David Pierce
“Streaming platforms have melted down the old genre system... into a tepid, AI-aggregated soup.”
This story (which I found via the excellent Sunday Long Read newsletter) is mostly about the way the producer Jack Antonoff has changed music over the last decade. But it also has maybe my favorite description ever of how Spotify has changed music:
“We’re not in the music space,” Spotify’s chief executive announced several years ago; “we’re in the moment space.” This statement encapsulates how the streaming giant sees itself: as a dispenser of a quasi-therapeutic soundtrack for mood enhancement and regulation. This is a vision of music not as art or even as commodity, but as something like audio furniture. Mood is the object; sound is beside the point.
Dream of Antonoffication
[The Drift]
