International Sad Hits

Song streams by Galaxie 500 on Spotify, May 2018

Alert listeners to Spotify have been noting its failures when it comes to streaming albums in their entirety - gaps between songs might be changed or absent (the famous “Judas!” cry is missing from Dylan’s live recording in Manchester 1966); single edits of tracks are substituted for album ones; entirely different performances (live, or an alternate take from a later remaster) pop up in sequence instead of the original…

This emphasis on track over album seems to be baked into Spotify’s algorithms, as well. A given track is picked up for recommendation to individual listeners; if the track is received well (however that is determined), it is seeded to more recommendations; and so on.

I believe I can see the net result on the cumulative plays for different Galaxie 500 songs (Spotify shows artists this particular chart of their own material, though very little other data). “Strange,” a track off our album On Fire, is streaming far more than any of our other songs - roughly ten times as often as the songs that surround it in its original sequence on the album (”Snowstorm” and “When Will You Come Home”).

What’s especially surprising about this is that “Strange” was not a single for Galaxie 500, and hasn’t historically been among our most popular tracks. Even Spotify’s own editors haven’t selected it for any of their curated playlists, the most popular of which uses the much more predictable choice, “Tugboat”:

Yet anyone using Spotify is much more likely to hear “Strange” than any other Galaxie 500 song - it is the most frequently streamed of our songs via “Discover Weekly,” “Your Daily Mix,” and Spotify’s “Radio” feature. And I assume this will only become more and more the case. Now that Spotify’s algorithms have separated “Strange” from the rest of our catalogue, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that it will be streamed more than others because it is frequent use of this track that causes it to be seeded it into more recommendations, which increases the frequency of its use…

Where, meanwhile, are the listeners to On Fire? Judging by the numbers of streams of its other tracks, there aren’t many on Spotify (”Plastic Bird” had fewer than 7k streams in the same period that “Strange” had 210,000). If we want to preserve the album format, we are going to have to work to preserve other means of listening.