Indeed, playlists have become so important that being left off can flop even megastar releases . Music journalist and commentator David Turner sees them as repeating the same old tune: “The tone of playlisting shifted very quickly in the last couple of years, from excitement to disillusionment, once we recognized that the same issues of gatekeeping that existed in forms like radio are just simply being repeated.
Playlist culture imports old power imbalances. When writer and music commentator Liz Pelly analyzed the gender of artists featured on Spotify’s most popular playlists, she found just one woman-led song featured on RapCaviar’s evolving 50-track playlist over four weeks, with other leading lists doing little better. The biggest editorial playlists on every platform also prioritize American voices: A recent study found that almost half of all acts featured by Spotify were from the US.
This trend threatens to disintermediate artists and labels, just as Amazon sought to disintermediate publishers by encouraging writers to publish directly. Liz Pelly has been warning of this danger for years: “A music culture dependent on playlists is dependent on Spotify, whereas a music culture dependent on albums is dependent on record labels.” Passive listeners are less likely to form connections with the musicians who make it or seek out their gigs.
Just resubscribed for the first time in a long time. So happy your layout is now normal again and readable. At one point you were laying out text in really strange and unpleasant ways.