Why I Feel Sorry for the “Spotify Generation”

Don’t get me wrong—I think Spotify and other music streaming services are great. The very idea that you can have pretty much every song ever recorded at the touch of a button on a supercomputer in your pocket, for the same price as a single album a month (more or less) is pretty damn amazing.

But I think we can all agree that kids growing up today, like my own kids, are definitely missing out on the whole experience of albums that we Gen Xers and our parents had.

You remember what it was like, right?

You’d go into town—probably with your mates. In my case, this was usually on the bus. Then you’d head to your favourite record store, be it OurPrice, Virgin, HMV, or some local independent store. Then you’d spend ages just browsing through the shelves.

When I first started listening to music, this meant looking through the 12” vinyl records—big, shiny black discs that magically made such incredible music when you popped it down on the turntable and lowered the needle onto it.

Later, this meant CDs. Smaller, but equally shiny, discs of magic that you popped into the drawer that slid out of your HiFi, then once it place the drawer slid back in to be read by a laser—an actual LASER!—to produce that wonderful music.

Everything about it was an experience. Even the packaging, with the artwork and the lyrics printed on the inner sleeve of the 12” or on the little booklet in the CD case.

The kids today have none of that. They have none of the joy of just standing around in the shop with their mates going “What about this? Will this be any good?” Or the anticipation of the journey home so you can play it for the first time.

Don’t you miss all that?

And that’s before we get to the very concept of an “album”, which is pretty much dead in 2023.

Last night, on the drive home, I queued up Oasis’s “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory” on Spotify. And that reminded me that a good album isn’t just a collection of songs—it’s a collection of the right songs in the right order.

How often on Spotify do you just hit “shuffle” on your playlist of favourite songs? Or on someone else’s playlist of songs?

Now, how often do you listen to an actual album of songs, as presented by the artist, in the order the artist intended?

Listening to What’s the Story yesterday reminded me just how much effort the artists put into creating an album. The music on that album flows from track to track. It’s almost as if there’s a narrative to it. And the same goes for other albums from what I now have to somewhat depressingly refer to as yesteryear. The best albums make sense. They are not just a collection of songs, they are a piece of artwork themselves. The album as a whole is a piece of art, not just the individual songs.

And that’s why I feel a bit sorry for the Spotify Generation. We have a family plan and both my son & daughter recently shared their ‘go-to’ playlists with me. My daughter’s is… well, she’s just turned 11, and she has no musical taste. Yet. My son’s isn’t that bad. At 17, his musical taste is maturing and there’s a lot of really good ‘classic’ tracks on there. (In this case, “classic” means anything from before he was born in 2005 – God I feel old).

But neither of them ever listens to a whole album. And that’s a real shame. And I feel sorry for them.