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You Can’t Outrun Spotify
Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine suggests that logging off is the only way out of our music streaming nightmare.
“The suggestion that the businesses of pop music, mood-enhancing background sounds, and independent art-making ought to all live on the same platform, under the same economic arrangements, and the same tools of engagement, is a recipe for everything being flattened out into one ceaseless chill-out stream,” she writes. The model now seems closer to financial speculation.” What’s also different is how Spotify has fully captured those incumbent corporate actors in the service of a marginally new system that deepens and accentuates the crappiness of the old one, with the same overarching issue of a small number of winners being powerful enough to set the tone of not really wanting anything else. In other words, I am a fan of the art form in the way most people are, so it’s notable that my primary exposure to any music education lies in little boxes containing brief nuggets of description, vetted to match Spotify’s corporate-friendly disposition, which are shoved somewhere in the tight real estate of the app when I hit play on a song.
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