Music consumption in the era of smart speakers

Just over five years ago I wrote a piece called ‘Music collections in the era of the cloud’, in which I lamented the then-contemporary streaming services’ inabilities to properly represent a users’ music library in the cloud. A few things have changed since then: Rdio is gone, Apple Music is here (and is still a weird mix of iTunes, the iTunes Store, and radio), Spotify has got pretty good at letting users creating their own libraries (albeit limited to Spotify’s catalogue), and Google Play Music — for all its faults as an uninspiring interface and a looming merger with YouTube Red — has emerged as a sensible choice if you’re the kind of user who wants to have your local files in the cloud alongside ‘regular’ streaming tracks. Plus, services like Plex Cloud and Cloud Player are fine ways of uploading and managing your personal music collection in environments entirely removed from the streaming services — excellent solutions for those of us who place importance on a personal library. (How quaint.) And so, at the end of 2017, many of the gripes I had in 2012 are in some way solved, or at least a little less hacky than they used to be.

But there’s still a fundamental issue that has only been exacerbated by recent advances in consumer technology. In 2017, the year when voice assistants essentially became normalised, we’ve never been further removed from music’s…