🎶Losing Focus: Some Thoughts on the State of Music Streaming

When Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone in 2007, the reception was far from glowing. Compared to cell phones of the time, the iPhone made a lot of confusing design decisions. Keyboard loyalists decried the lack of physical buttons, and the extra features like email or internet were seen as wasteful or pointless. Who would really want to carry a computer in their pocket?

I don’t think anyone is asking this in 2025. From mapping to banking, what hasn’t been streamlined by our ever-present pocket-computers? When it comes to music, smartphones and streaming are certainly cheaper and less labor-intensive than mp3s or CDs. But does this relentless focus on efficiency and optimization truly make music streaming a better listening experience? Today I want to examine something it seems like we’ve lost in the streaming revolution: Focus.

Fostering Focus: Positive Limitations and Purposeful Interaction

Despite being a physical media die-hard, I’ll spare you the misty-eyed tales of “simpler times”. I think there’s an objective benefit to physical media, which is the power of purposeful interaction.

But first, let’s take a look at how most of the world consumes music: streaming. Spotify can serve you the exact song you want in 2 seconds flat. Don’t like the current song? No problem! Just skip to the next track on the album, or pick something else from the entire breadth of human musical output. Don’t get me wrong, this freedom is awesome! But I and many others have developed a hair-trigger Spotify skip button. The second I’m not feeling a song, I mash “skip” with no hesitation, in the hopes that the next track will scratch this invisible itch. To me, this freedom is actually a downside. You can’t just sit and listen, because in parallel you’re always asking yourself “Is this what I should be listening to?"

Let’s contrast this with the most convenient form of physical media: CDs. If you want to listen to music on CD, you have to make multiple purposeful decisions. Picking out an album means scanning through your collection, cracking open the case, and popping it into the player. These actions aren’t difficult, but they are committal. The album you should to be listening to is the album you chose. Physical media even introduces barriers to non-committal listening habits. There’s the physical inconvenience of swapping out discs, and even then your album alternatives are limited to whatever else is in your collection. The process of picking and playing a physical album means greater investment in and focus on the music itself.

Plus, how often are our kneejerk “skip” reactions really right? On first listen, I thought Yes' landmark album Close To The Edge was unfocused garbage. But around the tenth listen, I started to hear the talent and musicianship that went into it. And after it clicked, I couldn’t stop listening. Was the album bad the first nine times? Of course not - I just needed time to warm up to it! If I hadn’t bought Close to the Edge, I don’t think I would have given Yes that chance, giving up on what is now one of my favorite albums.

Losing Focus: Media Consumption without Media Ownership

At this point, you may be thinking: “But Ethan, Spotify does have a method for you to own your music. It’s called pre-saving, where you can download any album to your local files and listen offline!” Well, sort of. One obvious difference is that Spotify can remove songs from its platform at any time. Don’t believe me? This album (also below) used to be one of my favorites, now it’s a “ghost album”. Spotify’s thoughts on this phenomenon are as follows: “If you can’t find the songs on Spotify at all, this could mean that they’ve been made unavailable due to licensing reasons”. Translating from Legal-ese to English, “If we can’t be bothered to re-up our licensing agreements, we can permanently delete songs from your library”. I’m not advocating for streaming services to forge licenses to keep songs on the platform. My point is, unlike physical media, streaming companies don’t owe you access to anything. Your favorite songs could be gone tomorrow, and that would be the end of it.

For most people, the convenience of music streaming more than makes up for losing a few songs here and there. But streaming services themselves seem increasingly disinterested in their core music-listening experience. I hate to pick on Spotify again, (I still think it’s a great service!), but it’s pretty notorious for this. Spotify has a long-standing tradition of “pop-up suggestions” - un-cancellable ¹ advertisements for Spotify’s less-used features. Even paying, ad-free users get these interruptive pop-ups. Why could that be the case? Well, their CEO recently announced a podcast and audiobook-driven “year of monetization”. For the millions of paying users, Spotify’s only path to further monetization is to sell them on new, additional-cost content. Spotify has little incentive to improve their core music experience - they’re focused on converting more users into their exclusive podcasts and audiobooks. This loss in focus, this disconnect between what services prioritize and what consumers actually ask for is my biggest beef with music streaming today.

Conclusion

On a cold winter morning in 1983, the head of Sony’s Audio Division assembled his best and brightest engineers. He passed around a block of wood, roughly the size of 4 CD cases stacked vertically. His claim: “We’re going to commercialize a CD player of this size. I don’t care how you do it, or whether you decide to put cicadas or grasshoppers in it, but just make this produce sound.” The entire room laughed - at the time, Sony’s CD players were bigger than cereal boxes. But a year later, Sony released the D-50 - a CD player smaller than that original block of wood - to resounding success. The D-50’s success wasn’t complicated - Sony just made a great, innovative product people wanted to buy.

At first, music streaming was a similar, objective upgrade over the preceding mp3 / player ecosystem. But now, streaming has tied your media (music, podcasts, etc.) with the method of access (Spotify, Tidal, etc.) For many, this makes switching platforms unthinkable - you’d lose all of your playlists and liked songs. Instead of the “carrot” of boundary-pushing features, streaming services would rather use the “stick” of vendor lock-in. Sony made money on the D-50 because it was a better product - streaming services make money by impeding users' ability choose better services.

I don’t want to come off like a Luddite here - streaming has unquestionably democratized music. But where do we go from here? In the era of vendor lock-in and declining media ownership, do established streaming services even have an incentive to innovate further? I’d love to think there’s an upstart company with a disruptive feature right around the corner. In 2025, the most convenient way to listen to music seems to be simultaneously mindless and increasingly unfocused on the music itself.² Whether convenient and best are synonymous is up to you.

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1. Yes, I know Spotify claims it’s “fixed”. Others are mysteriously unable to find the unsubscribe button two years later. ↩︎

2. And for artists under the 1M streams mark, arguably exploitative. But people smarter than me have spilled lots of ink on this topic - you don’t need my take here. ↩︎