40: All the things Spotify didn't want you to know but Liz Pelly found out

It seems to me that there are a lot of forces in the music business whose goal is to provide content as cheaply as possible. I hate the word ‘content’, but it’s what they use. They’ve been engaged in all these different processes of trying to reduce the cost of content, and it seems realistic to imagine that there will probably be other schemes tha... See more

the idea of your public library being what you turn to for universal music access seems so much more interesting than it being dictated by the major labels and streaming services, who are going to try to reduce the cost of content at every turn to shape what you hear.

I know a ton of people, from when I started researching in 2021, at public libraries around the United States and Canada that have been working on local music streaming programmes, where they pay small flat fees to local artists to license their music for these small-scale, locally focused music streaming programmes.