Spotify

Saturday

J. Scott Turner

How mediocrity took over the Grammys

Is music getting worse? Rick Beato is a musician, producer and critic with more than five million YouTube subscribers. His answer would be: yes, pretty much. In a recent video, he compares the 2026 Grammy Song of the Year nominees to those of 1984. There are a few bright sparks among the slate of new songs, but Beato regards most of them as derivative, unoriginal and unlikely to be remembered past the end of the awards show. In contrast, 42 years on, all the 1984 nominees – Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” and Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” among them – are firmly embedded in the popular music canon. One could ask the same question about science: has it gotten worse? My answer, I have to say, reflects Beato’s for music.

Tuesday

Sam Leith

Spotify wouldn’t exist without the musicians it exploits

It used to be said that you could walk from the west of Ireland to Nantucket on the backs of the cod, so thick was the Atlantic with the fish. But as readers of a certain age will remember, by the last decade of the last century, it was looking doubtful that the cod population would see this century out to the end. By 1992, the cod population was one 100th of its historic level.   We knew that the way we were fishing was, in that unappealing but apt vogue-word, unsustainable. The fishermen themselves knew that it was unsustainable – that they were destroying the very resource on which their livelihoods and futures depended; that they were, in effect, sawing off the branch they were sitting on. And yet, for years, the overfishing... just sort of happened.

Tuesday

Paul du Quenoy

Are you looking for a man in finance?

“Did I just write the song of the summer?” twenty-seven-year-old Megan Boni, an aspiring New York-based singer-actress known on social media as “Girl on Couch,” asked her public a few weeks ago. Days before, she suggested that her TikTok followers set to music a thirteen-word satirical musing she had improvised about her undersexed Gen Z peeresses’ lofty romantic expectations. Known simply as “Man in Finance,” the song’s lyrics easily divide into four short verses that unfold like shallow ads in the “Personals” section of an old newspaper: “I’m looking for a man in finance/Trust fund/Six-five/Blue eyes.” Adaptations have gone viral on social media, gathering more than 80 million hits and earning Boni more than $300,000 in revenue.

Wednesday

Amber Duke

Morgan Wallen bests the mob, again

It’s officially Spotify Wrapped season! For the uninitiated, this is the time of year when Spotify subscribers receive their year-end data on what they listened to the most throughout the previous twelve months. The streaming app tells you your top songs, artists, albums, genres and any other cookie they’ve been tracking. Every user’s Spotify Wrapped is packaged up nicely into an immensely shareable infographic that dominates social media for days. I do not share mine because my music listening habits when no one is watching are completely embarrassing! But a lot of people do, usually to show how cool or niche their music or podcast tastes are.

Monday

Cockburn

Could the Hollywood strikes be the final straw for Meghan and Harry?

#UNSUSSEXFUL is trending on Twitter, referring to what Meghan and Harry have reportedly labeled a bout of “bad luck.” A few weeks ago a source claimed that the pair were feeling helpless after their three-year-long quest to reinvent themselves had failed, blaming “the pandemic, financial crisis and family deaths." Now, Cockburn is hearing that they could have found another scapegoat. According to reports, the ongoing strike in Hollywood could affect Meghan and Harry's Netflix deal. The pair, who signed a rumored $100 million arrangement with the streaming platform in 2020, are reportedly finding it "tough" to move forward with their projects due to the simultaneous writer and actor strikes that have halted production across Hollywood.

meghan markle

Monday

Cockburn

Flashback: Meghan Markle gets staffers to conduct podcast interviews for her

Back in November, Cockburn wrote an entry of his gossip column titled "Meghan Markle: America’s laziest interviewer." While the piece may not have popular at the time, especially with Meghan’s #girlboss fans, boy does Cockburn feel vindicated now. It has recently come to light that while many were eagerly awaiting the one-hour-a-week podcast where the duchess investigated, dissected and subverts the labels that try to hold women back, Meghan Markle isn’t exactly the workaholic boss babe she made out — and Spotify has realized.  Last week, Spotify released a joint statement with Archewell Audio, Meghan and Harry's content creation label, announcing that "Spotify and Archewell Audio have mutually agreed to part ways and are proud of the series we made together.

