And it's something that's a complete mystery to me. I can't remember ever hearing of it. Can't think of a reason I'd have stumbled across it and gone to Spotify to start up with it so I could hear this thing. Is Spotify pulling my leg?
I started out looking for one to recommend — inspired by a not-too-inspiring playlist we heard last night in a fancy restaurant — but I ended up making a game out of trying to find one that didn't include "Born in the U.S.A." — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 13, 2024Meanwhile, "Neil Young says he's returning to Spotify , 2 years after exit over Joe Rogan."
If you're on Spotify, you, like me, got its "Wrapped 2023," summarizing our taste in music based on what we actually listened to. It tells each of us that "one place listened just like you," as an image of the globe rotates and homes in on one place.
I got Burlington, Vermont:
For years, TikTok has described its powerful For You Page as a personalized feed ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app. But that’s not the full story....
I'll have to give some more thought to how nefarious this is.
Cory Doctorow seems to think it exemplifies the awfulness of all sorts of things: "Tiktok's enshittification."
The Verge reports, and I already knew, because, though I am not a "kid," Spotify still wanted me to know where I stood in their system, which is FTVU:
Familiarity and variety... It's not paradoxical once you're familiar with a lot of things, which I, as an old person am. I also wanted to show you this — only because it's odd (and definitely "timeless," if by time, you mean the last century):
I'd just finished listening to my old favorite radio show, Jean Shepherd — a great episode, "Prison Life" — and I was out running in the woods at sunrise and had not even touched my iPhone, when I heard a sonorous voice launch into what I now know is Wordsworth:
Meade and I have separate Spotify accounts, but we link them in a playlist they call "Ann + laurencemeade/A blend of music for Ann and laurencemeade." Today, we noticed a spot to touch with an option called "View Blend story." Okay. Spot touched. This screen pops up:
"They went for it.... It's fortunate that the people that went for it were CNN, and they're just so untrustworthy. People know how biased they are, and they know how socially weird their fucking anchors are — just these awkward, non-relatable people.... If there's someone on TV... — like Jon Stewart is a great, relatable person who I find to be a brilliant guy, a kind person — if Jon Stewart thinks you're a piece of shit, I'm going to listen. But if Brian Stelter doesn't like you — it doesn't mean anything to me.... [Stelter's] pattern of communication is so strange. It's like: Do you listen to other people? They talk very differently than you...."
From Joe Rogan's episode #1807 (with Douglas Murray), which went up on Spotify yesterday.
"During the height of it all" refers to a boycott started by Neil Young and aimed at getting Rogan kicked off Spotify.
"... and podcasts off Spotify, saying that 'I find Joe Rogan problematic for reasons other than COVID interviews… For me it’s also his language around race.' Arie subsequently posted a video clip on Instagram compiling 24 times Rogan used the N-word on his podcast. 'He shouldn’t even be uttering the word,' Arie said in the post. 'Don’t even say it, under any context. Don’t say it. That’s where I stand. I have always stood there.'"
If we're going to take the "language around race" seriously and withdraw from group projects that include you with someone who's said something racially wrong, then where can you go? What can you do? And won't we also take the language around gender seriously? All of the machinery of pop culture will collapse.
ADDED: I've asked where's the stopping point, and I can see an answer in this quote from India Arie: "You" — Spotify — "take this money that you generate and you use it to invest in this guy." It is the special and huge investment in Joe Rogan that makes him different from all the other performers on Spotify whose "language around race" might be considered wrong. That link goes to Independent, where you can see the montage India Arie presented. It's hard to listen to carefully, because the "n-word" is bleeped with a piercing sound, but it seemed to me that Rogan was (always?) talking about the word, not actually using the word. Is there any reason to think that Rogan is a racist? Well, there's reason to think that racism is unavoidably woven into every human organism, but that returns me to my where's-the-stopping-point question.
ALSO: If you search Spotify for the "n-word" (written out), you'll find lots of songs and spoken word. There are artists who use that word as part of their name and at least one who has that as his entire name. And I saw multiple profiles that had just that word as their name, including one whose profile picture is a photograph of a naked, erect penis.
