territory which makes interacting with end users the way the app intends its own Herculean task.
Yes, these are all phenomena the app reinforces. Yes, I would define each of these broadly as “problems.” No, I don’t hate Tinder for any of those reasons. In the realm of online dating, these would seem rather a given.
If I’m being honest, I don’t even hate Tinder so much as I despise its UI.
As intuitive and bespoke as the “swipe right/swipe left” gimmick is in theory, anyone having used Tinder for a period of time exceeding five minutes knows that, in practice, it is anything but. Uploading a photo to your Tinder profile is just about the worst experience of its kind one can have on any comparable multi-million dollar app. If we’re being honest, just about everything about Tinder is pretty close to the worst experience you can have on an app not made by computer science undergrads or designed to mine Bitcoin on your smartphone.
Tinder is an app which, under all its rounded widgets, minimalist icons and red gradient sheen, is so poorly designed that I genuinely believe any person with good sense would slide right off it. However, Tinder users generally don’t have good sense—they are, after all, on Tinder. The key difference between Tinder and, say, Instagram or Twitter is, of course, that Tinder users are so horny they are willing to tolerate an experience which rivals bashing one’s head into a door frame in terms of desirability.
The endgame of Tinder is sex. As much as we can pretend that Tinder is about “dating”—placing upon this word the implication of searching for a type of fulfillment interpersonal and romantic rather than strictly carnal—Tinder is both generally more used for and quantifiably better at finding people with whom to have sex.
In service of finding the person whom you’d be least embarrassed to have had sex with upon a later date of recollection, Tinder offers myriad discrete categorical descriptors with which to describe oneself. Sometime before the last time which I had rejoined Tinder (June 2022) and the last time I was on the app prior to that (October 1st, 2021) they had added an option to disclose your star sign. Revolutionary stuff.
Everything on Tinder is designed to give you the power to curate how you appear to others. It’s not as if the app combs through your camera roll and arbitrarily assigns you a handful of photos (though I’m sure some “entrepreneur” with money to burn is working on that very idea as I write this very sentence)—you, the user get to choose how you are seen. I get to pick the photos in which my tits look the biggest, my ass looks the fattest, and you can’t see the peach fuzz on my upper lip.
This is of course a facade—a rosy portrait of a woman who, in actuality, barely shaves, never tucks, and dresses well in a vain effort to imply she doesn’t give a fuck about her appearance (which I do, as one can infer by the size of my eyeliner wings).
To be a woman, after all, is to perform.
I’m sure there’s a whole essay in there framed through the works of Judith Butler, however, in spite of my more snobbish and academic proclivities, I’m not interested in doing that here. My preoccupation is, on the whole, far more petty.
Out of all the various ways which Tinder affords its end users to control the way other people potentially interested in sex perceive them, the one which most continually vexes me—which makes me loathe every minute of using the app—is its Spotify integration.
Out of all of Tinder’s barely functional features—from its lacklustre, approaching-brutalist direct messaging panel, to its Instagram integration useful only to the most hyper-vigilant of aesthetic photobloggers—it's Spotify integration is by far the least useful. Tinder’s Spotify integration is so abysmal that it fails at the very thing it nominally sets out to do.
Tinder boasts to show prospective matches your “Top Spotify Artists.” In reality, it does anything but.
According to Tinder, as of the time of me writing this article, my top Spotify artists are as follows in the list below. For each entry, I elect to editorialize about what cause I have to believe for each artist’s inclusion. The reason for this will become apparent shortly.
Outside of these three songs I have listened to exactly no other My Chemical Romance in ~three months
I see fit to use all the words above to highlight this fact, not only to demonstrate that I possess an excellent memory, but also to try and reason why Tinder’s Spotify integration includes these particular artists. I do this because these artists are in no way indicative of my actual top played artists this month.
