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‘One minute it’s “would you like to listen to Galaxie 500?”, the next humanity’s enslaved’: can anyone escape Spotify?
As a new book skewers Spotify’s effect on music, two Guardian music writers spent a week assessing the limits of living with and without it
I read enough science fiction in my teens to know that this is very much the thin edge of the wedge – one minute it’s all matey “would you like to listen to Galaxie 500?”, the next humanity’s enslaved, living underground mining uranium for a robot. With playlists like “70s hippie afternoon”, it’s like their made-up Spotify Wrapped “genres”, where they’re named a) to mimic the language of memes, and b) as a reduction of music down to “vibes”, stripping away historical context. And the “coffee shop” vibe is so prevailing, it’s ended up dictating the types of music that get signed: you get more pop-ready, front-facing songwriters such as Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker on indie labels – they’re obviously great but they’re also products that work well in that ecosystem.
Or read this on The Guardian