November 11, 2024
Spotify is a cesspool of corruption that deincentivizes the creation of original songs and rips off artists, according to this spirited debut. Music journalist Pelly critiques the streaming service’s pretense of making lesser-known musicians’ tracks available to a world of listeners, arguing that the platform favors musicians signed to major labels, who receive millions of dollars in advances and free advertising, while obscure indie artists struggle to get by on royalties of $0.0035 per stream. Meanwhile, the platform creates playlists of anodyne background music with bland stylistic strictures and a “muted, mid-tempo, and melancholy” sound popularized by mainstream performers like Billie Eilish and now replicated by AI programs. Evocative prose and sharp analysis (“The suggestion that the businesses of pop music, mood-enhancing background sounds, and independent art-making ought to all live on the same platform... is a recipe for everything being flattened out into one ceaseless chill-out stream”) combine for a trenchant critique of the music streaming industry that calls for concrete reforms (federal legislation that guarantees artists adequate streaming royalties, nonprofit streaming services) while asking bigger questions about “why universal access to music matters” and the cultural consequences of restricting its production and dissemination. The result is a perceptive assessment of the current musical landscape and an eye-opening glimpse into its possible future.
December 1, 2024
Demystifying Spotify. In this age of platform capitalism, with streaming service content whizzing through our brains, the story of Spotify's success is uniquely instructive. Emerging in 2006, after the first forays of Napster and Pirate Bay into the ethical murkiness of peer-to-peer file sharing, Spotify has grown to mammoth proportions. Backed by stringent research, Pelly writes convincingly about how independent musicians, initially convinced of the purported democracy of the platform, have become subservient to big-business interests, like the majority of their 20th-century forebears. The algorithms behind Spotify's curated playlists, the passivity of its paying listeners engendered by those playlists' "we'll do it for you" ethos, and the decline in intelligent listening before data-driven systems tell a story of essentially translating customers' postmodern laissez-faire into hard coin. Pelly argues that the company has affected the quality of music itself, turning songs into little more than "streambait": Producers position the catchy chorus of a song, for example, at the very beginning of a track to hook listeners in the attempt to charm them from clickingNext, or they hire music production companies to write songs that will optimize income across multiple playlist categories. It will then be no surprise when one discovers Spotify has long embraced "ID syncing," the act of selling a user's personal data to other companies--and serving up music generated by AI, leaving even less room at the table for individual, all-too-human artists. A strong indictment to rouse consumers into considering just where our commitment to music is headed.
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Starred review from December 20, 2024
A seasoned music journalist, Pelly has written a groundbreaking debut that examines the music-streaming giant Spotify (with its 626 million users) and its effect on 21st-century music. Spotify was established by Swedish advertisers Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon in 2006 as a streaming platform to attract advertising clients; in 2011, it expanded into the United States. Demonstrating the transformation of the company from a song aggregator to a music gatekeeper, Pelly focuses on the creation of highly edited, mood-related playlists, which personalize and filter content for listeners who want near-continuous background music. She explains how playlists, first human-created and then algorithm-generated, favor major record labels and the companies that own them (like Universal, Sony, and Warner) in a new version of the old music industry model. Pelly contends that the streaming service has a disastrous effect on most musical artists, who barely earn a minimum-wage livelihood due to a punitive royalty system. As an antidote to Spotify, she champions free streaming services at public libraries and public funding for musicians. VERDICT A provocative, insightful, disturbing, and well-researched indictment of Spotify, the music industry, and streaming platforms, which daily mine billions of data bits from users to maximize profits and churn out musical formulas. Highly recommended.--Dr. Dave Szatmary
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