Accounting for statistical outliers, and aggregating between Receiptify, Spotistats, Last.fm, and the Spotify desktop client itself, my list of top artists from this month more closely resembles something like: Skinny Puppy, Death Grips, Black Dresses, Melt-Banana, Plumtree, Garbageface (hi karol), Ningen Isu, Kendrick Lamar, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, clipping., Asobi Seksu, New Order, Cat Power, Gaza, Xiu Xiu, Thou, JID, teen suicide, Sisters of Mercy, Soul Glo, 100 gecs, Unlucky Morpheus, JPEGMAFIA, and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult. Sort of a markedly different “vibe,” isn’t it?
If it were left to me to choose which version of myself I’d want to meet and/or hypothetically bed, I’m telling you right now I’d choose the second one.
To this end, Tinder presents a curious curatorial dilemma. The app will showcase up to ten “Top Artists” on your profile, listed two at a time, in descending order of Tinder’s internally appointed metric of popularity. Tinder offers you twenty “Top Artists” from which to pick—you may deselect artists, or refresh the selection in hope of finding better ones, though you cannot otherwise dispute the selections Tinder makes.
Did I mention that Tinder picks only one song—usually their most streamed—with which to represent the artist?
Not just that, but features are themselves counted towards an artist’s relative “popularity”. So it is that all my love of JID has produced is a place for Imagine Dragons in my “Top Artists,” seeing as their song “Enemy”—on which JID features—has garnered over one shitbillion streams. When someone sees my profile in the roguelike ether of the Tinder algorithm, the first thing I want them to think is certainly not that I like Imagine Dragons.
The game thus becomes trying your best to scrounge a serviceable showing from the rough assemblage of artists afforded to you, all while bearing in mind that people will judge you purely on the quality of a song the app elects to show them over which you have no control. Enjoy having “Creep” stand in for your sincere admiration for Hail to the Thief.
The Tinder user opting to display their “Top Artists” to all who see their profile tacitly accepts that people will judge their character not just on the quality of said artists, but also their character. My top artist on Spotify wrapped last year was Brand New. I had Daughters on my Tinder profile literally the day the allegations came out against Alexis Marshall. I think one can reconcile artists who do terrible things yet make good music, it is admittedly a difficult concession. I don’t blame anyone who would judge someone for professing enjoyment of a product created by immoral persons. Do you see now how deep is the conundrum this integration presents?
I’m not particularly enamoured with the version of me which Tinder puts forward. It seems rather “masked” in comparison to my actual listening habits, where you’ll find me listening to the most obscene, repulsive elektro, black metal, and experimental hip-hop. I’m not saying it’s particularly flattering that I listen to such fare as Brainbomb’s Obey, though I am saying that if you don’t love me at my Revolting Cocks, do you really deserve me at my bôa?
Displaying your music taste for Tinder is an exercise in striking a balance between “comfortably quirky,” and music which would, in common parlance, “scare the hoes.” It’s a disguise—a lie constructed between us, the app, and everyone on it—a lie in which we’re all complicit.
But then, online, isn’t everything?
We’ve all heard of panopticism, yes? It’s a topic of frequent discussion in many a first year Cultural Studies class—not to mention just about any venue in which you find yourself speaking to a particularly insufferably white, leftist, man, if we’re being honest.
If you’ve not had the displeasure of being regaled by such an enthusiast, I do actually recommend reading the “Panopticism” chapter of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I’ll summarize the argument; which goes that in a contemporary society where surveillance is assumed rather than not, citizens self-regulate their behaviour to fall in line with a “lawful” standard under the presumption that someone might be watching them.
Acceptable behaviour is not, therefore, enforced through direct force in a surveillance set, but rather the threat of discipline which surveillance implies. Instead, it falls to citizens—whom we might consider analogous to end users in this example—to police their own behaviours to an acceptable standard.
Discussing social media as a sphere of self-policing is not really an original thought. Lots of people far smarter and who I admire far more than myself have done this at length—some of them even specifically about such platforms as Tinder.
I haven’t seen anyone, however—outside of a few Medium dot com articles about Wrapped—discuss this phenomenon with regards to Spotify.
