Good Golly Zines

I'm still talking about Spotify

I shared this blog post in my newsletter first and restructured it slightly for the web

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This week, I read a post on Substack from Joel Gouveia about the "death of Spotify." His blog post responds to an interview with Jimmy Iovine, an entrepreneur and producer, on a podcast called Founders. In the interview, Iovine explains that music streaming platforms have changed the commodity of music. Spotify, Tidal, Apple, Amazon Music all offer the same product and "this lack of differentiation turns music into a utility."

"When music is treated like a utility, it's unconsciously devalued by the consumer. Its background noise."

This echoes something I read in Liz Pelly's book Mood Machine. Pelly talks about how Spotify encourages users towards background music, because it saves the company money. If they can push their AI-generated lo-fi, they don't have to pay as much to artists and labels. One of Pelly's sources at Spotify was a former employee who said tech company's main competitor is silence.

I'm still thinking about that.

While I was using Spotify, I found I was thinking less about the music I was listening to. I would listen to an album, fall in love with it, and then forget it completely. Moving to CDs and an MP3 player means being more conscious about the music I'm listening to, and more importantly, conscious of where my money is going.

In his Substack, Gouveia says Spotify and other digital streaming platforms are struggling because the opportunity for growth is shrinking. He says, "the music industry has spent a decade obsessing over how to get a million people to listen to a song at once. The next decade will be defined by artists figuring our how to get 1,000 people to care forever."

Mood Machine inspired Mid City's new music column because Pelly talked about the music industry before streaming was so prolific.

"In 2009, there were more alt-weekly newspapers in the U.S. than ever before -- 135 of them -- and these papers tended to cover local music in a way that to date has never really been replaced."

Mid City alone will not fill that gap for Ottawa, but I'd love if the new column could inspire a few people to go see a local show and find a local musician they love.

Some music-related recommendations: