I finally had a chance to make my way through Liz Pelly’s Spotify exposé that’s been making the rounds, and it is so infuriating. Definitely worth reading the whole thing, but the short version is that Spotify is seeding their most popular playlists with generic “background music” that they pay even lower royalties for. A good summary of the issue:

A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.

I’ve been on the fence about streaming services for a while, but I think going forward I want to use both my Kindle and Spotify in the same way. Sample a book/album to see if I like it, and then buy it in physical form (or Bandcamp!) if I do. Like when we used to listen to CDs in the record store to decide if it’s worth spending that precious music budget on.