To be clear, most of those Medium dot com articles are not even about Spotify Wrapped so much as they are greatly embellished presentations of the writer’s own Spotify Wrapped. A significant portion of them are Member-Only stories. I resent Member-Only stories on their principle, though I find none more baffling than these.
I am many things, though I am not so delusional as to think people should pay to access a couple hundred words about my listening habits sandwiched between screenshots from a mobile app.
Digression aside, it intrigues me that no one has written about Spotify as thoroughly as I have paid it thought. Permit me then, to extend it what I believe to be its due.
Spotify, as a company, is many things—multinational start-up success story, cultural institution, investor in foreign weapons technology. To most people possessing an internet collection, however, Spotify is the single most popular service from which to stream digital music.
This is, of course, in spite of the fact that as music streaming services go, Spotfiy offers just about the single worst experience for which one could hope, and since the late 2010s the company has been actively trying to worsen this already bad experience for its end users. Spotify is an incomparable archival music repository with a truly abysmal UI through which to access it.
For all the shit I’ve given Tinder up until this point, it’s worth pointing out that as both product and interface, Spotify is exeponentially worse at delivering a meaningful end user experience. For all its faults, Tinder is—at its heart—elegantly simple. It takes away the necessity of thought, presenting a series of yes/no dilemmas in brutally straightforward design language. Tinder is its UI, which is perhaps why I so deeply resent the parts of its UI which fail to live up to the understated promise of its primary mechanism.
There’s a number of reasons why the Spotify UI—once merely “bad”—has progressively deteriorated over the number of years I’ve been using the app (which, at this point, is about as long as I’ve been critically thinking about music and Web2 services of its kind). A lot of this has to do, as many critics have pointed out, with Spotfiy’s emphasis on playlists and playlisting as the primary means of engaging with its catalog.
Spotfiy promotes the heck out of its discovery algorithms, which are aimed at listener retention insofar as they serve you up a seemingly endless stream of new music with which to engage, rather than a comparably small catalog of music you already like. This change saw a concerted shift in the way users’ libraries worked, removing the ability to download individual songs and making it harder to meaningfully sort by artist and album on mobile. The UI went from something intuitively reminiscent of early-2000s iTunes to a labyrinthine arrangement of nested playlists and menus worthy of inclusion in a JRPG with a particularly rabid and devout cult following.
However, throughout all the changes that took place over the period for which I’ve used the app since 2016, one feature remained—much to my curiosity.
In the top-right corner of Spotify’s desktop client a collapsible tab will show you your “Friend[s’] Activity.” This panel includes a list of all Spotify users (as opposed to artists—there’s a difference) who you follow. Under their username is displayed, as clickable links, the name of the most recent track they listened to and the artist whose track it is. Beneath that is listed how/where they listened to it—from the artist’s Spotify page, from an album, or on a playlist. Each possibility is indicated by one of three pictograms—A person, a record, or tied eighth notes.
This leads me to a theory—that Spotify was once conceived of as a social networking program. The inclusion of this particular feature seems baffling otherwise.
Why else would an app whose primary focus rests upon providing a near-endless stream of music make individual user’s profiles discoverable in their vast data repository? Why else would they show you the moment-by-moment listening occupations of these users should you follow them, and they follow you?
On some level it makes sense. We’re obsessed with seeing what others are listening to. We spend a whole week at the end of every year posting screenshots of bespoke graphically-designed spreadsheets of our listening habits to every social network at our disposal.
To this end, I’m not sure most people’s use of Spotify can be considered wholly “their own.” There is always the promise that someone, anyone, might be observing them—why else does Spotfiy afford the option to hide your activity by listening in a “Private Session?”
It’s not as though we’re ignorant to this fact either. If you’ve ever heard someone say “Goddess, I hope this doesn’t end up on my Spotify Wrapped!” they said the quiet part out loud. Increasingly, we don’t listen for our own pleasure so much as we listen as though others were watching.
