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.
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.
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.
