When Spotify Slid Into Your DMs
I called this a decade ago. The MIDIA research just told you why.
So in sept ‘25, Ted Gioia dropped a piece called “Listeners Can’t Remember the Names of Their Favorite Songs and Artists” and I sat there reading it like - no shit, Ted. I’ve been screaming this since 2015.
He’s quoting new research from MIDIA - the report is called All Eyes No Ears, read that title twice and let it punch you in the chest - and it tells us four things that anyone working inside the music industry has felt for years but couldn’t prove on paper:
→ 16–24-year-olds are LESS connected to music discovery than 25–34-year-olds. The kids aren’t driving the scene anymore. The kids are passive.
→ 18% of people don’t want to leave their feed even when they hear something they like.
→ By the time they do leave, 33% have already forgotten the song name or never saw it in the first place.
→ And the real bomb - 55% of young listeners want deeper engagement with music. They just don’t know how to get there.
Let me say that last one again. The demand is there. The bridge is gone.
Im gonna rewind to 2015
When I was a student doing my Billboard Hot 100 research project, Spotify was just starting to eat the world. And I noticed something weird in the data - songs were charting harder than ever, but the artists behind them were getting more anonymous, not less. You’d ask someone what the song of the summer was, they’d hum it for you. Ask them who sang it? Blank stare.
I remember telling my mentor: Spotify is going to have to become social eventually. Because their whole growth model is built on volume of listening, and volume of listening doesn’t equal fandom, and without fandom the artist economy collapses, and without an artist economy - what exactly is Spotify even for?
Cut to August 2025. Spotify rolls out Messages. You can now slide into someone’s DMs inside the app. Group chats followed in January.
I was right. But what I didn’t predict was how fast the platform would weaponize it.
The Bunker Just Got a Chat Function
I told you in The Algorithmic Choir - platforms are bunkers. They don’t want you leaving. Every minute you spend on Instagram telling your friend about a song is a minute you’re NOT on Spotify. Every WhatsApp link is a tiny leak in the dam.
So Spotify did the only logical thing: they absorbed the leak. Why send your friend a Spotify link through WhatsApp when you can send the song inside Spotify? Why talk about music on Instagram when Spotify built you a chat?
This isn’t a feature. It’s a containment strategy.
And here’s the part Gioia almost lands but doesn’t quite say out loud:
The disconnect between virality and fandom isn’t a glitch. It’s the goddamn product.
A platform makes money from time-on-app. The LAST thing it wants is for you to remember the artist clearly enough to:
→ buy the damn concert ticket → buy a t-shirt (no platform commission) → buy a vinyl (no platform commission) → follow them on Socials (no platform commission) → tell a friend, in person, in a bar, on a Tuesday (no platform commission)
You forgetting is the desired user state. The platform isn’t failing at building fandom. It’s succeeding at preventing it.
What This Looks Like From My Desk
I run Meta Ads for the artists I work with within the agency. I retarget pixels. I build lookalike audiences from email lists of 800 people because that’s all we have. I work with ticketing platforms that often don’t even share full pixel data with us because they’re protecting their own conversion funnel.
Let me tell you what 20 million streams(for a single) looks like in real life: it looks like a song that fills your Reels feed for two weeks and doesn’t sell 100 tickets to a 1,400-cap room.
Just a side note I ad today: the artist may have numbers in socials, he/she might be a great content creator - hence - they educate people that way, which means…yeah… the social page is where they would like to see the artist.
I’ve watched a song trend on TikTok, watched the artist’s Spotify monthly listeners spike, and then watched the ticket page crawl because almost nobody who heard the song remembers the artist enough to give them 30 euros and two hours of their Saturday night. Not because the music sucks - the music is fine. Because there’s no connective tissue between “I liked this 8-second clip” and “I will commit my night to a stranger’s voice in a room full of other strangers.”
The connective tissue is memory. And memory is what algorithms strip out by design.
Going back a bit - Why Names Used to Stick
In the 90s, you heard a song on the radio. The DJ said the artist’s name. Twice, sometimes. You wrote it on a napkin. You went to the record store. You looked at the album cover. You read the liner notes. You played it for your friend, who said “oh yeah, that’s so-and-so.” Or, my favourite - I would record the song from the radio (even if I missed the intro or the first verse)), most of the time ruining my brother or father’s original cassettes. Every single touchpoint reinforced the name…
Now? You hear the song in your headphones, alone. The 15-second TikTok clip has no album cover. The artist is a username and a Spotify Canvas loop. You see no face. You hear no name. You scroll. The next song plays. The algorithm has moved on. Your brain has nothing to grip onto.
Names stick when you can attach them to a place, a face, a friend, a moment. The algorithm strips every single one of those out - and then the platforms wonder why nobody remembers names.
Now Spotify wants to give you the “friend” part back. Inside the bunker. On their terms. With their data.
Listen to me very carefully: your algorithm will never be your friend. The minute you start treating it like one is the minute you’ve lost the plot completely.
So What Do We Do
We name things. Out loud. To each other.
You tell your friends what artist made you feel something this week. Not by sending a Spotify link - by saying the name. “Listen to X. Here’s why.”
We go to shows. We buy the vinyl. We follow the socials. We learn the songwriter, not just the song.
Look at Robin and the Backstabbers - the band I wrote about two months ago. They never optimized for virality. Years between albums. No daily content drip. No algorithmic feed feeding. And kids who weren’t born when their first EP dropped are screaming their lyrics back at them in 2026. Why? Because the gaps made you go look for them. Scarcity built the memory.
That’s a good model.
Because if we don’t relearn it - in five years the most-streamed song on Earth will be by an artist who doesn’t exist, performed by no one, remembered by nobody. And the platforms will be very pleased with the engagement metrics.
The pulse isn’t dead. But it’s getting harder to hear over the algorithm.
You know what to do.
Rant not over!