This phenomenon is only further enabled, compounded, and reinforced by the myriad connections the app enables. You can get Spotify on everything—your computer, your telephone, your touch-screen tablet, your e-reader, your PlayStation.
In [current year] you can get Spotify on your watch.
Spotify even “exists,” to some extent, in the spaces between these hardware interfaces in the form of its myriad nodal connections and integrations. Tinder, as we earlier discussed, is just one such example.
Perhaps Spotify’s most notable integration is with the social messaging/community/forum hosting app Discord, which boasts a real-time Rich Presence integration with the music streaming app. This connection pulls data from Spotify, displaying by the second the track a Discord user is listening to, the artist it is by, the album it is on, the exact location in the song the user is at, and providing other users the option to play that track on Spotify themselves, or else join the user in a listening party.
“But, wait!” you might exclaim. “That seems considerably more robust than the in-app Spotify Friend Activity panel you described earlier!”
You’d be right.
At best, the Spotify interface confers considerably less information about what any user’s friends are listening to at any given moment than the same user could find on Discord, or any other social network such as the PlayStation Network or Xbox Live which possess Spotify integrations.
This is, I think, why third-party Spotify integrations like the aforementioned Receiptify, Spotify Pie Chart, Obscurify, and various other quantifying, aggregating, data-mining services are so wildly popular. Spotify gives us a peek behind the curtain but once a year with Wrapped, and—while there’s a certain charm to seeing exactly what someone is listening to at any given moment, it doesn't satisfy that nagging desire to judge someone based on a pre-packaged dataset of past listening habits.
We love talking about what we’re listening to, pulling up any number of these sites which produce what amount to little more than lavish, graphically-designed spreadsheets in tandem as if to say “here, this is who I am!”
We love talking about what we’re listening to so much that we might love it more than the listening itself.
Slowly but surely, Spotify is transitioning from a vessel for culture in the form of the songs in its streaming repository, to simulacrum culture in its own right.
What this detached, numbers-based approach to self-determination lacks is the ability to contend with any sort of subjective—let alone personal—relationship with music or, by extension, with art.
It can’t recount to you that time when—while driving to Toronto with a friend to see a comedy show listening to “A Lot of Boys Like Me Though” by Girl Pusher, I pointed out to him how the sample in that track is the same one used in My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s song “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan.”
It can’t attest to the glee I felt in similarly pointing out the congruence of the sample in Dragged Into Sunlight’s “Boiled Angel” with that from Skinny Puppy’s “Worlock,” nor can it point out how at 3:08 into said band’s song “Smothered Hope,” lead singer Niven Ogre’s grunt sounds like the Roblox “OOF” sound effect.
All those things are only products of forming a genuine, if not profound relationship with those particular pieces of music. Spotify Wrapped can paint a picture of things like tendencies, patterns, and habits, but never will it be able to articulate the exact reasons you love the songs you do, nor the feelings they instill as a consequence of doing so.
Quantitative analysis might tell you that you listened to “Teenage Angst” by Placebo 156 times in a single day, but considering my brain has a pernicious tendency to latch onto certain songs like an itch which can only be remedied by mine expunging them from my brain by means of incessant repetition, I at least am not too inclined to hold such examples as representative of my actual taste.
À prospos of nothing, though if you see “Pink Triangle” by Weezer on my Spotify Wrapped this year, please don’t be inclined to believe I actually enjoy it.
Spotify Wrapped isn’t you so much as it is a data ghost—a mechanical impression, an imperfect copy.
Spotify’s impression of me, mediated through all the pie charts and itemized receipts in the world, is about as accurate as Tinder’s is, which—as we’ve already seen—is charitably not very good.
At this point then, it behooves me to ask what this transition is hiding; because it’s always hiding something, isn’t it?
What does Spotify—the company, not the app or the interface, or the ecosystem, or anything associated with—stand to gain from creating such a cult of personality around itself? What is the advantage in enticing end-users to develop sentimentality towards an API interface because it sends them the automated equivalent of a first-year Computer Science summative project at the end of each year?
