Spotify and the Weight of Too Much Choice: Control, Customization, and the Exhaustion of Endless Options

 Spotify is, without question, powerful. It’s slick, modern, and built around the idea that you should be able to shape your listening experience down to the smallest detail. You want control? Spotify hands you the keys, the map, the steering wheel, and the ability to redesign the road while you’re driving on it. For a lot of people, that’s exactly why they love it. The ability to customize, to create your own playlists, to curate your sound exactly how you want it, that scratches a very specific itch. And I get why that appeals to folks. I really do.

But for me, that same strength is also Spotify’s biggest downside. Because at a certain point, customization stops feeling like freedom and starts feeling like pressure. Too many choices doesn’t always mean a better experience. Sometimes it just means decision fatigue. Sometimes it means you spend more time managing your music than actually listening to it.

Spotify is built on playlists. Everything revolves around them. Personal playlists, collaborative playlists, algorithm-generated playlists, mood playlists, decade playlists, genre playlists, hyper-specific vibe playlists that feel like they were named by someone trying way too hard. And while that ecosystem works incredibly well for some people, for me it can feel overwhelming. There’s this constant sense that you should be curating, refining, optimizing. Like your music taste is something that needs to be organized into neat little boxes at all times.

When you have unlimited control, you also have unlimited responsibility. You’re the one deciding what goes where, what fits, what doesn’t, what stays, what gets removed. And that can quietly turn music into a task. Instead of just hitting play and letting yourself feel whatever comes up, you’re thinking about structure. About order. About whether a song still belongs in a playlist you made two years ago. That mental overhead adds up.

I think that’s why Spotify works best for people who really enjoy curation as an activity in itself. Folks who love building playlists the way some people love building shelves or organizing collections. For them, the act of creating a playlist is part of the pleasure. It’s creative, intentional, and satisfying. Spotify is basically a dream platform for that kind of listener.

But if you’re someone who just wants to exist with music, who doesn’t always want to decide, who doesn’t want to be the DJ every single time, Spotify can feel like too much. Too many doors. Too many paths. Too many moments where you’re staring at your library thinking, what do I even want to hear right now?

That said, Spotify isn’t without its own kind of appeal for me. It just shows up in a very specific way. The one thing I genuinely do like about Spotify is its relationship with albums. Spotify makes it incredibly easy to add entire albums to playlists, and that’s where my use of it starts to make sense. Instead of carefully selecting individual songs and crafting some perfect sequence, I like to just throw whole albums into a massive playlist and let them coexist.

There’s something satisfying about treating albums as complete units instead of mining them for individual tracks. Albums have arcs. They have pacing. They have emotional flow. When you add an entire album, you’re respecting the artist’s intent while still allowing it to mix with other albums in unexpected ways. You’re not obsessing over which song is “playlist-worthy.” You’re saying, this whole body of work deserves space.

Massive playlists built out of full albums are, to me, the least exhausting way to use Spotify. You’re still customizing, but you’re not micromanaging. You’re creating a big container and letting the music move around inside it. One album bleeds into another. One era crashes into a completely different sound. And because the playlist is so large, there’s still an element of surprise. You don’t always remember what’s coming next, even though you technically chose everything in there.

That approach also solves one of Spotify’s biggest issues for me: predictability. Smaller, tightly curated playlists can get stale fast. You know every transition. You know every emotional beat. With giant album-based playlists, that predictability fades. The scale creates randomness. It’s controlled chaos, but chaos nonetheless.

Still, even with that workaround, Spotify never fully lets go of its identity as a platform obsessed with choice. Every screen invites you to tweak, adjust, explore, optimize. There’s always another playlist suggestion, another mix, another recommendation waiting to pull you in a different direction. It’s great if you’re in the mood to explore intentionally. It’s less great if you just want to sink into the music and not think too hard.

Spotify also reflects something bigger about modern culture. We’re told that more choice is always better. More options, more customization, more control. But psychologically, that isn’t always true. Too many choices can make it harder to enjoy the ones we make. When everything is available at all times, it can feel like nothing fully lands. Spotify embodies that abundance in a very literal way.

That doesn’t make it bad. It just makes it different. Spotify is a tool. A very effective one. And like any tool, how much you enjoy it depends on how you use it and what you want from it. If you love shaping your listening experience down to the finest detail, Spotify is incredible. If you love playlists as personal expressions, as mood boards made of sound, Spotify gives you endless room to play.

For me, though, that level of control comes with a cost. It asks too many questions. What do you want to hear? What mood are you in? What vibe fits right now? Sometimes I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t want to know. Sometimes I just want the music to meet me where I am without asking me to define myself first.

That’s why Spotify, for all its strengths, can feel heavier than it needs to be. It’s powerful, but power isn’t always relaxing. It’s customizable, but customization isn’t always freeing. And while I appreciate what it offers, I also feel the weight of what it demands in return.

In the end, Spotify shines brightest when you use it in a way that resists its own excess. Big playlists. Full albums. Letting go of perfection. Letting things sprawl instead of tightening everything into a theme. When you stop trying to make Spotify into the ultimate expression of your taste and instead treat it as a giant crate of records you can shuffle through, it becomes more enjoyable.

Spotify isn’t about surprise in the same way some other platforms are. It’s about intention. About authorship. About saying, this is what I chose. And for some listeners, that’s exactly what they want. For me, it’s something I approach carefully, knowing that too much choice can drain the joy out of something that’s supposed to feel alive.

So yeah, Spotify is impressive. It’s flexible. It’s endlessly customizable. And it absolutely has its place. I just have to use it in a way that doesn’t turn music into another thing I feel obligated to manage. When I let albums speak for themselves and stop overthinking the rest, Spotify becomes less exhausting and more what it should be in the first place: a way to let music exist in my life without needing to control every second of it.