Yes, Spotify is now available everywhere – at home, braais, in homes, cars, all over the place. It’s become so popular that you can’t escape it. But if you’re a non-subscriber, a free-tier peasant like me half the time, you’ve got problems. Terrible advertisements every three songs and that squeaky woman’s voice telling you to subscribe – all deliberate ploys to make you so sick and tired of those announcements that you finally cough up the monthly ransom.
And if you’re not paying? Good luck trying to listen to a playlist from A to Z. Everything is jumbled up on purpose. You want to hear an album in order on your phone? Tough. Shuffle only, my friend. This is the reality.
It feels like Spotify is dominating the music industry completely. But you know, technology changes. Let’s think about those of us who started out listening to seven singles and LPs. Then compact discs came and wiped those out. Then the iPod arrived and made CDs look clumsy. And then, as the internet got faster, there was that short, glorious period where pirating music was everywhere. Some of us old pirates still remember the days of MP3skull – you’d wait until midnight when the internet was cheaper, download all night, and feel like a proper criminal. But everything tightened up. Napster disappeared overnight, LimeWire got sued into dust, and suddenly piracy became taboo. You can’t even find a decent pirate site anymore without fifty pop-ups and malware.
And rightly so, I suppose – commercialization of music still stands supreme.
Spotify brought a lot of music to a lot of people, but the complaints never stop. The ads, the shuffle punishment, the feeling that you’re being nickel-and-dimed for something that used to be simple.
The big question I keep asking myself is this: is there some new technology coming that will finally knock Spotify off its throne?
People keep talking about AI-generated music as the next revolution. You see these AI “bands” like Velvet Sundown racking up a million streams, and apps like Suno where you type a sentence and out pops a whole song. But here’s the thing – it’s still an app. You still have to open something, log in, press play. There’s still no truly free music unless you switch on the radio, and let’s be honest, FM playlists these days are abysmal. And don’t even start me on community radio stations – those naive, untrained presenters laughing at their own jokes, trying to teach us about blues and rock when they’ve clearly never been in a band in their lives. It’s so painfully cringe that you’d rather drive in silence.
These days the best thing is still a stack of old CDs. I picked up a mint-condition double Enya album at a charity shop yesterday for five rand. Five rand! I took it home, shoved it in the CD player, and listened to the whole thing without a single ad, without shuffle, without some squeaky voice begging for my credit card. Pure bliss.
So here’s my theory: someone, somewhere, is always going to get paid – whether the music is made by humans or by robots. AI might help write the songs, but it’s still manufactured, still controlled, still locked inside some company’s ecosystem. Royalties might drop a bit for AI tracks, but I can’t see them disappearing completely. We will always be in the stronghold of some technology we have no control over.
But don’t just take my word for it. The internet is screaming the same frustrations louder than I ever could.
A few voices from the wilderness:
- “Spotify’s free tier isn’t free – it’s psychological torture with ads. Same five tracks on repeat and that woman’s voice every ten minutes. I’d rather listen to silence.”
- “Shuffle on mobile for non-premium users is straight-up sabotage. My 800-song playlist plays the same twenty tracks on loop. It’s not random, it’s punishment.”
- “Artists get paid peanuts. My band made R300 from 120 000 streams last quarter. Spotify keeps the rest and tells us to be grateful for ‘exposure’.”
- “Every update makes the app worse. Now it hides your library behind seventeen menus and forces podcasts down your throat. I just want to play an album in order, is that too much to ask?”
And on the AI music front, the complaints are even spicier:
- “AI songs sound good for fifteen seconds, then you realise there’s no soul, no story, no point. Just expensive karaoke made by a computer.”
- “It’s all stolen anyway – trained on real artists’ work without permission, then sold back to us as ‘the future’. Pure theft dressed in shiny tech.”
- “Give it a year and Spotify will be 70 % AI slop that nobody asked for, just like YouTube is 70 % AI thumbnails now. Music is becoming wallpaper.”
Some of those voices agree with me, some think I’m an old dinosaur clutching my five-rand Enya CDs. Doesn’t matter. They’re real people feeling the same itch I feel: something is shifting again, and we don’t quite know what’s coming next.
Maybe the AI robots will win. Maybe Spotify will swallow AI whole and keep ruling. Or maybe, one day, some kid in a garage will build the next Napster-for-the-AI-age and the whole castle will come tumbling down again.
All I know is I’m keeping my CD player plugged in… just in case.
What do you think – will Spotify still be king in 2030, or are we all going to be listening to robot composers whispering sweet nothings directly into our ears?
Drop your thoughts below. I’m especially curious what the free-tier sufferers and the charity-shop raiders have to say.
Until then, I’ll be here with my five-rand Enya, no ads, no shuffle, no squeaky voice telling me to upgrade.
Pure peace.
