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The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Spotify's biggest sin? Its algorithms have pushed artists to make joyless, toothless music
In the hands of some of its most gifted practitioners, songwriting is a kind of emotional alchemy. For the past week, I have been returning to a perfect example: Every Time the Sun Comes Up by the US singer Sharon Van Etten, which was released in 2014. Its lyrics might be fractured and fragmented, but it is an almost perfect portrait of self-doubt and downward spirals: one of those songs that captures feelings so deep that they go way beyond words. I went back to that song as I read a superb new book that has both educated and profoundly depressed me. Mood Machine, by the New York-based journalist Liz Pelly, is about the music-streaming giant Spotify, and how it attracted its current 615 million subscribers, making a billionaire of its Swedish co-founder and CEO, Daniel Ek. But its most compelling story centres on what Spotify has done to people's appreciation of songs and the people who make them – much of which is down to the platform's ubiquitous playlists. Thanks to Spotify's algorithms, I recently found Every Time the Sun Comes Up in a personalised (or 'algotorial') playlist titled Farmers Market, versions of which have been saved by nearly 250,000 listeners. On mine, the song sits alongside such classics as the Rolling Stones' Beast of Burden, Mazzy Star's equally aching Fade Into You and Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, whose pathos and depth seems to have been neutralised by their new setting, summed up in the accompanying blurb: 'fresh produce, reusable totes, iced coffee and all the lovely spring things'. Such is what Pelly calls 'the relegation of music to something passable, just filling the air'. Playlists tend to mean that songs once full of power and emotion get recontextualised, and washed of their meaning. And at the same time, Spotify constantly boosts music that never had any of those qualities to start with: a type of latter-day muzak that reaches its apogee in a genre now known as 'Spotifycore'. Pelly traces the birth of this 'muted, mid-tempo and melancholy' sound to around 2018: the US singer Billie Eilish seems to have unwittingly kicked things off, and the result has become inescapable, thanks to the kind of Spotify playlists whose titles include the word 'chill'. You know it when you hear it: it initially makes you feel as if you are in a big-budget Netflix series, before you find out that there is no discernible plot. Spotify in effect encourages musicians to produce this aural wallpaper, by showing them the data that proves this is how to make money from the platform. Such music answers some very 21st-century needs: as Pelly reminds us, it offers solace to people who are 'anxious and overworked, engaged in cycles of trying to focus hard and chill hard'. It also helps them sleep, which is one of the functions Spotify capably delivers. And whether the platform's users are awake or slumbering, Spotifycore also has a quality that makes it perfect for endless streaming: one song blurs into another, meaning that the app can be left to tick over, requiring minimum effort on the part of the user. This is the core of Ek's business model: the idea, after all, is to keep you listening – or half-listening – for hours at a time. What does all this mean for the music itself? Those of us who are addicted to Spotify – and just to be clear, my habit extends to several hours a day, though I mostly leave its playlists untouched – know how seductive an invention it is: an almost infinite jukebox, accessible via devices that are the same size as a Twix. But using it also comes with increasingly sharp pangs of ethical discomfort, and a sense that its version of streaming has long since started transforming music in no end of unsettling ways. Though Spotify has no direct involvement in its creation, a lot of the vapid music clustered on its playlists is now made by production-line suppliers of what the company calls 'perfect fit content', or PFC – which could just as easily be made using AI. The fact that no money is paid out if a song is listened to for less than 30 seconds has come close to killing the idea of a slow-burning intro (if they were modern creations, there would be no hope for such songs as David Bowie's Sound and Vision, or the Temptations' Papa Was a Rollin' Stone). The limited public outcry about the tiny rewards Spotify offers most musicians and songwriters may be connected to the fact that the average 'chill' playlist is intended only as background music: as Pelly says, 'it follows that a population paying so little conscious attention to music would also believe it deserving of so little remuneration'. Technology always bends and re-shapes artistic creativity: the fact that the archetypal album began life at about 40 minutes and then stretched to 70 or 80 was a story scripted by the invention of the 12in record, and its eventual superseding by compact discs. But what sets Spotify apart is something much more insidious: it goes beyond alterations of music's forms into what we think music is there to do, and one of big tech's most sinister powers: the way that it sidelines dissent in such a subtle way that we only realise what has happened when it is far too late. At the risk of making myself sound ancient, I had always understood the demise of music made with guitars – the best of which came with at least a hint of countercultural rebellion – as something down to that instrument's old age. Now, I