Comprehensive ... Her approach is aggressively moralistic ... Pelly is a romantic, but her book isn’t an exercise in nostalgia. It’s about how we have come to view art and creativity, what it means to be an individual, and what we learn when we first hum along to a beloved pop song.
Pelly builds her tendentious but convincing case on internal Slack transcripts, anonymous interviews with disenchanted current and former employees, the company’s changing narratives of itself, and some door-knocking in Stockholm, where Spotify is headquartered, to present a bruising portrait of the company.
A useful guide to the way the streaming platform has altered the business of being an artist, but it’s one that avoids the conflicts between being a consumer and a patron of the arts ... A combination of reportage, history, and analysis ... One of the most compelling — and damning — parts of the book: ghost artists, also sometimes called fake artists ... Isn’t the final word on how this all happened, but the level of detail Pelly was able to get from current and former Spotify employees does explain a lot about how we got here.
I was hungry for a book like this ... Stands out as the definitive book on how we should think about Spotify as a phenomenon, not necessarily because her account is the most comprehensively reported, but because Pelly provides a sustained look at how the company has affected, and continues to affect, the world it took over ... To get out of this digital hellhole, you should probably literally leave it.
Sordid ... There’s a sensibility here that I sometimes find cloying ... The author’s charge that user-generated playlists commodified the mixtape is true, but the fact is that most people are interested in being paid for what they choose to spend their time doing. When Pelly downplays financial pressures, she sometimes seems to imply that a musician doesn’t — or shouldn’t — want more people to like their music.
It may be the most depressing and enraging book about music published this year, a thoroughly convincing argument that Spotify’s success has had a disastrous effect on pop music ... Doesn’t leave you filled with optimism for the future.
A provocative, insightful, disturbing, and well-researched indictment of Spotify, the music industry, and streaming platforms, which daily mine billions of data bits from users to maximize profits and churn out musical formulas. Highly recommended.
