Broken social scene
February 21, 2020

Penny Fractions: Where is the social side of music streaming?

"The mobile experience of Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal and YouTube Music are all built in a way where unless one seeks out playlists created by friends, it’d be easy to be completely oblivious to their own musical tastes. What little fragments of leftover social features exist are primarily afterthoughts at this point. Why, with so many music streaming platforms, we’ve arrived at a fairly flat and isolated way of experiencing music" - Penny Fractions asks in an excellent article about the social context of streaming media. A possible answer: "The record industry is gleefully stagnating with ideas because as the business continues to grow after years of decline, there’s little reason to try new things" (the existing ones even look similar - below). An alternative: "If there’s going to be a new way to expand the social aspect of digital music I doubt it’ll arrive out of such litter".