Liz Pelly

"Spotify also presents a new and complicated extension of hyper-commercial webspace, and it’s a development that could prove to be particularly harmful for musicians: the corporate-branded playlists. This ‘feature’ could be explained as the platform’s interpretation of corporate personhood, where paid-for brand accounts can create their own profiles and make playlists in the manner of the platform’s regular users. This has led to a proliferation of playlists made by brands. For example: the 'Coffeehouse Pop’ made by the official Starbucks page, or the 'Running Tempo Mix’ created by Nike Women. So long as corporations have at least twenty songs on their playlists and don’t include an artist more than once, they’re good. In the past, such an arrangement would require a given artist to sign a licensing or advertising deal, and it often appeared transactional, hence the traditional notion of 'selling out.’ Today on Spotify, artists often have no idea they’ve been added to these playlists. I only managed to discover this phenomenon upon plugging a friend’s band name into a tool called Spot On Track, which uses Spotify’s public API to present the different playlists where specific artists and their tracks appear. My friend’s band was completely unaware of its inclusion on the Nike and Starbucks playlists, and the band receives no additional compensation beyond the usual streaming royalties sent to labels and rights-holders… We should call this what it is: the automation of selling out. Only it subtracts the part where artists get paid."

From my latest critique of the streaming economy, “The Problem With Muzak: Spotify’s bid to remodel an industry,” for the December issue of The Baffler. I wrote about Spotify’s obsession with “chill” playlists, the way Spotify attempts to imbue corporate-branded playlists with editorial integrity when in reality they are actually advertisements, how Spotify is trying to make labels irrelevant, the implications of the music press embracing the platform, and other topics.