YouSaid · the spoken record

Liz Pelly

lines on the record: 26
first: 2025-03-24
most recent: 2025-03-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I'm not against an anti-technology person. And I'm also surely not against universal access to music or any ways in which we can make music, not just more accessible, but more central to our culture and lives and social lives and society, a fundamental part of how we relate to each other. I think that making music more accessible is part of that, but there's also so much more that we could be doing with technology from my perspective to make universal access to music, you know, not only work better for musicians, but also have music be contextualized in ways that serve it better for listeners too.”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A bunch of music on a central server that you access through the internet so that you don't have to have all the files downloaded on your computer. The problem is the way in which different industry practices and incentives and corporate consolidation and the very consolidated nature of the global recorded pop music industry has created pressures and different types of exploitation that play out in the streaming model too.”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can subscribe to it, and they just, instead of paying the 30 artists in their co op on a per-stream basis, they just like split the fees 30 ways every month. And it's an example of something that's really interesting to me because it's not a technological solution at all. It's a social and economic solution. There's nothing particularly like high tech about what they're doing. It's just a different way of thinking about relating to each other and working together to make something that works for them. And similarly, I talk a lot in the book towards the end about the role of the public library in perhaps reimagining what music streaming can look like. Again, you know, when we're talking about technology, we're often not talking about the technology itself, but the way in which power and economics and industry practices inform that technology. And I feel like the idea of like the public library streaming service is a really good example of that. Like the problem is not having”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Introduced in Congress, which you know to me is a really interesting story how this group of like DIY musicians end up help writing a bill for the US government. So I try to like describe that and I think it ends up being a story that is also an interesting story about just grassroots organizing too. I talk about different musician-led co-ops and collectives that have tried out different models of music streaming over the years or different ways of working together to create collectives and co-ops that would make music streaming look different. I think what's really interesting about one of the projects that I talk about in the book is this group called Catalytic Sound, which is a group of like 30 avant-garde jazz adjacent musicians who run this co-op together where they have an online web store for their music and they also have a streaming site where”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Musician solidarity projects that have popped up in recent years. I talk about this group called United Musicians and Allied Workers that came together during the pandemic on Zoom. You know, it started out as a group of these scrappy, fed up musicians, self-organizing meetings on Zoom to talk about the state of the music industry and different issues that they were dealing with as independent musicians in some ways inspired by the fact that their tours had all been cancelled due to COVID and they had more time to actually like organize these meetings. And they within their first year did this campaign called Justice at Spotify where they organized protests outside of Spotify offices around the world. And eventually they're organizing around streaming led them to work with congresswoman Rashida Talib on something called the Living Wage for Musicians Act which has now been, you know,”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have been publicly denied over the years perhaps. So I do think that there is sort of like a hopeful ending in some ways. I also think that something interesting about the story of the way in which music communities have responded to the era of platform capitalism and Web2 is in some ways could be like uniquely instructive for thinking about technology more broadly. We're thinking about public interest technology or what would it look like if people had more of a say in helping shape the trajectory of the tools that they rely on in their everyday lives since there are some really interesting examples of musicians and music communities trying to be involved in those conversations. So on one hand I discuss different musician unions and solidarity projects self-organized.”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it is super interesting since the book came out, like observing the type of reader who finds it to be depressing and the type of reader who finds it to be hopeful. And I do find that it's the type of reader that was hoping there would be a moment where they're told like download this app instead of this app and you'll be an ethical consumer who find it to be depressing. And I do actually think that a lot of at least in the feedback that I've received directly from musicians, I've heard more from musicians and people who like participate in independent and underground music that they find it to be more hopeful or even like uplifting at the end because it doesn't end on a note from my perspective like all doom and gloom, but I think there is power in doing this sort of like mapping of a company like this, getting some of the receipts and some of the practices that people like deep down have sort of like known were making things harder but”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, I think that's a really great point. Streaming services and Spotify in particular have really sort of like shaped a narrative since the beginning and kind of aligned their brands with this idea that these are platforms for music discovery, but it's often the artists that people would be hoping to discover, independent artists, lesser-known artists, artists that aren't on the top 40 radio or on commercial radio that are the most negatively impacted by the whole system when it comes to their ability to monetize their work.”