meghan markle podcast

Friday

Cockburn

Taylor Lorenz was right all along

Journalists are OUT, influencers are IN. That’s the chief finding from a new report by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford, which discovered that 55 percent of TikTok and Snapchat users, and 52 percent of Instagram users, get their news from “personalities,” compared to 33-42 percent who get it from mainstream media outlets or journalists on the same platforms. “This Reuters study once again validates what I have been saying for over a decade,” Taylor Lorenz told Cockburn, “content creators are the new media and it’s been that way for a while.” The Washington Post columnist has long banged the drum about the importance of emerging social media platforms and the importance of members of the media cultivating brands on them.

taylor lorenz

Tuesday

Cockburn

Listen: Kamala Harris’s Afrobeats playlist

Grab the aux! Vice President Kamala Harris has released a playlist of African artists for her trip to the continent this week, in a move mimicking a trend former president Obama started in 2015. Cockburn wonders if this a sign of Kamala’s well-known ambitions to reach the highest office in the land, by channeling her inner Barack. Joe better watch out! The list consists of songs by musicians from the three countries — Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia — where Harris is stopping during her visit. Harris’s stated intent for her playlist is to “amplify artists and sounds from my travels around Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia.” Included in the twenty-five-song list are Moliy’s “Ghana Bop,” Chile One Mr. Zambia’s “I Love You” and Alikiba’s “Mahaba.

kamala harris spotify playlist

Friday

Cockburn

Spotify logs losses and cuts jobs after splurging on Meghan

Being friends with Meghan Markle may cost you socially, but now it’s looking like it’ll ruin you financially as well. The streaming service Spotify has logged $230 million in losses, after the CEO has admitted to getting "carried away" with major investments in the past year. This includes Spotify’s lightbulb moment of throwing $18 million at Meghan and Harry for, checks notes, twelve hours of content, where Duchess Difficult invents more things to complain about. Prince Harry mustered up as much brain power as he could for the podcast, which saw him telling tennis star Serena Williams, “I like what you've done with your hair. It's a great vibe.” Enlightening, Haz.

meghan spotify

Monday

Art Tavana

Apple Music cynically exploits Kanye West by deplatforming him

Apple Music has “quietly” removed two of Kanye West’s playlists from its platform. This news was leaked to the music press quietly, of course, and has (thus far) produced tons of free media impressions for the streamer. The move was presumably a shrewd public relations stunt, or maybe a rogue employee with coding skills. Who knows? But the media framed it as Apple Music taking a stand, quietly, of course, as the streamer repositions itself in the headlines after it announced last week that it was raising subscription prices. “De-platforming” Kanye West is messaging they’d like to piggyback, for obvious reasons, as it appeals to a swath of bored subscribers who could end up tweeting Apple Music for not being on the “right side of history.

Tuesday

Peter Van Buren

The left thinks social media is reality

Spotify once took a run at Joe Rogan. YouTube banned Dan Bongino. Twitter permanently suspended Marjorie Taylor Greene. Twitter also famously canceled Donald Trump, and for a while, me. As with the suspension of Trump (and on a much, much lesser scale, me) progressives cheered the deplatformings the way public lynchings used to attract a picnicking crowd. The left controls social media (as well as most mainstream media) and so day by day their unreal world becomes ethically more cleansed, more free of things they do not like, and with all the bad news (Hunter Biden) made to go away. The world online is the way they want it to be, with the real world held at bay behind the screen. Like living in The Villages in Florida, or maybe in the Matrix.

