Why I Finally Quit Spotify
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/why-i-finally-quit-spotify ↗
Chayka writes The New Yorker's Infinite Scroll column on internet culture and the book Filterworld.
This piece is his account of leaving Spotify after the platform's algorithmic homogenisation made his listening feel impoverished rather than expanded.
The piece is short and personal, but the underlying argument is serious: recommendation systems optimised for engagement can produce cultures that feel thinner than the ones they displaced, and the cost of that thinness is not evenly distributed.
For product direction the essay is a useful case study in the unintended consequences of "personalisation" when what is personalised is designed for retention rather than for the listener.
Pair with Simon's attention-economy essay.
Central argument
Chayka argues that Spotify's recommendation algorithm, optimised for engagement and retention, has narrowed rather than expanded his musical world — producing a kind of homogenised listening diet that feels impoverished compared to the richer, more effortful cultures of discovery it displaced. The deeper claim is that personalisation, when designed primarily to keep users on the platform, does not serve the listener's actual interests but instead flattens taste and erodes the conditions under which diverse musical culture can flourish. The cost of this flattening, he suggests, is unevenly distributed — falling hardest on artists and listeners outside the mainstream that algorithms are trained to reinforce.
Critique
Chayka's account is avowedly personal, which limits its generalisability: one New Yorker writer's experience of algorithmic fatigue may reflect the preferences of a culturally self-conscious minority who were already heavy active seekers, not the median user who may genuinely benefit from low-friction discovery. There is also a tension the piece does not fully resolve between the homogenisation critique and the counterfactual — pre-algorithmic gatekeeping through radio, labels, and editorial taste-making was also narrowing and also unevenly distributed, just by different power structures. Chayka gestures at this but does not weigh it, which leaves the normative argument somewhat underspecified.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO, the piece is a sharp illustration of how retention-optimised metrics can quietly hollow out the product's core value proposition: a system that keeps users playing while degrading the quality of what they discover is succeeding on its dashboard and failing its users, and the gap between those two things is a strategic risk that won't show up until churn or substitution arrives. It also surfaces a concrete design and measurement problem — engagement metrics cannot distinguish between a user who stays because they are genuinely satisfied and one who stays because switching costs are high and alternatives feel uncertain, which means product teams need qualitative and longitudinal signals alongside time-spent data. The essay is a useful prompt for asking which user outcomes the personalisation system is actually optimised for, and whether the answer to that question is one the team would defend publicly.