Spotify and the Algorithm that Chains Creativity
First of all, I don’t want to complain. I’m part of this musical consumerism too, and I benefit from it. My words are not those of victimhood or resignation, but rather opinions and observations I’ve gathered over time. I don’t want to demonize anyone: I’m the first to enjoy the advantages of Spotify.
Since I started publishing music on digital stores, for the first time I’ve had a stable flow of listeners — 40–45 thousand per month, all around the world. When I was twenty or thirty, playing in clubs and trying to promote my albums, this kind of result was unimaginable. It felt like an impossible goal. And yet today there are people in America, Brazil, and many other places listening to my music.
There are Italian artists I truly admire who have fewer listeners than me, even though they are exceptional. At the same time, there are others who create very anonymous ambient music and yet have 200,000 monthly listeners. That’s the paradox of the platform.
Spotify is halfway between a streaming service and a social network: it allows for a minimum of interaction between users and musicians, but in the end everything revolves around the algorithm. And that’s where the frustration comes in. The algorithm keeps pushing the tracks that were lucky at the beginning, keeping them ahead of new releases. As a result, an artist’s musical evolution is never really highlighted.
I even ran an experiment. I asked to calculate which of my tracks had the highest ratio of saves to streams. The surprise? It turned out to be Flight to the Ford — a track I cared deeply about, one I considered very successful, and yet it was completely ignored by the algorithm. This shows that Spotify doesn’t give proper weight to saves, which in my opinion are far more meaningful than streams.
So I find myself chained to a “tavern-style,” medieval-tavern genre, when in reality I’ve developed much more over the years: Celtic, epic, orchestral influences, traditional instruments from southern Italy rearranged in a symphonic way. Yet all of this work goes largely unrecognized.
How can we overturn this creativity-eating monster that is the algorithm? I don’t have a definitive answer. One thing I did was to create my own playlist, Best of Nicostrauss, where I put the tracks I consider most representative. I also look for independent playlist curators who might give space to less pushed songs. It’s an uneven battle, I know.
My hope is that one day Spotify will change the rules and give more weight to saves, not just streams. In the meantime, I’ll keep doing what I do, without complaining too much: I can’t bite the hand that feeds me. But still, I hold onto the hope that creativity will return to the forefront, and that quality will matter more than quantity.