Thirteen years ago today, I wrote a blog post that changed my life.
I was a 20-year-old summer intern at NPR Music, sitting in front of the Tiny Desk, grappling with the contraction between how much I loved music and how little I paid for it.
I wrote that I had 11,000 songs in my iTunes li... See more
The rise of algorithmic curation and AI-generated content has sent this into overdrive: On Spotify, music is detached from its human creators and flattened into algorithmically-generated playlists with hashtag-able labels like “Lo-Fi Chillwave Anime Vibes.”