Celebrities are themselves influencers. Not only that they have fans that follow them around, as they also have the power to shift the industry they are into, sometimes to their liking.
Among the many celebrities, Adele is one of them.
Born as Adele Laurie Blue Adkins in 1988 in London, Adele is an English singer and songwriter, and considered as one of the world's best-selling music artists.
Since her debut in 2008, she quickly spawned numerous top singles. The same goes to her newer albums, which further cemented her status in the entertainment industry.
With her long lists of popular songs, she has influenced the industry in general, and has received numerous accolades and achievements from her works.
And in her fourth album titled 30, she wished to take her listeners to experience her personal pains, by involving them through her divorce and her journey to find happiness.
But in order to do that, listeners should listen the songs in order, said the pop star.
Spotify is an audio-streaming and media provider from Sweden. As the world's largest music streaming provider with hundreds of millions of monthly active users, many musicians depend on the platform to reach their fans.
Adele included.
The thing is, Spotify's default play button in albums is defaulted to shuffle the songs within it.
What this means, listeners will not listen to the album 30 in the way Adele wanted.
She calls the album 30 her "ride or die throughout the most turbulent period of my life." This is why Adele revealed that having the 12 tracks on the album to play in order is her "only request" to Spotify.
"This was the only request I had in our ever changing industry! We don’t create albums with so much care and thought into our track listing for no reason. Our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended," Adele wrote in a tweet.
She didn't have to wait long, until the streaming giant agreed to make her listeners listen to her music in order, by removing the said button.
It even replied to her tweet, saying that it would do "anything" for Adele.
In other words, Adele singer single-handedly changed the way streaming giant Spotify dictates how users listen to music.
Anything for you
— Spotify (@Spotify) November 21, 2021
It should be noted that premium Spotify users can still access the shuffle function while a song is playing. Those users can also listen to tracks across an artist's discography in random.
What Spotify changed here is that, the button has been removed from individual album pages.
"As Adele mentioned, we are excited to share that we have begun rolling out a new Premium feature that has been long requested by both users and artists to make ‘play’ the default button on all albums," said a representative for Spotify told Variety in a statement.
"For those users still wishing to shuffle an album, they can go to the Now Playing View and select the ‘shuffle’ toggle. As always, we will continue to iterate our products and features to create the best experiences for both artists and their fans.”
Before this, Adele resisted in putting her previous album, 25, on the streaming platform for about seven months after its official release.
"I believe music should be an event," she said in 2015. "For me, all albums that come out, I'm excited about leading up to release day. I don't use streaming. I buy my music. I download it, and I buy a physical [copy] just to make up for the fact that someone else somewhere isn't. It's a bit disposable, streaming."
As things changed, as 25 is finally on Spotify, and as 30 is also available for streaming, Spotify is more than happy to grant Adele's wish without any hesitation.
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