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When they think of the history of recorded popular music and actually find a result for that situation to happen, you have to have universal Sony and Warner willing to license their catalog since they're the ones who sit on the rights to most of the history of popular recorded music. So that puts those labels in a position of outsized negotiating power and they're able to have the platforms work for them in ways that is not possible for smaller independent or DIY artists”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of it all because that really is like the most, I think, meaningful way in which it has been changed or the way in which artists have been affected. And certainly if you asked any musician to tell you about the way in which streaming has impacted their lives, the first thing they would start with, I think, is the revenue model and how hard it is to sort of figure out ways to meaningfully monetize your music in a financial system that is really set up to benefit major labels and pop stars. You know, the kind of the model that we think of when we think of streaming today or the streaming model as we know it is a functional impossibility without the participation of Sony Universal and Warner Music, the three majors, in order to have an app where the average listener can open the app and search for the vast majority of what they might think.”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's interesting. Well, you know, I think that ghost artist example is really a good starting point for the way in which streaming has created new challenges for people who make instrumental music. Definitely, I think if you spoke to anyone who makes classical jazz, ambient, lo-fi hip-hop beats, and asked them about the challenges presented to them in the streaming landscape, they would mention these sorts of practices and how it creates new challenges for not just monetizing their music, but meaningfully connecting with fans because of how tightly controlled the pipelines of music discovery are by not just like playlists, but these algorithmic systems thinking about the way in which dreaming has impacted the experience of the musician, it's hard not to start with the material realities.”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Similar issues that the conversation around generative AI music already is raising too is that, you know, a lot of people since this article came out sending me links being like, can you tell me if this is a real artist or not? Do you know if this is generative AI? And I feel like those aren't questions that anyone should ever have, especially not about music that's being recommended to them under the umbrella of an editorial recommendation. I feel like it should be labeled if it is music from generative AI, if it's music that you're being recommended due to some sort of pre-existing commercial partnership. This is stuff that should be clear to the listener.”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, and the reporting that I did on it, that's what I found. You know, it's interesting because there clearly is sort of like this big question that it raises. You know, if people are only half listening to this music and it's really meant for like a background listening experience and already you have anonymous producers making it in bulk like it seems obvious that there is some sort of path for this practice to just also be kind of taken over by generative AI music production and is that something that is going to happen? I think in a lot of ways you know one of the biggest issues I see with this practice is that people are being recommended this music and it is nowhere on the platform made clear that they're being recommended certain tracks due to certain commercial deals that exist that this music is being made by stock music companies or like you know what I refer to as ghost artists it's not labeled and it really raises”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's something that you'll hear a lot from people in the music industry the ways in which streaming services really championed this way of relating to music, not just lean back listening, but what the industry refers to as functional music. So music for studying, music for reading, music for sleeping, music for meditating. And there's something that I try to unpack in the book is the different consequences that this has had on music and culture. I think something that is particularly interesting is in the book I talk about this phenomenon of the ghost artist or this practice that became popular around 2016, 2017 on Spotify where they started to populate some of their popular lean back playlists, functional music playlists. Playlists filled with instrumental music with this kind of style.”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that's a really good question, too. And I also should say that I love to have the classical radio station on in the background of my house and the jazz radio station. I feel very lucky to live in New York City where there are really amazing community FM radio shows. And in some ways, yeah, so like chapter three of the book, it's called Selling Lean Back Listening and it's about the Rez in the streaming era of what the music business refers to as the lean back listener. So someone who is content to hit play on a playlist themed to a mood or activity rather than actively searching for a certain artist or album. And it's absolutely true that streaming services did not create this idea of the lean back listener and also that the history of commercial radio or radio in general could be understood as a sort of history of lean back listening as well.”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oftentimes it's like this pool of music that is based on your listening history that is being sort of repackaged and sold to you through different themed boxes. So trying to unpack a little bit about how those changes came about and the different points in the history of the playlist system where influential things happened that changed the direction of the strategy was interesting.”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reliance on the listening history. And one moment that I really noticed was in the trajectory of personalized recommendation on Spotify, there was this moment where the language really shifted from discover and being about discovery and showing you stuff that you hadn't heard yet to now if you open Spotify the language you're more likely to immediately see is made for you and kind of more focused on showing you things that you already have kind of signaled that you like kind of”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, something that I tried to illustrate in the book too is that I write an introduction that the story of streaming is as much about what's changed as it is about what's stayed the same. And I think that that's an important distinction too because in the early days, streaming was really pitched as this new disruptive technology like other platform companies of the late 2000s and 2010s. And I think it is interesting to look at some of these aspects of the platform that were pitched as sort of these things that were going to be democratizing or game changing that really were like a continuation of pre-existing histories