Started on 5.29.25, finished on 6.10.25

I had a really busy couple of weeks, so the length of time it took me to finish this book should not be taken as a judgment on its content in any way. I found it really, really interesting.

I also found it slightly befuddling. As someone who, 98% of the time, is doing purposeful, lean-in listening—listening exclusively to either playlists that I or a friend or artist I follow have made (or albums of course, lol), except twice a week maximum when I listen to the Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists, I was shocked to read statistics about just how many people are not being intentional at all with their listening.

It reminded me of a conversation I overheard at the Lucy Dacus show last month—the woman sitting behind me said, “I can’t remember the last time I spent less than $100 on a concert ticket.” It’s truly a different world!

I was appalled to learn about the transition from carefully curated editorial playlists to algorithmically-driven “playlists” that pretty much just play you the same songs the service already knows you like. I was also appalled to learn how much of the market share is going to Spotify-commissioned songs that nobody seems to notice when they’re doing their lean-back listening.

I picked this book up expecting the solution would be to switch to another platform, but I’m not really sure that it is. It’s pennies either way. For now, I’m going to continue buying tickets to shows, buying merch, and supporting my very favorite artists directly, and I’ll be keeping an eye on how the streaming world continues to develop.

Click here to buy this book on Bookshop.org

My favorite quotes:

“And while the potential of generative AI feels urgent, it’s also important to remember the less flashy ways that artists and listeners have been impacted by different systems of automation and machine learning over the past decade-plus, as artists’ careers have become increasingly managed by algorithms, and listening has become more and more mechanized.”

“What Spotify had really done was engineer a frictionless experience: the sense that the music just materialized from thin air. But similar to other app-enabled magic tricks of recent history, such as overnight packages and instant food delivery, frictionlessness is always an illusion.”

“A huge number of listeners, no matter what their taste may be, are using the platform—and in a lot of cases exclusively—and a majority just listen to playlists. There’s a term thrown around called ‘passive listeners.’ That’s pretty depressing.” -from an indie record label owner

“Often, conversations about the streaming era center the way music has been financially devalued, but there is also a broader, harder-to-pin-down cultural devaluation that comes with streaming: the relegation of music to something passable, just filling the air to drown out the office worker’s inner thoughts as spreadsheets get finalized and emails get circled up on.” (Should this have been “circled back on”? lol)

“It’s not sustainable to put out challenging records. To be sustainable, you have to put out records that are going to get repeat listens in coffee shops.” -Quote from Darius VanArman

“Like many other corners of the Spotify operation, it was all about metrics. If users weren’t skipping tracks, the higher-ups didn’t see a problem.”

“The bottom line is, Spotify wants content for as cheap as possible. Ideally they’d want to own content, like Netflix—hence their podcasting investment. If I’m Spotify and there’s a lot of people making this type of functional music content, and there’s AI now also making this type of content, you’re going to want to find a way to supply that content to users at the lowest price possible.” -Quote from ex-Epidemic employee

“… new types of automated ‘Niche Mixes’ overtook more screen space, but the music contained within them never seemed all that different; ‘Sad Crying Mix,’ ‘Sad Late Night Mix,’ and ‘Lonely Sad Mix’ were all different options, when I clicked around recently, but the offerings were mostly music from my listening history, with just a few new recommendations. The boxes within which Spotify segmented its recommendations were growing more niche and plentiful, but more than anything, it felt like an interface trick, a way to make the user feel a sense of abundance about the rewrapping of songs they already liked, taking algorithmically premeditated low-risk content and making the options seem new—it was, as ever, an illusion of choice.” -This one seriously blew my mind. Like truly, truly, what is the point?!

“When I look at a Spotify bedroom pop playlist, it doesn’t feel like I’m learning about bedroom pop, it feels like I’m learning about the SEO-optimized version of bedroom pop that exists on the Spotify servers.” !!!!

“You know what the machine thinks you like, but you don’t always know why the machine came to that conclusion; you also don’t know what the machine thinks other people like, or the ways in which what you are recommended relates to what other people are recommended. It is music recommendations as a means of creating silos, not connections.”

“VC funding has led to an obsession with scale. But not all business scales. Not all art scales. Scale is a shitty measure of impact. Scale means that everything has to get bigger and bigger and bigger, and if we demand that of the web, we’re going to miss out on small changes that actually change lives.” -Maggie Vail, label manager of Bikini Kill Records

“On a collective level, we have to be active participants in the cultural economies we want to see flourish; we have to validate the culture we want to see in the world.”