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‘Death to Spotify’: the DIY movement to get artists and fans to quit the music app
theguardian.com
“Easy: Zep,” he barked. “Physical Graffiti.” “Monster of a record, yeah,” I said. “Ben?” “Me? Oh, I was kind of a geek,” he said. “My mom passed on her love for Billy Joel. The Stranger, though—not the doo-woppy stuff. I’m not that bad.”
Dawnie Walton • The Final Revival of Opal & Nev: Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022
The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly
Liz Pelly • The Ghosts in the Machine
Take Whitney Houston’s 1987 smash “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me),” which was bought in late 2022 as part of a $50 million to $100 million deal by Primary Wave, a music publishing company backed by two private equity firms. The song was recently rebooted into our collective hippocampus via a movie about the singer, titled, naturally, “I... See more
Marc Hogan • Same Old Song: Private Equity Is Destroying Our Music Ecosystem
Literary Hub
lithub.com
In the 1990s, as the musician and indie label founder Jenny Toomey wrote recently in Fast Company, a band could sell 10,000 copies of an album and bring in about $50,000 in revenue. To earn the same amount in 2024, the band’s whole album would need to rack up a million streams — roughly enough to put each song among Spotify’s top 1 percent of... See more
Marc Hogan • Same Old Song: Private Equity Is Destroying Our Music Ecosystem
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
... See more