wonder whether it might also have happened because it doesn't fit the low-volume, inoffensive aesthetics demanded by playlists with titles such as Stress Relief, Soft Office and Beach Vibes. I definitely think the large-scale decline of songs that deal in social and political commentary is partly to do with Spotify's relentless muzak-ification: in the UK, the one high-profile artist who does that kind of stuff is the brilliant, Bruce Springsteen-esque Sam Fender, and his artistic loneliness speaks volumes. With Trump in the White House and the world in chaos, the absence of a pop-cultural response is striking: might it be connected to the tyranny of what Pelly calls 'sad piano ballads with weird drums', and Spotify's reduction of artists to near-anonymity: people hanging on for dear life, with no voice? And beyond anything political, does that not pose a threat to music with any real substance at all? Van Etten, I am pleased to say, is playing three concerts in the UK this coming week with her band the Attachment Theory, and returning in the summer for another run of shows. I will be there for at least one of them, soaking up her deep, powerful music in the context it was created for. My phone will be switched off, and 'chill' will not be on the menu. And like just about everyone there, I will not be giving any thought to farmers' markets, iced coffee or 'reusable totes'. John Harris is a Guardian columnist
New York Times
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Sharon Van Etten Finds Her Way Home
Backstage at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, N.J., on a bitterly cold February night, the singer and songwriter Sharon Van Etten drank tea and hung out with family members. At her show earlier that evening — her first appearance at the legendary venue and her third show on tour in support of her seventh album, 'Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory' — she joked that the gig was booked in response to demand by her own family, and likely she was related in some way to approximately 10 percent of the audience. 'You guys sound great!' shouted an older man in a blue National and War on Drugs T-shirt. 'Awww thanks,' Ms. Van Etten said, before turning to the crowd and announcing, 'that wasn't even my dad!' Her dad, Steve Van Etten, was there, in fact, hanging out afterward in the green room with her mom, Janice Van Etten, and older sister, Jessica Van Etten, an elementary school teacher in Monmouth County, N.J., along with other relatives and friends. Ms. Van Etten is most associated with the Brooklyn music scene of the 2010s. Her third album, 2012's 'Tramp,' was produced by the National's Aaron Dessner, released on the indie label Jagjaguwar and featured guest spots by Beirut's Zach Condon and the Walkmen's Matt Barrick, among others. It established Ms. Van Etten as a distinct new voice, an artist with a unique ability to make rage and self-doubt sound pretty. In the years since, Ms. Van Etten has never made the same album twice. She's chameleonic, generating a striking number of notably different sounding tracks that become widely adored soundtrack-of-your-life instant nostalgia bombs, the kind of songs that go on mixtapes for new crushes and early midlife crisis road trip playlists. See: 2014's lilting, haunted 'Every Time the Sun Comes Up'; 2019's 'Seventeen,' which packs the gut-wrenching sweetness of an entire coming-of-age novella in one four-plus minute slice of folk-rock; and, her latest contribution to this collection, the sparkly dirge 'Afterlife' off her latest album. Unsurprisingly, given the cinematic moodiness of her work, Ms. Van Etten has also explored film and TV work, from acting in a recurring role in Netflix's 'The OA,' to scoring and composing. 'Sharon is more than a collaborator. She is a partner-in-crime who is thinking deeply about the entire project and not just her part in it, no matter big or small,' said filmmaker Celine Song, for whom Ms. Van Etten (with Zach Dawes) wrote 'Quiet Eyes' for Ms. Song's Oscar-nominated film 'Past Lives.' 'She's a complete artist.' But the Hollywood log line version of Ms. Van Etten's life story — Jersey girl with cool hair moves to the big city and finds her creative community, her voice, fame and fortune — comes many, many chapters into a more complex, circuitous and wrenching tale. First, there was the failed attempt at college in Murfreesboro, Tenn., a place she'd barely heard of much less been when she moved there at 18 to attend the music recording program at Middle Tennessee State. There was an emotionally abusive, undermining boyfriend, the mental breakdown and attempts to restart her life, taking jobs at IHOP and McDonald's and the overnight shift at the Donut Hole. There were addiction issues, a multi-year estrangement from her family, and eventually, four years after leaving home, the escape from Tennessee orchestrated by Ms. Van Etten's kid sister and the dramatic return to her parents home on Thanksgiving Day in 2003 'with my tail between my legs.' Before that there was the Jersey girl high school experience, spent lusting not after the promise of the glittering skyline across the river but 'driving around in cars, smoking cigarettes, listening to music and going to record stores and sometimes to the beach or driving to Philly just to get a cheesesteak.' And before all of that, there was the joyfully chaotic suburban childhood spent as the middle child of five in a ramshackle old Victorian in Nutley, N.J., with a wrap-around porch where her father first taught her to ride a bike. No Longer Solo 'Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory' may be the singer's seventh album but it's her first collaborating in full with her band. Ms. Van Etten has been working with most of her bandmates for years — they are 'like family' — but even until recently she's held on to this nagging fear of letting go of the solo title. But it's never been about ego. 