Don’t Stop the Muzak

Liz Pelly’s article on Spotify’s collusion with the stock-music industry [“The Ghosts in the Machine,” Report, January] is fascinating and well researched, but it could have used more historical perspective. The move toward corporate-produced music seemed inevitable for decades, ever since record labels (along with publishers, periodicals, film studios, and radio stations) began to consolidate and, with the help of new technology and marketing science, maximize corporate control at the expense of artists’ agency. Technological advances in digital recording, sampling, and vocal editing, as well as the advent of streaming platforms, only made it easier to reduce music to “content” and market it like fast food.

Until the 2000s, the structure of the music business involved record companies’ finding promising artists and signing them to exclusive contracts, which often granted labels ownership of recordings, publishing rights, use of the artist’s name and image, and even the right to license live performances. In return, the companies invested in production, touring, and promotion in hope of generating hit records. As technology and marketing continued to develop, so did the means of exploiting the work of artists—and now, as Pelly reveals, sidelining them altogether.

The present state of the music industry—both fragmented (vast numbers of independent and DIY releases, mostly unprofitable) and consolidated (Universal, Sony, and Warner accounting for more than 70 percent of industry profits)—is hardly surprising. There’s music, and there’s business; artists and those who value their work must recognize the difference.

David Conrad
Nashville, Tenn.

As a journalist who covers the music industry and a musician myself, I’ve been aware for years of the rumors that Spotify uses fake artists to pad out popular playlists in an effort to strengthen its bottom line at the expense of real musicians. But even as a longtime critic of Spotify, I couldn’t have imagined that something like Perfect Fit Content might constitute a major pillar of its business strategy; the rumored program seemed too blatant in its disregard of everything Spotify ostensibly stood for to be anything more than a small experimental venture. But, as Pelly reports, PFC has in fact been a priority at Spotify, featured across hundreds of playlists that are monitored on an ongoing basis by a designated internal team.

Andy Cush
Brooklyn, N.Y.

I’ve been composing postminimalist music for two decades. I’ve long been frustrated by my music’s failure to gain traction on streaming platforms, and often wondered who the mediocre ghost artists were that would autoplay after my songs. But while it’s devastating, if unsurprising, to learn that Spotify is taking money from musicians’ pockets, I think that the responsibility for redressing this lies primarily with the public, which has come to embrace what Theodor Adorno called the “regression of listening.” Before Pelly’s report, most listeners would not have known the difference between a true work of art and stock music. Nor do most care to find out, content as they are to cede their aesthetic judgments to a higher authority.

Bret Schneider
St. Louis

I teach music theory and composition to a range of intellectually curious students who love music. They primarily listen to music on Spotify, and have in recent years cited ambient and lo-fi as their favorite genres. This departure from tried-and-true staples like rock, hip-hop, and country confused me, until I understood how music functioned in their daily lives. During one class discussion, a student confessed that the main reason he listens to music is that he is afraid to be alone with his own thoughts. When I asked who else agreed, the vast majority raised their hands. The ubiquitous use of headphones in public and the constant hum of playlists in dorm rooms do not reflect an obsession with music, but rather a desire for relief from introspection. Music, it would seem, has become mainly a source of distraction—even to music students.

Robert Rankin
Adjunct Assistant Instructor of Composition, University of Utah
Salt Lake City

Public Domain

In his wonderful history of the Easy Chair [“An Ornament of Our Dingy Office,” Easy Chair, January], Christopher Carroll notes that one of Bernard DeVoto’s columns was a “landmark article on the conspiracy to transfer public lands . . . into private hands.” In that column [“The Sturdy Corporate Homesteader,” May 1953], DeVoto examines the Timber and Stone Act of 1878, under which, he reports, “four million acres of publicly owned timber passed into corporate ownership at a small fraction of its value, and 95 percent of it by fraud.”

The most brazen theft of public redwood forestland under the Timber and Stone Act occurred in the 1880s, in Humboldt County, California, and resulted in the illegal privatization of tens of thousands of acres of primordial redwood forest. I wrote about this in my 2023 book The Ghost Forest, a chronicle of redwood logging since the mid-nineteenth century. Carroll writes that DeVoto underscored the importance of future researchers’ access to “bound files of Harper’s in library stacks. He has to use them; he cannot write history without them.” My book, like so many others, was published on the backs of historians such as DeVoto.

Greg King
President and Executive Director, Siskiyou Land Conservancy
Arcata, Calif.