Thursday

Lou Perez

It’s not Joe Rogan who needs to apologize

We are spending too much time talking about Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan is spending too much time apologizing. “Whenever you're in a situation where you have to say, ‘I'm not racist,’ you fucked up,” Rogan apologized on February 5. “And I clearly have fucked up.” Rogan was addressing a montage that is circulating on social media, showing him saying the N-word on multiple episodes of his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. When Joe describes the montage as “the most regretful and shameful thing that I've ever had to talk about publicly,” I believe him. And I don’t think Joe made a mistake apologizing. That was Joe expressing his authentic self.

joe rogan

Monday

Michael Warren Davis

Time for the baby boomers to grow up already

It was a nice neighborhood until those people moved in. Now you can’t even swim in the pool. By four in the afternoon, they’re all sitting around drinking Corona, smoking pot, and blasting their awful music. Oh, and the language! I used to love swimming in that pool when I was little. Now, I’m not sure I want my kids anywhere near it. Seriously, the retirement park has gone to the birds since all the boomers moved in. When my grandparents died, my mom and dad inherited their double-wide in this park near Sarasota. From what I remember growing up, it was a lot like the retirement park in Seinfeld, only with old WASPs instead of old Jews. There wasn’t as much shouting. Everything else was the same though. There were lots of pastel sweaters and Bermuda shorts.

boomers

Wednesday

Bill Zeiser

Joe Rogan and the risk of being unreasonable

In the mid-2000s, I was an avid fan of mixed martial arts. My friends and I would pool our money to order the pay-per-view events of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the combat sport’s largest promoter. One of the fixtures of UFC broadcasts was — and remains — the color commentary of Joe Rogan. Most people of that era would have been more likely to recognize Rogan as the host of Fear Factor, a hokey NBC gameshow in which contestants attempted to withstand such challenges as being covered in live insects or dropped into deep water while trapped in a car. But my buddies and I were more impressed with his UFC broadcast work. He was knowledgeable about the sport and infectiously enthusiastic, to the degree that we wondered whether he was coked out of his mind.

Tuesday

Stephen L. Miller

The hippies have become the cops

You either die a rebel or live long enough to see yourself turn into a snowflake. The generation of free love and free expression have gradually transformed into the baton-wielders. I’m referring to Neil Young’s demand that Spotify either pull his entire catalog or do away with Joe Rogan’s podcast. Spotify reportedly paid $100 million to acquire Rogan’s podcast in 2020. You'd imagine their contract includes legal bulwarks against such demands. Young is reportedly upset with Covid “misinformation” (the media’s new favorite vague term) and is no longer willing to abide by a streaming service that plays host to Rogan. It took Spotify about three seconds to make their decision: Neil Young is no longer on their platform.

neil young

Saturday

Will Lloyd

Spotify and the death of discovery

One Saturday in 1975 a young man was walking through Macclesfield town center, without very much to do. He popped into Boots the Chemist and began flicking through their selection of records. After 10 minutes of random searching he found Patti Smith’s newly released LP Horses, and quickly returned home with it to Salford. As he recollects in his Autobiography, for Steven Patrick Morrissey finding Horses – in a pharmacy in Macclesfield of all places – was a defining experience: ‘Cross-legged by a dying fire later that night, and with only a side-light for company, I allowed Horses to enter my body like a spear… So surly and stark and betrayed, Patti Smith was the cynical voice radiating love… The past snaps.

ed sheeran spotify

Thursday

Michael Hann

Thank God for the return of the generation gap in pop

In June, a 20-year-old man called Jahseh Onfroy was murdered after leaving a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Onfroy was a rapper, who recorded under the name XXXTentacion, and he had become extraordinarily successful — his two albums had reached No. 2 and No. 1 in the US, despite moderate sales, because of the amount of online plays they had received. The day after he died, my social-media timelines were full of music writers discussing his death, and the tenor — from those with kids, at least — was clear. Post after post noted that XXXTentacion was a nasty piece of work, and few should mourn him, yet the writer’s 13- or 14- or 15-year-old was devastated by his death. XXXTentacion was, it is true, a nasty piece of work.