Scientific publishing keeps borrowing the Spotify metaphor, but most versions focus on access and UX rather than structure. This piece argues that the real shift in music wasn’t streaming albums more efficiently, but changing what moved through the system: tracks became interoperable objects, while albums became one way to assemble them.

The analogy breaks when applied to science because papers are treated as both the song and the album. Preprints removed gatekeeping, but without shared formats and explicit relationships, figures, data, and methods still don’t circulate independently.

Curious where this analogy fails, especially from people building research infrastructure or working on AI systems that rely on scientific content.

Yes. The article is the album.