Wed, Dec 25, 2024 11:03

Years ago, I dropped Spotify due to the increasing number of playlists, like those for jazz, featuring little-known artists with single-track covers of popular songs. It was obvious to me that Spotify populated the playlists with songs as a way to reduce royalty payments to artists. This process, internally known as the “Perfect Fit Content program,” is the subject of a recent Harper’s Magazine article by Liz Pelly. This excerpt from her article perfectly captures how the process is changing our relationship with music.

A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.