Poor old Spotify

For those ignorant of such things, Spotify is a website that permits users to play music directly from their internet-enabled devices. There is a large catalogue from which to choose. If one wishes to keep the music then it must be purchased. There are plenty of other such websites but I single out this one because it is one of the very few that I have used from time to time, and because today I received a plaintive little email from them displaying this desperate plea:

Apologies if you find this hard to read but this is exactly how it was sent. I suppose people who spend all day listening to pop music don't know much about image design.  Anyway, let us examine the contents forensically.

"It's been a while...".  No greeting. No "Dear Ramblings" or, if they wanted to be more formal "Dear Mr Commuter (Ruislip)". Instead they give me a phrase without a subject. What has been a while? How long is a while?

We then move from this unsubstantiated assertion to the baffling "So we made you a throwback playlist...". If they had said "So here is a gift voucher that you can spend in the retailer of your choice; please, please spend more time browsing our website" then this would definitely have grabbed my attention. I don't know what a throwback playlist is. Every single piece of music I (and, I suspect, you) own was recorded at some time in the past. At what point is a track sufficiently old to be dubbed as a throwback? Does anyone on Spotify even realise that there is a huge body of work produced in the past five centuries that is regularly performed? Clearly not, because for these dumbos the pieces included in this unwanted playlist are tracks from about twenty or thirty years ago.

The suggestion that I might have memories for works by a-ha and Eurythmics shows once again the inadequacies of data mining and prevalence of stupidity over thought processes in consumer websites. Spotify know the sort of thing I have browsed in the past. They also therefore know the sort of thing in which I have not the slightest interest, and pop songs of the past thirty years feature pretty damn high in this list.

And so we come to the summing up. Will I "love" their "throwback playlist"?  Here are the possible answers and you, dear reader, may select the one you feel is most appropriate.

• No
• No, no, a thousand times no
• Do you really think I can be arsed even to look at their stupid list, never mind actually listen to it?
• Er, that's about it, one of the above should be sufficient