Spotify's vision has always been to be everywhere you are. By bringing Spotify into ChatGPT, we're creating a powerful new way for fans to connect with the artists and creators they love conversationally, whenever inspiration strikes.
Sten Garmark, Spotify's SVP of Global Head of Consumer Experience.
When I've read this quote, I found it rhetorically fascinating. It blurs the line between "connection" and "interaction".
Can we be clear about what's actually happening here? No one is actually connecting with artists. Why are we continually trading away depth for immediacy?
Some examples?
- We text instead of calling.
- We eat frozen food instead of cooking.
- We buy fast-fashion instead of clothes that last.
- We scroll through infinite feeds instead of engaging with a single work deeply.
Each of these substitutions promises to save time, as if the goal of life were to eliminate the experience of living itself. Friction is treated as an obstacle to be optimized away. But friction is also what gives texture to experience. The effort, the waiting, these are not bugs in the human condition. They're THE features.
When platforms like Spotify talk about "connecting fans with artists," they're not selling music. They're selling the feeling of intimacy. The same way social media sells the feeling of community or dating apps sell the feeling of romantic possibility, or casinos the feeling of winning.
It's a form of emotional outsourcing. We no longer engage with music as an act of discovery or empathy; we engage with it as a consumer interface designed to deliver predictable microdoses of sentiment.
Art becomes data. Connection becomes simulation. Emotion becomes UX.
None of this is to condemn technology itself; it's to question the uncritical way we let convenience dictate meaning.
At what point do we admit that we've lost the plot? Or are we clapping like trained seals, caring only about superficial appearances?