As Observer-reading ABC1 cultural consumers, our carefully cultivated tastes in film, in literature and in oak-aged cheeses are the exquisite hand-crafted carnival masks that we wear as armour in the awkward middle-class dinner party of life. But the tragic consequences of last week’s Spotify data hack continue to unravel. And we wonder privately what could be more revealing, more socially shaming, than exposure of the aching gulf between the music we claim to like, and the music we actually listen to. I live on borrowed time. I’m not alone.

On Tuesday, a writer for the Wire magazine was sacked after analysis of her leaked playlists revealed that, despite passionate appraisals of post-Coltrane black power ecstatic jazz, her favourite artist was in fact the late funnyman Bernard Manning’s house band, Shepp’s Banjo Boys.

And on Wednesday, a founder of the taste-making hipster website Pitchfork trimmed off his own beard after a number of Nickelback albums appeared on his most-played profile. Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger said, from within a Jacuzzi of foaming Jägermeister, that he felt “vindicated”.

Closer to home, our culture secretary John Whittingdale was forced into damage-limitation mode on Thursday after it emerged that he spent all of last year listening to nothing but an old BBC Sound Effects of Death and Horror album over and over again, though the powerful filth-maven seemed most ashamed by the fact that the record in question was a BBC product.

Pressed on this damning electro-acoustic revelation at the Edinburgh television festival on Friday, the semi-feral human claimed he had been trying to work out if the track Eyeballs Being Gouged (17 seconds) had a leftwing bias. And he concluded that it did, despite the eyes in question having been gouged by Nick Robinson as a Conservative-supporting teenage intern.

The Daily Mail and the Sun picked up on the fact that all the supposed sounds of maiming and amputation on the BBC’s lucrative 1970s sound effects series of long players were actually achieved by cutting up vegetables, rather than actual people, and that this was a betrayal of the promise of trust that lay at the very heart of the BBC.

Whittingdale, his lips honeyed with some kind of phosphorescent linctus, removed a single satin lady’s evening glove and responded that, had he known that the sounds of mutilation he had been enjoying in private every night were in fact just chopped vegetables, then he wouldn’t have derived so much pleasure from them.

“Only a pervert would choose to delight himself alone while listening to shredded fennel,” protested the defensive culture secretary, definitively, over a Scottish supper, to a “feisty” Sue Perkins. Then, during the cheeses, Whittingdale hastily assembled an independent panel of openly corrupt newspaper barons, murderous highwaymen and low-life business vermin to farm out all BBC death and horror sound effects in future to competitive independent service providers and Conservative party donors based in offshore tax havens, forcibly bound by an inflexible “no fennel” pledge.

As the Spotify revelations unspooled, I realised my own cultural currency was in danger. Although my main income stream remains live standup, I now exploit a number of secondary finance rivulets, unsentimentally fracking my assiduously cultivated record collection in the hope of transforming the intangible flatus of taste into the black gold of financial remuneration.

I have hosted live anniversary tributes to the venerable Scottish folkies Old Sawney’s String Beans, the East German anarcho-punk band Kohlrübe, and the cult Ohio power-pop group Voiding My Gussets, for which I received, respectively, some hay, a rancid swede and a plastic bag of tangled blank audio tape.

In 2010, I even fronted a doomed attempt to introduce actual jazz to the Cheltenham jazz festival, alongside the annual three-day boogie-woogie jam from Jools Holland, whose costly absinthe and Doritos rider consumed most of what should have been my fee.

Next April, this self-inflated perception of me as a person of superior musical taste means I will take on the coveted 21st-century role of a curator, curating the hipster weird-beard drone-rock weekender Lady Godiva’s Operation, held on this occasion at Zygotic Mynci Caravan Park near St Asaph, in north-east Wales. I am already in talks with Guillemot Penis Hospital and the pianist Irene Von Scheizentank.

But now my future as a respected art/music facilitator hangs by threads in the light of the Spotify leak. I envy the bored businessman, whose mere marriage is in tatters since his infidelities with nonexistent and inexpensive transsexuals were accidentally spewed from the Ashley Madison dating site.

Because I know that, although I have listened to Trout Mask Replica, Locust Abortion Technician and Public Castration Is a Good Idea once each in the last 12 months, my most played album this year is actually Platinum, by the unapologetically unreconstructed American country singer Miranda Lambert. And now Spotify knows it, too. And then so will you. So it’s game over for me.

What can I say? Someone sent me a YouTube link to Miranda’s nostalgia-lubed power ballad Automatic, and its pre-digital prelapsarian vision of a southern-state Eden of Polaroid photos, handwritten love letters and teenagers taping the top 40 off FM radio melted my stupid heart.
Do Netflix, Spotify and Facebook know me as well as they think?

Like a sentimental old fool, I bought Miranda’s album immediately, and a lifetime of meticulous cultural self-grooming was squandered in a moment of impulsive madness. Realising that drastic action was required to try and salvage what might survive of my reputation, yesterday I sent a message to my mailing list of blindly devoted fans, clarifying my untenable position.

“Dear All. You will know by now, that far from being the person I pretended to be, I am actually someone who enjoys the country singer Miranda Lambert’s Platinum album. But you know what? At least two of the tracks are superb, it’s a mainstream country record on which some of the songs are co-written by a lesbian, and there’s a beautifully judged hanging cadence at the end of the cautiously life-affirming Bathroom Sink that I defy anyone to sit through dry-eyed.”

And then I realised. It’s like Miranda sings to me in Bathroom Sink: “I’m looking forward to the girl I want to be, but regret has got a way of staring me right in the face.” The Spotify leak had liberated me. If we have no secrets then we cannot be compromised. Finally, I was free, free to be who I really had been all along. You go, honey!

And then I remembered, I don’t even have a Spotify account. Ah. Too late.

Stewart Lee’s A Room with a Stew is at Leicester Square Theatre, London from 21 Sep.