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The Guardian
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘One minute it's 'would you like to listen to Galaxie 500?', the next humanity's enslaved': can anyone escape Spotify?
Laura Snapes, deputy music editor I was set the task of not listening to Spotify for a week, but Alexis, your task was much worse: only listening to Spotify-created playlists, and the songs it suggested to you based on your listening history. How did that go? Alexis Petridis, chief rock and pop critic One day in the car I just listened to nothing instead of facing it again. When it plays me songs I like, it's not what I want to hear at that moment. That's not to say the music it was recommending wasn't good. One morning it played Schizophrenia by Sonic Youth. I love that song but I didn't want to hear it then. It played me Billie Holliday's Riffin' the Scotch followed by My Bloody Valentine, which clearly demonstrates the great breadth of my music taste – but just because I like it all doesn't mean I want to hear it all together. I didn't like that it was untouched by human hands. I always think that the amazing thing about a record collection is that it doesn't make sense to anybody other than you. And yet when it's presented like that, I find it really jarring and difficult – it's all over the place. LS The algorithm is straining to find the data points that connect all those things, to close the net and make it coherent when it's not. AP The first one I tried had an AI DJ that kept saying 'Ga-lax-ie 500', which sounds like a laxative. I wonder how much of this is to do with my age and these things not having always been in my life, but I find it inherently creepy, both the AI voice and the narrow recommendations based on your own taste. I read enough science fiction in my teens to know that this is very much the thin edge of the wedge – one minute it's all matey 'would you like to listen to Galaxie 500?', the next humanity's enslaved, living underground mining uranium for a robot. There are generated playlists that are meant to be generically adjacent to the time of day you listen to it: 'Wednesday Shoegaze.' Why? Then you have '70s rock hippie afternoon', featuring a lot of music that isn't from the 1970s. There's I Am Waiting by the Rolling Stones, which is from 1965. Expecting to Fly by Buffalo Springfield is from 1967. Eight Miles High by the Byrds is from 1966. How do you generally use Spotify? LS I have mp3s of anything I care about. I pay for Spotify but I try to spend as much or more on Bandcamp or whatever every month, like carbon-offsetting. To some degree, you and I need to have Spotify, like a film critic needs Netflix. But also, artists don't earn anything from me playing their mp3s; if I stream music I already own on Spotify, they're at least getting fractions of a penny and the listener data they need to operate in that ecosystem. And I don't have to listen to ads. How about you? AP Ordinarily my listening isn't centred on Spotify. I use YouTube more for work. I listen to a lot of physical records. Did you listen to a lot of different stuff as a result of not using Spotify for a week? LS Sort of. I subscribe to a lot of music newsletters and inevitably open 20 Bandcamp links a week and shut 15 without listening to them, because there's only so much time. But this week I went through most of them and really loved an album by a Swedish composer called Hugo Randulv. I generally only use Spotify as a discovery tool to listen to albums I've never heard before that I've seen recommended elsewhere or to play old favourites out and about. The only time I cheated was when I ran out of fun music mid-run and put Doechii's last mixtape on, but I bought it when I got home. I never use their playlists. I stopped checking my Discover Weekly because it often recommends things that would be logical for me to like, but I've already decided that I don't. But that doesn't compute with their algorithmic concept that one of these things is just like the other. AP That's the thing – however good the algorithm is, there's something about human taste that it can't quite replicate. Let's look at my 'made for you'. I never usually browse this. Here's my 'reggae mix' … featuring folk legends Shirley and Dolly Collins. LS Wow. With playlists like '70s hippie afternoon', it's like their made-up Spotify Wrapped 'genres', where they're named a) to mimic the language of memes, and b) as a reduction of music down to 'vibes', stripping away historical context. This might be getting a bit Adbusters, but I think the temporal playlists are also about syncing with consumer habits. Your 'get ready with me' playlist, a 'main character energy' walk to Starbucks. And the 'coffee shop' vibe is so prevailing, it's ended up dictating the types of music that get signed: you get more pop-ready, front-facing songwriters such as Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker on indie labels – they're obviously great but they're also products that work well in that ecosystem. AP The guy from the label Secretly Group says in the book that they couldn't sign the experimental band Oneida now. It's a really good example of how the competition markers of pop have been brought to bear on all types of music because of Spotify. It's forcing everybody into