PERSONAL TECH

Spotify Sees a Future Where Music Genres Don’t Really Matter

Stuart Goldenberg 
In the last few weeks, my two children, ages 4 and 2, have suddenly become obsessed with Simon and Garfunkel.
At their insistence, the 1960s folk duo is the only music we listen to during car rides. My son, the older child, can recite several lines of “The Sound of Silence,” a single that hit the pop charts nearly half a century before he was born. Their interest in 1960s-era folk came on the heels of their deep dive into Maroon 5, the annoyingly catchy pop group; a monthslong mania for Michael Jackson; and an intermittent passion for a staggering range of singles from every era and genre.
Their cultural acumen is entirely the product of technology — in particular, being introduced to new artists through Spotify, the world’s largest subscription music-streaming service. According to executives at Spotify, my children offer a peek at the future of music consumption. Spotify, which has just introduced a new version of its app, says that because online streaming services let us call up and listen to anything we like, and because its curated playlists push us toward new stuff, we are all increasingly escaping rigid genres.
Spotify says that its curated playlists, like this one for runners, mix and match songs from many genres. Spotify 
That trend looks sure to accelerate as streaming becomes ubiquitous. At its annual developer conference on Monday, Apple is expected to unveil a streaming music servicebased on its acquisition of Beats, the company co-founded by the music impresarios Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, and best known for its headphones.
There’s also Pandora, the radio service that claims nearly 80 million listeners, and Rhapsody, a streaming service that offers only a paid version, which it recently said has about 2.5 million users. Rdio, another streaming service, recently introduced a plan that goes for $4 a month, less than the standard $10 price. And there’s Tidal, a much-mocked new service founded by Jay Z and his blue-chip friends.
Google and Amazon both offer music plans, too, and Google’s subsidiary YouTube, which is in many ways the world’s largest jukebox, announced an ad-free music video service last year.
Spotify itself has about 60 million active users, 15 million of whom pay $10 per month for an ad-free premium version. On average, the company said, the service exposes each of these listeners to one new artist every day. That is making listeners less beholden to music of certain styles and eras. Instead, many of us will try anything, just because we can easily sample it online.
Spotify is betting that fixed musical genres will fade away. In its new version rolling out to iPhone users, the company has expanded its effort to program for moods and activities rather than merely certain kinds of musical tastes.
“What we want to do is make Spotify more of a ritual,” said Shiva Rajaraman, the company’s vice president of product. “You’ll begin to use it for a set of habits, and we will start to feed content for every slot in your day.”
The app uses a variety of computerized filters to personalize its recommendations, but in general, Spotify is betting on a wider palate. To achieve its goal of programming your entire day, Spotify has to show there’s a lot more to music than the narrow band of songs you think you like; instead, there are many tracks and artists that you may have never considered, but that may match a particular moment or activity the app thinks you’re likely to be doing, from waking up to working to exercising. The company said its data supports this premise: playlists based on moods and activities — like “running,” “focus” and “party,” which contain songs that may cross many genres — are just as popular as those for specific genres like rock, pop and hip-hop.
If Spotify is right about our increasing willingness to try new stuff — and critics who follow the pop charts said it may be — the trend could upend how we think about music.
Until recently, because of the narrowcasting ethos of terrestrial radio, music was fiercely segregated by genre. In an era less bound by those niches and instead dominated by an online free-for-all, we may discover new artists more quickly than in the past — though, on the other side of the coin, we may also develop less fierce attachments to certain artists, flitting, as my children do, between anything and everything. For better or worse, streaming services may turn us into cultural nomads.
Spotify’s effort to program beyond genres is also a canny bit of salesmanship. The company’s biggest hurdle may not be competing services but rather artists, many of whom have been vociferous about their disappointment with the economics of streaming music. Last year, Taylor Swift — whose nimble crossing from country to pop offers perhaps the clearest proof of Spotify’s argument that we are less bound by genres — pulled her music from Spotify.
“I think this is a very focused campaign to try to prove to the industry that they are artist-friendly, and that they are helping to discover new artists,” said Jeffrey Rabhan, chair of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University.
After using Spotify’s new app for a couple weeks, the company’s argument sounded more plausible to me. By suggesting tracks based on my activities and parts of the day, I found the service exposed me to music out of my comfort zone. One early morning, the app suggested “Epic Uplifting Sunrise,” a playlist that consists of soaring post-rock instrumentalists, including the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. I’ve previously found Sigur Rós to be about as pleasant as airport security, but something about listening in the morning, just before coffee, seemed to register. I got into it; it felt uplifting and, indeed, epic, just as promised. I played the playlist every morning for three days, and by the fourth day I was recommending post-rock to my wife.
Chris Molanphy, a pop critic and pop chart analyst who writes for Slate and National Public Radio, told me Spotify’s power to expose listeners to new songs resonates beyond the service itself. The Billboard charts now count plays on Spotify and YouTube in their calculation of the country’s top hits. Programmers for radio stations also look at these services to decide what to add to their rotations.
As a result, Mr. Molanphy said, Internet plays are pushing quirky new acts to the top of the charts faster than ever. He pointed to Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know,” an unusual hit that catapulted to the top in 2012; “Royals,” by the New Zealand teenager Lorde, which was an early online hit before it topped the charts in 2013; and Hozier’s “Take Me to Church,” which dominated radio last year.
“These were all songs that were different from what radio was playing, and radio tends to be a homogeneous medium,” Mr. Molanphy said.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that many of the new artists tend to be one-hit wonders; in fact, 2014 was one of the worst-recorded years for follow-up hits. “There’s just far less loyalty, and many artists are having a hard time following up on their hits,” Mr. Molanphy said — Taylor Swift being the sole notable exception.
Streaming services have bred a musical culture that more closely resembles a cocktail buffet than a sit-down dinner: We sample widely, and when we find something we like we binge, but we don’t necessarily stick around to savor. I expect that soon my children will forget about Paul Simon. My son is already asking about Dylan.
Email: farhad.manjoo@nytimes.com; Twitter: @fmanjoo