A nice vinyl album with artwork shows a lot of care has gone into making it, where as an album in Spotify has been stripped of all uniqueness and identity in all but the sound itself.
A vinyl without sleeve and artwork and a carefully curated Spotify playlist sit somewhere inbetween.
"Spotify has been stripped of all uniqueness and identity in all but the sound itself."
There is at least the cover picture left, but yes, I would not recommend Spotify for mindful listening. It is designed for "engagement", I still have not found out, how to tell it to stop, after that one song I want to hear.
It insists on playing something else. Very rarely something interesting shows up, but usually I just get annoyed for it playing radio, when I wanted ONE song, nothing more.
So I love my own digital music collection and player that remains under my control.
I have a shuffle there as well, but conscious listening remains possible, even though surely the experience would be more powerful, combined with the ritual of going through the physical records, holding the artwork in my hands and putting the one record in. But for convinience, I stick to my digital collection. (I don't think all my music is on vinyl and I would need extra rooms then)
"How to get Spotify to stop playing music: Take headphones off."
And when the sound comes from the boxes? Then yes, I have to hurry back to the laptop to stop the not fitting next song (e.g. something fast, after I choose something chill). This is ridiculous.
The feature "stop after song" is avaiable in every serious music player I used (and also the one I programmed myself). But it is not in Spotify, even though it is trivial.. This is what I call "designed for engagement". I have to click more and find new things etc.
"I dont think I've ever listened to a song I didn't want to listen to on Spotify. "
So how do you achieve that? Do you only use custom playlists, or do just mostly don't care so much?
Because if I have one song in my head, then sometimes I just want this exact song and if I tell spotify to play this song - then afterwards it plays something totally different, even though it tries to fit the same genre, but this works badly. And even if it would be the same genre, some songs are just deep. And you want silence afterwards to process them - if you are consciously listenting in the first place. For some background noise spotify works great, no doubt about that.
I wonder why nobody thought about recreating album sleeves with the original artwork and no vinyl inside, just the housing capable of carrying one or more CDs, that is, giving a CD owner the ability to put their discs into a old-style sleeve. I'm all for digital music, but totally miss the old sleeves and prints. Would it be economically viable for a business to acquire only the rights for the prints, possibly plus lyrics, but not the music, so that they could sell the prints alone?
A vinyl without sleeve and artwork and a carefully curated Spotify playlist sit somewhere inbetween.