Music is now leased to you through a secret system that you don’t understand, by a company with which you should have no emotional connection. In addition to co-opting corporate social media strategies to benefit from the attention economy, tech companies have inherently made songs fleeting, cheap, and sometimes intrusive, corrupting the cultural exchange between artist and listener. So you’re in the top percentile of Big Thief listeners? That’s not just a measure of your love for an artist’s music, but also a reflection of the time spent enriching the value of a company. They even go so far as to turn the amount of time you spend in their app into a badge of honor during their annual year-end promotional campaigns.

In Spotify, each song’s play count is prominently displayed, in effect gamifying the music industry so that tracks tacitly compete against one another inside the app. Music becomes an advertisement for the streaming service, and the more time and attention you give it, the more it benefits the tech company, not necessarily the music ecosystem.

The truth is that if you’re using Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, or any other streaming service, you’re not paying for music so much as the opportunity to witness the potential of music.

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