January / February 2022

Editor's Lead In
Adele Versus Spotify
Greg is not a huge fan of Spotify, but all his suggestions for improvements have been ignored.
Editorial By Greg Borrowman

  I wish I had the same clout with streaming services as Adele! Almost immediately after she complained that Spotify was playing her latest album (30) in 'Shuffle' mode, the company made the decision to make 'Play' the default mode so the tracks would play in the order she wanted.

I know Adele was responsible for the change, because Spotify's announcement name-checked her. "As Adele mentioned, we are excited to share that we have begun rolling out a new Premium feature that has been long requested by both users and artists to make play the default button on all albums," said a spokesperson for Spotify, but at the same time added that: "those users still wishing to shuffle an album are able to go to the 'Now Playing' view and select the shuffle toggle." To be fair, Adele simply joined a conga line of musicians — and, presumably, Spotify users — who have been campaigning for this for years.

I can see Adele's point of course. Like all musicians, she doesn't put tracks on her albums in random order, or even in the order she writes them, or the order in which she records them. She creates her albums to tell a story, which in the case of 30, is pretty much all about her divorce. Adele Twittered: "We don't create albums with so much care and thought into our track listing for no reason. Our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended."

This should be blindingly obvious to anyone, including Spotify. Can you imagine Dark Side of the Moon played back on shuffle? Or Sgt Peppers?

However you should also consider, with your philosopher's hat on, that even if a musician did decide to position tracks on an album randomly, once that album is released, those tracks are then no longer in 'random' order, they're in album order and we would become so accustomed to playing them in that order that if they were then randomised via a 'Shuffle' circuit, we'd find ourselves aurally discomforted.

This effect is pretty easy to demonstrate. You likely have a 'Greatest Hits' album of sort in your collection. The track order on that disc was selected by the record company, so there's no artist's story being told here. So if you're playing Madonna's Immaculate Collection, you'd expect "Vogue" to always follow "Cherish" whereas if you had the original album (Like a Prayer) you'd have expected "Dear Jessie".

Strangely, though, tracks following exactly isn't always the case. If, for example you're playing Best of Bowie you'd expect "Suffragette City" to follow "Changes"... at least you would if you live in the USA. If you live in Belgium, you'd expect "Rebel Rebel", and if you live in Ecuador, "Life on Mars". This is because there are twenty-one(!) different versions of Best of Bowie with the tracks on each different version reflecting those which were the most popular in that country when they were first released.

Sometimes the artist does have a say. So the tracks on Pink Floyd's Echoes, link seamlessly link together despite never being originally written to run in this order. To do this, however, meant that "Time" didn't make the cut, which is more than just a shame!

But back to the Spotify Shuffle controversy, the bad news is that if you're not paying for Spotify, tracks will continue to be automatically shuffled. If you want order, you're going to have to cough up for a Premium membership.

— Greg Borrowman

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