Adele and her fight against Spotify

Thanks to Adele, Spotify has modified a “small detail” of its platform. From now on, when we listen to an album, the option to listen to its songs randomly will no longer appear by default. One might think that this is a minor detail, and yet it is something that is certainly very relevant and that puts the focus on the debate that exists around the way we consume music today.

Coinciding with the release of her new album ‘30’, and thanks to her protests, Adele has managed to get Spotify to change this function on the platform. So now when we listen to an album it will be reproduced as the artist intended. Although this will continue to be an option that the user will be able to modify again.

The order of the songs on an album has always been something important to which artists have put a lot of thinking. It has always been this way, at least until with the development of technology and the emergence of streaming, we have somehow moved to the culture of immediacy, of the need for constant stimulation, lack of time, and therefore the consumption of songs independently. This is not a trivial question, since due to this and other things such as the total listening time for a playback to be counted, the way in which songs are created today, has changed in many ways. I recently read a curious fact, certainly very relevant and that helps to understand the phenomenon. A very high number of comments posted by users on YouTube videos of new songs are published when the user has barely seen a minute of it. In other words, it seems that users don't have to listen to a song to judge it publicly. It speaks for itself.

Cover photograph press Adele