Spotify is broken

So, all you Spotify users out there know all about your end of year Spotify Wrapped thing they send you each December. Of course you do. Well I can pretty much predict my top 5 songs as they never change much. As a sound engineer I use the same ones (on repeat) to tune PA systems and if you throw some basic maths at it assuming I do 200 gigs a year certain songs will get at least that number of plays.

There is also one artist with two songs in my soundcheck playlist so it is a fair assumption for that artist to have 400 plays a year by me before I start to listen to anyone else for pleasure. That is a big head start.

Anyway my Spotify Wrapped arrived for 2024 and, according to them, there is one artist I seemingly "love more than any other",one artist I played on over 600 separate occasions - Abdoujaparov ..... WHAT !. How is that possible ?.

Ok, I know the band because of the Carter USM back history (a band I do occasionally dip into) but Abdoujaparov might get one spin of Bodypart Superstore and a couple of their blistering cover of All The Way From Memphis, and that is it. Strangely I have probably watched more clips of the real Djamolidine Abdoujaparov (the Tashkent Terror) spectacularly crashing in the Tour de France than I have listened to songs by the band named after him.

It really makes you wonder what data companies collect from you and how they use it. There are dark arts at play somewhere. It won't get better with Ai - that is for sure. Apparently there is someone called the Weeknd (who need to study vowels a bit harder) who have 4 billion streams of a song I have never heard and Ai is insistent that I give them a listen. No. That is one thing that won't be happening.

For me and 2024 Spotify have got it badly wrong but who cares. It was an amusing reveal and so here's a bit of Abdoujaparov channeling Mott The Hoople to improve your day. You can thank me later.