How many songs are there on Spotify?
Recorded music. In its entirety. Ten quid a month. That’s the pitch of Spotify anyway, and not only are there some serious questions to be asked about the pricing (it was ten quid in my day), but there are also a few questions to be asked about that whole “recorded music in its entirety” bit. Credit where credit’s due, they’ve got a serious claim to it. Everyone from the most omnipresent acts of the day to obscure C86 acts who were together for a month and change can be found on the streaming titan, but how much music can be found on Spotify, really?
Let’s start from the source. Their official website states proudly that they’ve got “more than 100million tracks, 6m podcast titles, and 350,000 audiobooks”. It’s said with the kind of grandiosity they’ve arguably earned. Any challenger to their streaming crown has been categorically shoved into second place (Apple Music has less than half the global subscribers the green giants do) or straight into irrelevancy (remember Tidal?). They’ve also listened to a few of their critics and adapted their practices. Not the ones talking about royalty payments to artists, but we can’t be expecting miracles from corporations now.
One can still find forum posts from as recently as 2017, nearly a decade after the app launched, asking why the music on the app is so Western-focused. I myself remember my K-pop-minded friends tying themselves in knots to get their favourite artists on the service not too long ago. Today, though, part of the reason their global reach vastly outpaces Apple’s is the sheer amount of non-English-speaking music on there. It truly is a global service, and while I’m loathed to give credit to a company that is quickly becoming a monopoly, there is something to be said about that.
So, what music can’t be found on the app?
We’re long past the days of Neil Young, Taylor Swift, Jay-Z and Thom Yorke banning their music from the app, but if you want to chuck on some Joanna Newsome, you’re out of luck. Unless, of course, you want to savour her one-line cameo in the theme from the 2011 Muppets movie, which would be understandable. There’s no Garth Brooks, a bunch of Boris’ best records aren’t on there, even one of Kendrick Lamar’s best deep cuts ‘Cartoons & Cereal’ still hasn’t found its way on there due to sample clearance issues.
One might easily wonder why anyone still holds out. It’s easy to see them as Luddites, King Cnut arguing with the tides of progress. When the biggest pop stars in the world can’t escape the emerald pull of this company, why should anyone listen to a harp-slinging folkie? Because she may have a point. She told the LA Times that Spotify is a “cynical and musician-hating system… a villainous cabal of major labels. The business is built from the ground up as a way to circumvent the idea of paying their artists”.
I speak as a fully paid-up member of Spotify Premium, and she has a pretty inarguable point.
As the great philosopher Angel from Buffy once said, “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.” Sure. A few discerning music fans switching over to Tidal won’t change the world. However, monopolies exist because people believe they do. There are always alternatives, so if you throw up your hands because you have no other choice, it’s probably best to ask yourself why you feel that way first.