and practices and dynamics. So even in these moments where what streaming is doing is replicating pre-existing habits or practices, I think it's also sort of instructive. Yeah, you know, I think that the reason why”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every moment, and it was also the year before they hired an in house team of playlists editors to start curating playlists largely themed towards certain moods and activities. So there clearly was this moment where they really shifted thinking about what they were offering from it being about accessing all the music in the world to the product being about recommending you the perfect song for the perfect moment when you open the app. And according to some of the research I did, there's actually a research study that Spotify had commissioned on its own user base where they were able to kind of recognize that more users were coming to the platform than they realized for recommendations for more of a Pandora-like lean back experience. And it seems that after that research was conducted, they started to sort of optimize for that type of user.”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way in which to access a world of music. It was really focused on prioritizing words like instant, simple, free, and kind of explaining what streaming was. And then there was this moment in 2012 around December 2012 going into 2013 where the front page really changed and all of a sudden it was like this early Instagram aesthetic filter imagery of people in their cars, sun flares walking along the side of the road on vacation, a person swinging in a hammock and it was more about like you know painting this Spotify as this lifestyle product or sort of kind of trying to signal to potential Spotify subscribers different moments in their life in which maybe they would use Spotify to soundtrack a moment or a mood and this was right before they launch this new brand campaign called Music for”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Landscape of like playlist influencers who emerged on Spotify in the early days before Spotify had created a strategy to have more control over the user experience. So while I was researching Spotify in order to write this book, something that I spent a long time doing was looking at the front page of Spotify.com on the internet archive and looking at the different ways in which Spotify's homepage changed over the years. And I noticed that there's this one really particular moment in 2012 where the way in which Spotify seemed to be positioning itself and its product offering really changed really quickly. You know, for the first few years of Spotify's existence, its branding, the way it was sort of putting forth its offering as a product was more about giving users access to all the music in the world. It would talk about Spotify as”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, definitely not. I mean, I sort of position the playlist as kind of like the polar opposite of the mixtape, like culturally. In the book, I kind of set up the concept of the Spotify playlist in two different contexts. You know, the playlist, there's one sort of historical precedent for the playlist, which is just music technologies that allow the reordering of songs. So, you know, thinking about mixtape culture, thinking about other digital music apps that had existed before Spotify that would allow people.”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From 1999 to 2001, the major labels had been trying for years to figure out how to bounce back from that period. They had tried starting their own streaming services themselves. They weren't very successful. If you talk to people who were in the music industry at the time, they'll talk about how they were really clunky. There was a lot of buffering, the economics of these services was really confusing. There had been other platforms too, like in the US, there was a streaming service called Rhapsody that launched prior to Spotify. There was Pandora, you know, there were other streaming services. People in the music business will talk about how Spotify's user experience was the slickest. They had that free tier. And then eventually in the United States, what I sort of trace in the book is how when they launched in the US in 2011, how they're sort of playlists and curation strategy was also kind of part of their growth.”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Averse to anything having to do with free music. You know, they were looking for solutions to what they saw as the problem of free music. Together sort of in negotiations with the major record labels, the model, the freemium model of having a free tier and a subscription tier sort of emerged. But I do think that even the existence of that free tier at all was part of what made Spotify so successful so quickly. And if you listen to other people who worked in the music business at the time talking about why this platform was successful where others had failed because Spotify wasn't the first streaming service by the time Spotify came along in the product launched in Europe in 2008, but they started working out in 2006. And at that point, you know, Napster existed for example.”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lawrenceon says in these early media appearances, they knew the funding source would be advertising, but they weren't sure what the traffic source would be. And I think that that's really interesting phrasing that I've sort of latched onto because I think the discussion of music as the traffic source for an advertising product sort of gives you some insight into the thinking in the early days of this product. model of any song you could think of funded by advertisements didn't last long with the music business in the early days you know spotify was originally positioning itself as not necessarily an alternative to piracy but they described it as something that would be better than piracy is how the phrasing that they used but at that time because of the impact that file sharing had had on the music industry the music business was really”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a really good question. So, Spotify was created in 2006 by Daniel Ack and Martin Laurenson, these two men with backgrounds in advertising. And when they came up with the idea for Spotify, it was an idea for a platform that would give access to a large catalog of media that a user could stream for free and their original funding model was that it would all be funded by advertisements. At the beginning, it wasn't even really clear to them that it would be a music platform. If you listen to early interviews with early Spotify employees, Martin Lawrenceon, the co-founder, they'll talk about how at first maybe they considered that they would do video, maybe it would be music, maybe it would be audiobooks as”
2025-03-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT