Manufactured Data Scarcity
All your information is under the hood even if you’re interested in seeing what is driving the engine.
Spotify Wrapped Day is my favorite holiday.
Every year on December 1st, I’m treated to dissection of not only my listening habits and idiosyncrasies, but all of my friends’ analyses as well. My friends that are in bands post their annual rollups, showing off their growth and success. I reach out to people I haven’t spoken to in years, and they reach out to me, based on shared musical interests uncovered by the sharing of the various summary pages. I’ve got my “100 Top Songs” playlists going back to 2014, giving me a way to instantly hop into a time machine to traverse the sonic timelines of my life.
Other apps have hopped onto the bandwagon. Unsurprisingly, other music streaming services like Apple Music have copied the annual roll up, but so have other apps like Snapchat and Google Photos’ “Year in Review” or the hardo-outdoors activity app Strava’s “Your Year in Sport.”1 Never has companies harvesting all of your data never been so fun!
I won’t lie: I love these rollups. Before Facebook natively housed “memories” I remember downloading an app called Timehop (?) for this very function. What is so intriguing about these annual summaries, however, is that they are composed of your data that accumulates constantly throughout the year.
Every day that isn’t December 1st, however, Spotify doesn’t let you see who your top artists, genres, or songs are. The closest thing you can get is a vague monthly summary of top artists and songs, visible only to you, hidden on your profile on the desktop app.
In 2020, Spotify unveiled a Decade in Review, an epic review of your listening history of the last ten years. All of this data is sitting on Spotfy’s servers right now, informing the models that provide you with recommended songs and artists. But all of this data is totally hidden from you. There are no live dashboards of your listening data, top songs or artists or genres. All of that information is under the hood, so to speak, even if you’d be interested in seeing what is driving the engine.
I call this phenomenon manufactured data scarcity. The data is all there—you can even access it by requesting Spotify send you all of the data they have on you—but it is hidden behind a gate of awareness (Spotify isn’t exactly promoting this feature), inconvenience (it takes them days to compile the data and send it to you), and technical know-how (most people haven’t a clue what to do with a .JSON file).
Manufactured data scarcity exists across essentially every platform that you use. I’m not necessarily making a value judgement here, because like I said, Spotify Wrapped Day is my favorite holiday of the year. With that said, I do wonder if part of the reason that companies manufacture data scarcity is because, if they didn’t, it might make salient just how much information they have on you.
Perhaps if it was easier for me to see that I listened to the full length of “Deseándote” three times in a row for some reason on July 11 around 1AM UTC (6PM Mountain Time), which is kind of weird because I know this was when I was missing my homies I had just been on a trip with in Puerto Rico, I’d be a little less stoked on how much of an insight into my life I am giving Spotify/[insert tech company here].
I guess this post can just serve as a reminder that if you aren’t paying for something, you are the product, and sometimes even when you are paying for something you’re still the product.
By the way—I might not post anything for a while. I’ve got a lot of data to sift through from Spotify.
Living in Boulder has turned me into an active hardo-outdoors-activity-tracking-app user.