competition with Ed Sheeran and Sabrina Carpenter, and that's not always your motivation for starting a band or making music. It helps you get on in that world if you look like Sam Fender. LS It can get even more granular. A lot of what I listen to on there is drone, the sound of one organ key being held down for half an hour. But Spotify's idea of ambient is closer to what they call 'perfect fit content' (PFC), as Liz Pelly found out in her book Mood Machine, where they commission muzak-style farms to produce chilled-out music to fit lean-back, mood-based playlists and allegedly pay a lower royalty rate than they do to traditional record labels. Filling playlists with that counts out the artists really invested in those sounds and disciplines who might otherwise stand a chance of making a living from them – there are examples of those playlists being overhauled and musicians losing out on money they had been earning. You found that several jazz playlists seemed to have next to no 'real' artists on them. AP The jazz thing is the ultimate extension of that. On one level, yes, Spotify is giving work to the jazz musicians who produce PFC, and it's hard to get work as a jazz musician. On the other hand, look at Ezra Collective. They're playing Wembley. This is what can happen when listeners are exposed to something exciting and underground. A jazz playlist full of music apparently commissioned for the purpose is actively stopping listeners from being exposed to that sort of thing. Do you ever discover things from Spotify? LS Definitely. I try not to let autoplay run after an album ends, but it has led me to good stuff. Sometimes its persistence has made me change my mind about something. I didn't get Astrid Sonne at first, but I listened to so much Clarissa Connelly – they went to the same experimental Danish music school – that it kept feeding me her, and it clicked. Thinking of massive tech companies, with, say, Amazon, I think most people are aware of the moral conflict in using it – the conditions that packers and delivery drivers work in. Do you think there's that same sense of compunction about what Spotify is doing to artists? AP No. I think there's a vague sense that you don't get paid very well, but the really big stars – the most visible artists – are doing all right. Kate Nash is doing OnlyFans to make money and it's come to something if you've got to do that to keep your career afloat. But in the broader scheme of things, most people see Sabrina Carpenter or the Weeknd and they're doing really well. So I think there's a disconnect in people's minds about this notion that artists aren't being correctly remunerated by Spotify. LS It infuriates me that they've also demonetised any songs with fewer than 1,000 plays. AP Anohni makes a very good point in the book that a record can be really impactful but you only have to listen to it twice. There's loads of music I like, such as extreme electronics, that I'm not going to listen to over and over again. LS I thought the only naive part of the book was the ending, which looks at potential alternatives to streaming. Pelly highlights public libraries in the US that have streaming platforms for local musicians. It's a lovely idea but with the best will in the world it's not the same thing. I think we've seen a lot of larger-scale alternatives collapse. AP Right – who's still talking about Tidal? It seemed to me to be completely unworkable, though I appreciate her trying to put a positive spin on it – 'there is another way' – but I don't think there is. LS I think the most likely outcome is that Spotify will move on from music to a different product, and other solutions will have to be found. It's one reason I've never got rid of my mp3s, because this could all disappear too. Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guide #176: Seas of smartphones and bulky backpacks: the worst things about going to gigs
This year has the potential to be an incredible one for live music. There is of course, the return of the greatest wibbling rivalry in pop. But even discounting for the Super Monobrow Bros, the next 12 months will be bursting with performance, from sugary-sweet pop to the most brutal black metal, played everywhere from gigantic stadiums, to the tiniest of toilet venues. Hearteningly, it seems that live music attendances have recovered after cratering during Covid – though of course smaller gig venues remain in peril (if you can visit one this weekend, please do – it's Independent Venue Week). Yet while our capacity for gig-enjoying has never been higher, it does have its limits. In last week's newsletter we asked you to share your biggest gig gripes and the response was massive: the Guide inbox was bursting with annoyances, ranging from the significant (accessibility at venues) to the minor but still irritating (that bloke in the moshpit with the backpack pressing into your chest). Your responses were so great that we thought we'd run a bumper collection of them. We've also asked some of the Guardian's music critics – who have to attend a LOT of gigs, and as such have had a LOT of pints spilled on them over the years – to share their gripes too … After almost two years out of action thanks to Covid, the UK's surviving venues were desperate to welcome punters, primed to buy beer and merch, back through