Music Visualizers Used To Be Everywhere. What Happened?
NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T
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As streaming services, and the notion of subscribing to a catalog of music rather than owning, takes over, we've lost a crucial relic from the heyday of the media player.

I would like to talk about music visualizers, those wild and trippy things that came loaded with your favorite media player of choice back in the early '00s. But first, I have to talk about my desk.

For the past several years, my desk setup at the office has remained largely unchanged. In front of me sits a 27″ Apple Thunderbolt Display, and just to the left sits a 15″ 2014 Retina MacBook Pro. On the big display I have an arrangement of windows that simultaneously lets me look at the Digg CMS, a preview of this website you know and love and our workplace chat program. On the MacBook display I had, for many years, just one program running: Tweetdeck. The big screen was for Digg dot com, the thinking went, the smaller was for Twitter dot com.

Up until very recently this was fine. Until it wasn't. For my own sake, I've stopped using Tweetdeck, and for the past few months, I haven't really replaced it's spot on my "secondary" display with anything. It's just sort of a spillover for things that I don't really need, but also don't really want to close. A note application riddled with links, a desktop overflowing with screenshots I refuse to delete and, yes, the Spotify desktop app.

On the big display there is an order and a purpose (keep this website running), and on the small display there's just clutter… and my music.

Last week I had a minor revelation. What if, instead of using a computer screen to remind me how scatterbrained and disorganized my life is, I could use it to just look at something. Something that wouldn't be distracting, but that I could just put my eyes on when I'm trying to sort through some thoughts in my head. I listen to music almost all day long, so what if I just put a music visualizer on there? An idle curiosity of 2003 was now to be my workplace productivity boon in 2019.

And then I ran into an issue. Spotify doesn't have one.

 

 A little more than a decade ago, this wouldn't have been a problem. If you grew up with the internet back then, you likely got your music from a malware-riddled file sharing program, you stored it in an incomprehensible mess of folders and filenames on the family computer and you played it with a media player that had a custom skin downloaded from WinCutomize. And to top it all off, you wouldn't just listen to the music, but you'd watch the visualization — a dazzling mess of colors that somehow suited all moods and genres.

And then the iPod came. Sure, iTunes, still to this day, has a visualizer, but the introduction of a device that let you take all of your music with you anywhere suddenly made Winamp skins and visualization presets look, well, juvenile. Kids listening to terrible rips pirated off of KaZaA would be listening with the visualizer on. Adults had tens of gigabytes of .OGG files, all legally-purchased and with the correct album art for every single track.

Eventually, streaming services like Spotify came on the tail-end of Web 2.0 and basically closed the gap between teens burning CDs for their friends and music nerds who have their library backed up three times on external drives. While there is still certainly an argument to be made for owning your music, there's certainly something to be said for having access to some 30 million songs that are all properly labeled, organized and have the album art.

As nostalgic as some of us like to get about Winamp skins, the sheer access to music has clearly swayed people. In 2018, Spotify hit 207 million monthly active users, 96 million of which are subscribers; likewise Apple Music cracked 50 million subscribers; and even internet-darling SoundCloud is moving towards integrating artists into Spotify and Apple's platforms. According to a latest report from the RIAA, streaming revenue is up, and digital track sales are down. These days, most piracy is largely from people ripping stuff off of YouTube they otherwise can't stream on Spotify or Apple Music.

Sure, it's great. We all get to listen to a lot more music, and artists, hopefully, are getting paid more. But what we've gained in access we've lost in terms of user experience. Have you streamed a song on Spotify, Soundcloud, or Pandora? It's not very fun to watch.

 

As late as 2014, the Spotify app had a visualizer, albeit a hidden one. Today, the best visual experience it can muster is a full-screen display of the album art with a drop shadow. Which is great if you love album art, but it's hard to say it holds up to repeat viewings. It's something that a subset of users have been asking for since 2012, and that Spotify officially nixed any future plans to implement one in 2017.

That isn't to say that Spotify killed the visualizer. It's still here. There is currently a single working web-based visualizer that will work in conjunction with Spotify. You can still use the one that's survived in iTunes if you're an Apple Music subscriber, sure. Heck, you can even install a plugin that will recreate the MilkDrop visualizer found in Winamp. And you can even hack together a solution through Winamp on Windows, or pay $30 for a standalone visualizer program and just pipe Spotify through that.

The music visualizer never went away in the way old software or websites have disappeared from the web, at least not yet. What changed is how we listened to music on our computers now. Spotify, who acquired music big data firm The Echo Nest in 2014, clearly has the knowledge, talent and capability — as demonstrated by their annual Wrapped feature — to make not only a competent, but probably the best music visualizer ever seen. But you can't exactly blame them for deciding to commit their resources elsewhere. Their growth is in getting users to explore their extensive library through algorithmic and human-generated playlist and recommendations. Spotify and other music streaming services are, in a way, productivity software now. The sheer access to music now means that music is less about the singular experience of listening — as a visualizer would make it — but the background of whatever it is you're doing.

In an earlier version of this story, I wanted to make the argument that streaming services should bring back the visualizer because, well, why the heck not? It's a seemingly easy thing to do, and it would make people happy. But I think the issue really isn't with the streaming services, but really with how I've changed my music consumption habits over the years.

Once Rdio and Spotify launched here in the US in 2011, I was happy to ditch my own music library, freeing up scarce hard drive space for other important things, like video games, on my home machine. My tastes in music would change so quickly, that buying and cataloging a music library seemed like a waste of time. But now, I'm realizing that my yearning for a visualizer isn't a yearning for a better Spotify, but a yearning to go back to owning my own music again.

What seems like the easier thing to do? Demand that the world's most popular streaming service cater to my specific vein of niche nostalgia? Or just buy the music I want to listen to, load it into Winamp, and then bliss out for days?

<p>Steve Rousseau is the Features Editor at Digg.&nbsp;</p>

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