In the early 1960s, in what became known as “the Payola Hearings,” the U.S. government outlawed the practice of radio stations accepting under-the-table cash in exchange for airplay without disclosure. According to several accounts of the day’s payola practices, sometimes DJs were handed stacks of cash, but other times they were offered fake

As recounted in Spotify Teardown, the book Fleischer coauthored, Spotify began as a “de facto pirate service”—because its beta product was made using pirated files—delegitimizing its stated mission of offering an alternative. But what’s possibly more telling is Spotify’s ambivalence about being grouped in with pirates. It simply aligned itself

In Spotify’s quest to create a product that was “better than piracy,” as Ek would often say, it aimed to have files load and stream as quickly as possible when a user pressed “play.” The engineering team even gave themselves a specific metric: any song should begin within two hundred milliseconds of pressing the button. They wanted it to feel

As streaming has organized everyone into its lean-back-vibes economy, in the quest for a frictionless experience, musicians coming from historically separate corners of the music business have begun to operate within the same landscapes. That’s true of the fact that major label pop stars and independent artists alike now rely on the same tools. But

Related patterns emerged in the playlist titles—especially the vibed-out ones approximating authenticity through lowercase titles, catering to Spotify’s ongoing company-wide bet to win over Gen Z subscribers. (Using all lowercase to approximate an off-the-cuff, low-key aesthetic is also a trend that major label pop stars have adopted in recent

It’s a story of listeners being sold music more as a utility than an art form, and musicians starting to see themselves more as content creators than artists. It is a story of precarity, hyper-commercialization, individualism, and all of the above being obfuscated under the notion of “vibes.” And it’s the story of how those problems then played out

By 2023, a digital strategist for another independent record label told me he had all but given up on the prospect of his artists landing playlist placements; that everything was algorithmic now, streaming income was down across the board, and it seemed like there was little he could do about it. “My optimism comes from hoping for the imminent

At its most potent, music helps us give form to ideas and feelings that were previously inexpressible—fleeting moments where the ineffable becomes real, where loneliness dissipates, where the world briefly makes sense. And when music moves us in ways that we cannot fully fathom, it’s the words of music writers that can help pull us closer toward

At a music conference in 2019, Spotify executive Jim Anderson appeared on a panel, after which a concerned musician stood up during the Q&A to ask about the financial model, and whether it was fair to artists. A disgruntled Anderson replied: “The problem was to distribute music. Not to give you money, okay?”14