their doors. Seemingly intent on clawing back losses wherever possible, the percentage they took on that merch caused many artists – also trying to recoup their own pandemic-induced losses – to revolt and set up their own popup shops near venues. But in many London spots, at least, one staple revenue stream seemed to shut down for good: the venue-operated cloakroom. I've been to many gigs at branded venues that no longer operate a secure place to stash your coat, but instead seem to operate in tandem with a neighbouring kebab shop, offering the dubious privilege of paying a tenner to leave your bag behind the fryers. The system reeks – literally. Laura Snapes I can't stand concert attenders who have learned every step of choreography for a show and then decide to put on their own mini-performance in the crowd. I don't mean when everyone does the Charli xcx Apple TikTok dance, but the obnoxious zealot with main character syndrome who clears a space (sometimes pushing away other concertgoers) and has all their friends filming them mimic the routine for ages. I saw a lot of it at Renaissance World Tour in 2023 - we're here to see Beyoncé's dance break, not yours! Jason Okundaye As a music reviewer living in a rural area, I have to drive to gigs, so the rocketing cost and difficulty of parking near venues gets my goat. Gone are the days of secret back street spots or free parking after 6pm. The priciest and rubbishest parking experiences are arenas, but with deadlines to meet I won't fork out £25 to get stuck in Manchester Co-op Live's official car park after the gig. My latest solution there is a secret spot 40 minutes walk away down a dark, deserted, scary canal towpath, so if I don't get mugged by the car park operators I risk actually getting mugged. Bah! Dave Simpson It has to be 1,000 phones in the air via outstretched arms so that's all you end up being able to see. Completely ruins gigs. And for what? Do these people really watch the footage back enough times to make it worth not being fully present in the moment? With the high cost of gigs today you'd be better off watching it in the comfort of your living room than through your phone screen … though of course you wouldn't then get the insta kudos of being able to tag to say you were there. Kerry, Belfast The over-excited super fan who stands next to you whoops and hollers and in the most recent case repeats 'Bob fu@&king Mould' over and over again into my ear drum. Even Bob's heroic guitars did not drown him out. Jim Mowat People: gigs get HOT. Please hydrate before – or bring an empty vessel you can fill up once you're in the venue. A gig I went to in July [Lizzy McAlpine in Manchester] was brought to a standstill – and at a moment of high emotion for the singer – by the sudden need to pass out gallons of water to people who hadn't thought to procure their own, and were flagging. It's disrespectful to the artist, not to mention immensely annoying for the rest of the crowd. Rachael Beale Those in the crowd who feel they have to wear their backpack through the entire show. Absolutely no need. Jason L Sign up to The Guide Get our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Friday after newsletter promotion The squeezer-ins: I get that people arrive at different times, and the audience at a standing gig is a living, moving organism. I get that people are going to try to get to the front, and I get that often people-sized gaps are left, and that's OK – an audience is fluid before and during the gig. But, if there isn't a person-sized hole there, don't squeeze into it, forcing your physical presence on others who have to move to accommodate your bulk. Be aware of and considerate of those around you. Ian Oxley My biggest gig gripe is the way some people react to being asked 'Can I just get past please mate'. It produces, usually, an irrational and audible response, disturbing the attention of everyone around them. If there's space then let them through, nod, and say 'no worries' as they react with an obligatory 'cheers mate'. Nathanael Easey In the 70s: the dreaded drum solo. You knew it was coming. The band slowly disappeared to get 'refreshed' while the drummer banged away for what seemed like two days. Often with a highlight of playing the boards with a spoon. Aarrrghhh! Squideatingdough People putting other people on their shoulders in front of others and thereby blocking the view of those not just directly, but some distance behind them. It should not be allowed. Janelle Potter Not a fun one – inaccessible venues! As a wheelchair user, the amount of extra admin required to see live music is mind-boggling. Bigger names play bigger and (hopefully) more accessibility-aware places, but going to smaller venues to see more obscure bands is a massive headache. Most places do try to make it happen, it just takes a lot of sorting out. But often, it feels like some venues have an accessibility statement which might as well be a picture of a shrugging bouncer standing at the top of a flight of stairs. They should do better, and it shouldn't be the responsibility of the disabled music-lover to make it so. Steve Woodward The dreaded words 'and now a few songs from our new album'. Just play the classics please, that's why we are all here. Lee Jackson If you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday
