Lee
Quotes that stood out to me the most in this Orwellian deconstruction of Spotify.
- Ch. 3: “Unsurprisingly by the mid-2010s as the increasingly passive listening environment commanded less and less attention of its users, sleep playlists were absolutely crushing it on sootify. One former employee recalled a specific all hands meeting that reflected and celebrated in the success of these sleep playlists. ‘They were very proud of this,’ the former employee recalled, ‘it proved to them that they're not a music company, they're a time filler for boredom.’ ‘There was a moment where it all started to feel Orwellian,’ the employee continued reflecting on a different later meeting. In his estimation based on data observed while at the company, there was only a tiny percentage of lean-in listeners, the vast majority of music listeners, they're not really interested in listening to music per se, they just need a soundtrack to a moment in their day. ‘I think Daniel Eck was the first person to really exploit that, I honestly think that the core to the company’s success was recognizing that the company wasn't selling music; they weren't providing music, theyre filling peoples time. And he said at a company meeting, I remember, ‘he was like, Apple music, Amazon, these aren't our competitors, our only competitor is silence. I definitely think people are afraid of silence’.”
- Ch. 4 talks about how Thomas Edison essentially monatized mood/vibe music to consumers with curated phonogram playlists.
- Ch. 4: “If a musician decides to protest over unfair royalties, its not hard to imagine a situation where a streaming service might just replace them with somebody else, or better yet maybe just a ghost artist who doesn't actually exist.”
- Ch. 9: “If we're willingly letting corporations create culture ir determine culture for their own financial gain, that's unequivocally bad, she said. And what makes it so much worse, is that it's coached in all this language if individualism that people buy into and believe. It's an era where we can't agree on basic facts of history in general, and then we're giving corporations the power to create their own version of culture, and therefore their own versions of history. And then they make a lot of money off of it, while the people who are actually creating the work and art that make it possible for them to even do this whole scam, don't get paid anything.”
- Ch. 10: “Fandom is data.”
- Ch. 10: “Over time in the group, he started to observe the broader tendency to describing music through micro-genres: like Cottage Core, a pastoral countryside aesthetic that flourished in tiktok during the pandemic. And Dark Academia: moodboard, poetry books, dusty libraries, dark coffee, classical music. And he also started seeing a lot request for liminal space type vibes. Referring to an internet aesthetic fixation that had pictures of abandoned eerie old backrooms. But that's not a genre of music but a lot of people keep asking for it. Usually it ends up being like vaporwave.”
Ch. 10: “It seemed like any random word or phrase could be cast as a description signifier by adding ‘core’ to its ending. Everything has become an aesthetic or vibe. You lose depth when you out everything into a box or category, but we live in a capitalist world where everything is a cliche. It's just consumerism.”
- Ch. 10: “The philosopher Frederick Jameson described the concept of auto-surveillance, under which the capital and the state no longer have to do anything to you because you have learned to do it to yourself. This was fan culture reshaped by algorithmic ubiquitousness, which is to say by tools of surveillance.”
- Ch. 11: “If there was any running theme from table to table, it seems to just be rich people seeking to get more rich, with little regard to the impact they may have on working musicians.”
- Ch. 12: “It might seem like just music, but streaming services are susceptible to what's called ‘surveillance creep’ or ‘function creep’. A surveillance system might start off with one purpose, but over time it's purpose might shift and expand beyond its original use case. We might know that a streaming app is watching our every move, but it's just to recommend us more music we think, and so we're conditioned to think it's low stakes. So much so that when for example a music app starts monitoring and mapping our voices or tracking down our search history off app, maybe we don't even notice. Or when it takes the most basic facts of our listening behavior and sells them to date brokers for mood data, which then they sell to assemble more complex profiles on us.”
- Ch. 13: “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 platform is to distribute music not to give you money, okay.’”
Quotes that stood out to me the most in this Orwellian deconstruction of Spotify.
- Ch. 3: “Unsurprisingly by the mid-2010s as the increasingly passive listening environment commanded less and less attention of its users, sleep playlists were absolutely crushing it on sootify. One former employee recalled a specific all hands meeting that reflected and celebrated in the success of these sleep playlists. ‘They were very proud of this,’ the former employee recalled, ‘it proved to them that they're not a music company, they're a time filler for boredom.’ ‘There was a moment where it all started to feel Orwellian,’ the employee continued reflecting on a different later meeting. In his estimation based on data observed while at the company, there was only a tiny percentage of lean-in listeners, the vast majority of music listeners, they're not really interested in listening to music per se, they just need a soundtrack to a moment in their day. ‘I think Daniel Eck was the first person to really exploit that, I honestly think that the core to the company’s success was recognizing that the company wasn't selling music; they weren't providing music, theyre filling peoples time. And he said at a company meeting, I remember, ‘he was like, Apple music, Amazon, these aren't our competitors, our only competitor is silence. I definitely think people are afraid of silence’.”
- Ch. 4 talks about how Thomas Edison essentially monatized mood/vibe music to consumers with curated phonogram playlists.
- Ch. 4: “If a musician decides to protest over unfair royalties, its not hard to imagine a situation where a streaming service might just replace them with somebody else, or better yet maybe just a ghost artist who doesn't actually exist.”
- Ch. 9: “If we're willingly letting corporations create culture ir determine culture for their own financial gain, that's unequivocally bad, she said. And what makes it so much worse, is that it's coached in all this language if individualism that people buy into and believe. It's an era where we can't agree on basic facts of history in general, and then we're giving corporations the power to create their own version of culture, and therefore their own versions of history. And then they make a lot of money off of it, while the people who are actually creating the work and art that make it possible for them to even do this whole scam, don't get paid anything.”
- Ch. 10: “Fandom is data.”
- Ch. 10: “Over time in the group, he started to observe the broader tendency to describing music through micro-genres: like Cottage Core, a pastoral countryside aesthetic that flourished in tiktok during the pandemic. And Dark Academia: moodboard, poetry books, dusty libraries, dark coffee, classical music. And he also started seeing a lot request for liminal space type vibes. Referring to an internet aesthetic fixation that had pictures of abandoned eerie old backrooms. But that's not a genre of music but a lot of people keep asking for it. Usually it ends up being like vaporwave.”
Ch. 10: “It seemed like any random word or phrase could be cast as a description signifier by adding ‘core’ to its ending. Everything has become an aesthetic or vibe. You lose depth when you out everything into a box or category, but we live in a capitalist world where everything is a cliche. It's just consumerism.”
- Ch. 10: “The philosopher Frederick Jameson described the concept of auto-surveillance, under which the capital and the state no longer have to do anything to you because you have learned to do it to yourself. This was fan culture reshaped by algorithmic ubiquitousness, which is to say by tools of surveillance.”
- Ch. 11: “If there was any running theme from table to table, it seems to just be rich people seeking to get more rich, with little regard to the impact they may have on working musicians.”
- Ch. 12: “It might seem like just music, but streaming services are susceptible to what's called ‘surveillance creep’ or ‘function creep’. A surveillance system might start off with one purpose, but over time it's purpose might shift and expand beyond its original use case. We might know that a streaming app is watching our every move, but it's just to recommend us more music we think, and so we're conditioned to think it's low stakes. So much so that when for example a music app starts monitoring and mapping our voices or tracking down our search history off app, maybe we don't even notice. Or when it takes the most basic facts of our listening behavior and sells them to date brokers for mood data, which then they sell to assemble more complex profiles on us.”
- Ch. 13: “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 platform is to distribute music not to give you money, okay.’”