The Stupor of Spotify

What the Strayer U. “Get Motivated” Playlist Says About the Lost Promise of Spotify

What the Strayer U. “Get Motivated” Playlist Says About the Lost Promise of Spotify

Call me a tech curmudgeon. The last thing I want to see when I enter the music-streaming service Spotify is an invitation to a playlist started by Strayer University. It’s the Get Motivated playlist, of course, and it lives on the mostly horrid current Spotify homepage, taunting Hot Pocket-eating couchsurfers with appeals to stop reading about how Eminem is “Popular Near You” and do something useful with their lives. Like suggest a random song that can help get listless ones off the couch. There, your good deed for the day is done! Back to World of Warcraft.

Does anyone need this creation, this fake-participation marketing gimmick from a private for-profit university with programs in business and health services taught online or in office-park campuses? No. Can Strayer or the lemmings who click on this type of ad be trusted to curate music for you? Please. You can get better listening advice from a parking meter. Surely somewhere in the vast Strayer system there’s a professor of education or psychology who could pull together a serviceable get-up-and-go playlist – even that would be better than this ridiculous advertorial. Thirty minutes of silence would be better.

Inside Spotify, playlists like this are likely seen as a new revenue frontier. Prepare to click for the JetBlue “Waiting on a Friend” playlist, with mega-extended versions of classic rock songs designed to make you forget you’re spending multiple hours on some runway, or the eHarmony “Songs for that Awkward First-Date Car Ride,” which starts with “Leader of the Pack” and descends from there.

The possibilities are truly limitless! And that’s the problem. Spotify has one of the deepest music databases available, but you can hardly tell that when you enter its portal: The homepage is an info-cesspool of specious popularity-contest data, nebulous “Trending Now” identifications (which, ironically, are not updated often) and wrongheaded Strayer-style “playlists.” The material, helpfully illustrated with pictures of wellknown artists, is what passes for “editorial” in Spotifyland, and that’s a shame. Rather than help its users discover some of the truly galvanizing music in its holdings, the service would rather tell you things you already know (like the news flash that for decades, Bruce Springsteen has “maintained his status as a frontline recording and performing star”) and remind you about what was popular when you were in high school. Really, it’s no wonder Spotify has turned to Strayer for some motivational help. Spend enough time on the music service’s homepage, and you, too, will find yourself numbed by the inane.