Last summer, I quit Spotify, and wrote about it with the rather unsubtle headline “Why I quit Spotify.” My reasons remain sound: The software had become clunky, the ads relentless, and the Sabrina Carpenter songs too inescapable. I wanted to find a better music streaming service. It gives me no pleasure to report that a few weeks ago, I rejoined.

The algorithm got me. I don’t just mean that it got me, the way the TikTok algorithm glues you to the screen. Spotify’s algorithm got me the way an old friend gets me and my weird affection for yacht rock or ongoing obsession with French touch music from the mid-Aughts. It took a few months of digging through the proverbial crates of Apple Music for me to realize that Spotify has something other streaming services could never get: 15 years of my music listening habits and artificially intelligent software to reinforce those habits.

This is why algorithms tend to be viewed as villains these days. They’re the technology behind TikTok’s For You page, which keeps feeding you weird videos you can’t stop watching, and Amazon recommendations that appear to know what prescription you’re taking. Facebook’s algorithms, meanwhile, have been radicalizing Americans for at least a decade, and Instagram’s algorithmic feed is wrecking the mental health of an entire generation. The implications of Spotify’s algorithms, you could argue, are quaint by comparison.

Spotify’s algorithm got me the way an old friend gets me and my weird affection for yacht rock.

Quitting and unquitting Spotify made me realize something, though. As central as algorithmic feeds are to how you consume........

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