'It takes patience and courage and openness to make things happen together,' said Angel Olsen, a friend and collaborator. 'Doing it all under your own name is very very different.' For Ms. Van Etten, trusting her music could be safely shared with other people is a lesson she is still learning. 'Because of my ex, I had to write in hiding — he didn't like my music and he didn't like me writing,' she said. 'Music turned into this place that was just for me, very private. When I finally left and I started playing out for real I had this guard up.' The songwriter Doug Keith was the first musician to ever try to put a band together for Ms. Van Etten, back in 2010, five years after she first moved to New York, when she was still playing gigs completely on her own. 'I just kept putting him off,' she recalled. 'My ex was always just like, any dude that wants to play with you, just wants to get in your pants.' Mr. Keith eventually had to explicitly say to Ms. Van Etten, 'I'm happily married, I love your music, and I really just want to help you with your show.' In a way, every album Ms. Van Etten has made since her 2009 debut solo release, 'Because I Was in Love,' has been part of a process of adjusting to the idea that isolation breeds confinement not security. With her latest album, the singer is leaving her instinct to stay solo out of self-protection behind once and for all, in her creative life. And on the day after the Stone Pony show, as we drove around New Jersey revisiting some of the key sights of her youth, she's thinking about how her tendency to seek freedom through separation has influenced her personal life as well. Earlier in the day there was a visit to the Princeton Record Exchange where Ms. Van Etten signed copies of the new album and giddily flipped through the bargain bins, as she's been doing for a couple decades now, forever in search of that next record she's never heard of that might wind up changing her life. There were tuna melts at Holsten's ice cream parlor in Bloomfield, where the Van Etten family used to go after ice skating (and where David Chase shot the last scene of 'The Sopranos'). And there was talk of stopping at the singer's cousin's hair salon to experience 'full-on Jerz,' as Ms. Van Etten's husband and manager, Zeke Hutchins called it. But the singer had to get to a pre-arranged tour of the rambling Victorian Ms. Van Etten lived in during elementary school, which is still owned by the people her family sold it to over 30 years ago. 'I will probably cry,' she warned. 'We really did have a nice childhood,' Ms. Van Etten said during a moment of quiet in the car. 'I left for Tennessee to rebel against the sweetest people's world. They didn't understand me, maybe, but …' Was the conflict mostly within herself and not them? 'Exactly,' she said. When Ms. Van Etten was the most lost back in Tennessee, the singer's then boyfriend tried to convince her that no one in her family could be trusted. 'Family is just blood, they don't care about you, they don't get you, you don't owe them anything,' she recalled him saying. But it never fully stuck. (She used to call her little sister from a series of burner phones. 'I wasn't a drug dealer, I was just trying to talk to my family.') It wasn't easy coming back home. 'It's not like it went back and everything was fine. We had to repair wounds and have some difficult conversations, and some conversations we still cannot have, but I knew that everyone wanted me to be okay. I feel so grateful.' The House on Prospect Back at the Stone Pony, with assorted members of the Van Etten family all together, the subject of the house on Prospect came up a lot. Ms. Van Etten's cousin Jackie was texting, wanting to know when the singer was going to actually see it. Janice Van Etten said she still dreams about the house, and wondered if her husband remembered what he said about the staircase when they first saw it. 'You said, the girls will get married here, remember?' The family's youngest, Peter Van Etten (aka 'Sweetie Petie') was born in the house. And Ms. Van Etten remembered how her dad and one of his brothers, Uncle John, would come over on the weekends, get a six pack and work on the house. 'Uncle John had the best laugh,' Ms. Van Etten recalled, later noting that three of her father's brothers, including John, died prematurely. On the day the family moved in, Ms. Van Etten, who was around 4 at the time, got lost in the shuffle. She was eventually found hiding under a grand piano the previous owners had left behind. 'I found shelter,' she said. 'That piano became my best friend.' When the singer was in sixth grade, her mom, who stayed at home for 15 years raising the five kids while Steve Van Etten worked, finished her teaching degree at Montclair State, got a job, and the family moved to Clinton, N.J. But the house on Prospect became a symbol of a particularly happy period in the Van Etten family, and, over time, a representation of the determined love that binds them. 'I guess this sounds really corny,' Janice Van Etten said back at the Stone Pony, 'but when we lived in the house on Prospect, nothing had gone wrong.' 'There it is,' Ms. Van Etten exclaimed, smiling, her eyes filling with the predicted tears, as the house came into view at the top of a small hill.