So... Reasons to Abandon Spotify... one of the reasons is that it gives you "unfettered access to the entire history of recorded music for $10/month." That sounds more like a reason why it's just crazy NOT to have Spotify.
Or am I supposed to think there's something unethical about this fantastic freedom to listen that is cheap enough for just about everyone?
I know, the musicians want to get paid more. Ross quotes singer-songwriter Damon Krukowski:
Spotify used the financial model of arbitrage to obtain a cheap if not free product—digital music—and resell it in a new context to realize profit. In other words, Spotify’s profit requires that digital music have no value. Spotify continually talks down the value of music on their platform—they offer it for free; they tell musicians we are lucky to be paid anything for it; they insist that without their service, there is only piracy and zero income.
Said Lurker21, in the comments to this morning's post about Joe Rogan, which included appreciation of Joe's line, "I love Joni Mitchell, I love her music, 'Chuck E.'s in Love' is a great song" ("Chuck E.'s in Love" being a Rickie Lee Jones song).
Since we're talking about Spotify, I'd just like to say that on Spotify, anybody's music is a genre of its own. You search the artist's name and, from among the results, choose the icon with the artist's name followed by radio. Thus, for Joni Mitchell, I find "Joni Mitchell Radio" — with varied artists along with Joni:
It works, as I say, with any artist. Just to pick someone I like who was obscure to me until recently:
"Similarly, Spotify should be allowed to decide whom to do business with.... Content creators and content consumers alike choose their preferred associations.... But I do worry about the continued fragmentation of society that attends the idea that everyone sharing a cultural space must align ideologically to coexist... I’m wary of boycotts generally, as there are few limiting principles once you decide you cannot tolerate someone’s thinking. Given Young’s own controversial, science-averse advocacy on such issues as life-saving, child-blindness-averting GMOs, one could ask what’s stopping a retaliatory boycott. Or, to return to the real estate analogy, freedom of association means you’re free to move, but you shouldn’t be able to threaten an exodus to get the homeowners’ association to evict a neighbor.... There’s something deeply corrosive about attempting to live in a way that demands everyone agree with you...."
From "What concerns me most about Neil Young’s Spotify fight" by Sonny Bunch (WaPo).
Yes, let's agree to try to live together...
"I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue."
Said a statement at the website of Joni Mitchell, quoted in "Joni Mitchell pulls music from Spotify, saying she stands with Neil Young in covid protest" (WaPo).
Spotify did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post but in a statement a Spotify spokesperson told The Post earlier this week regarding Young: "We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators. We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to covid-19 since the start of the pandemic."
Neil is a big loss, and Joni is an even bigger loss — much bigger — for us Spotify users. To boycott for censorship — to withhold yourself to gain withholding from others — it's a nasty business. Once you get started, where do you end? Freedom of speech is the better choice, perhaps more understandable to Americans than Canadians, but Americans have been losing our grip on the concept in recent years.
Did Joni make this decision personally? Is she really doing this sort of thing these days? I remember when she was so busy being free.
Spotify is removing Neil Young’s music after the musician gave the streaming service an ultimatum, saying it could not provide a platform to both him and Joe Rogan due to the podcast host’s “fake information” on COVID-19 vaccines. “I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform. They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both,” Young wrote in a letter earlier this week to his record label and management team....
Well, of course, Spotify should side with Joe Rogan. The person who makes an ultimatum like that should lose. It's ridiculous. If that worked, there'd be an obnoxious celebrity throwing his weight around every day.
So much for "rocking in the free world," Neil, you big jerk.
"According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.... The new music market is actually shrinking.... [T]he 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. It was twice that rate just three years ago.... [T]he current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century, such as Creedence Clearwater and The Police. I saw it myself last week at a retail store, where the youngster at the cash register was singing along with Sting on 'Message in a Bottle' (a hit from 1979) as it blasted on the radio. A few days earlier, I had a similar experience at a local diner, where the entire staff was under thirty but every song more than forty years old. I asked my server: 'Why are you playing this old music?'
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