The short and longer answers are both, unsurprisingly, money.
Spotify has been bleeding money ever since it launched in the yesteryear of 2008. While its posted loss in the first year of operations was a measly $4.4million, that number has steadily climbed each year since, reaching a staggering peak of over $100million. Despite hopes and assurances that the premium subscription and other means of monetizing the company would one day make it profitable, Spotify has, to this day, yet to so much as break even.
Pretty embarrassing for a publicly traded company, huh?
The attempt of Spotify, through means such as Wrapped and its other social networking and sharing integrations, to cultivate a parasocial relationship with its user base is a transparent attempt to obfuscate the actual parasitic nature of a company who cares neither about its customers nor the artists on whom it is reliant, and claims to support.
Companies aren’t people after all, but if Spotify can get you to see it as something other than a server bank full of FLAAC files and spreadsheets located somewhere in Switzerland, you might just prove slightly more amenable to the interests of the app rather than the artists who you listen to through it.
I find Spotify particularly insidious for this sort of strategy, because unlike other sectors of the entertainment industry, the American Federation of Musicians lacks the comparable organizing might of entertainment unions like the Writers’ Guild of America or Screen Actors’ Guild. The predatory streaming economy is particularly devastating to recording artists, and this phenomenon of platform worship which Spotify themselves curates only serves to prop up the illusion of business as usual.
It seems unlikely, however, that this is going to last.
Streaming services in all industries are taking hits, and investors and CEOs alike are sounding the alarm bell. If anything, the recent WGA and SAG strikes seem to highlight the fact that services the like of Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Spotify, et. al. can only really exist if they’re subsidized by serious labour inequity, and that particular house of cards seems poised to collapse.
What are we, the customers, the users, the consumers to do, then? Take it from a girl who owns every season of Doctor Who on DVD, physical media is an investment you’re going to want to make in the next couple of years.
With streaming beginning to show its cracks, the primary way by which most people consume popular culture is teetering on a knife’s edge. It's easy to forget that not everything on the internet is as permanent as we might like to think, and that you don’t own any part of the streaming catalogues for which you pay to access.
All that can be taken away at a moment’s notice, hence why if you want to be assured of accessing something you need to buy it for yourself. There’s a reason why I invest in Blu-rays of all my favourite movies and video games—never do I want to one day find that I’m no longer permitted to play them on the whim of some company or licensing agreement.
Yeah, it’s expensive—I get that—but remember that it's expensive for a reason. Buying an LP on vinyl does far more to equitably compensate an artist than streaming their album a hundred times ever will. Plus, you get to listen to it as many times as you want and it comes with sick-ass liner notes. Seriously, nothing compares to seeing album covers in all their glory at full scale.
As a very wise friend of mine likes to say, there’s no such thing as “the cloud”—that’s just somebody else’s computer. I’m in the process of copying all of my files stored in Google Drive, Trent’s OneDrive server, and so on, onto labelled solid-state drives, so that I never find one day that my entire published (and unpublished!) archive has just up and vanished. I’d highly recommend you do the same, as no system is truly infallible, and it's only so long until we blissful idiots are reminded as such.
While you may think that this article has seemingly strayed from its original topic of discussion, I’d argue that what I’ve tried to highlight here is that our understanding of streaming—and, if we’re being honest—the internet as a whole, is every bit as constructed as is the image of “you” curated by Tinder, or Instagram, or even Spotify.
The illusory permanence of streaming is perhaps the greatest parlour trick of capitalism in the last decade. More and more these days, we’re sold the right to own nothing.
By way of closing, I’ll ask what you’re going to do when (not “if,” because it will one day happen) Spotify closes. Where will you get your music from? While I might miss the convenience of having more songs than I can possibly even remember at my fingertips, I know that between my bandcamp downloads, my CDs, tapes, and vinyl records, that I’ll be relatively fine.
What about you, reader? How solid is the ground beneath your feet?
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