Spotify unwrapped w/ Liz Pelly

In 2006, the music streaming service Spotify, founded by Swedish entrepreneurs Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon was launched in the context of widespread music piracy, file sharing, and declining profits for the music majors. Presenting themselves as music fans who were intent on saving the music industry, Spotify has since gone on to become the dominant music streaming platform, far eclipsing any of its rivals, and making Ek and Lorentzon billionaires. While once lauded by the media, Spotify's reputation has significantly declined as understanding of how little most musicians receive from streaming has become more widespread and as Spotify has courted controversy by populating some of its playlists with so-called "perfect fit content" - stock music produced for Spotify in order to reduce the amount of royalties the company pays to rights holders. Journalist Liz Pelly has done more than most to bring to light practices such as these and to challenge the myth-making of Spotify's founders. In today's episode we spoke about the early years of Spotify, as it emerged in the context of mass file sharing and as the major music labels were coming to see Sweden as a lost market - making it ripe as a site for experimentation with streaming. We went on to talk about how Spotify is shaping the user habits of listeners and about the damaging consequences of the datafication of music. Finally, we chatted about some of the inspiring efforts to challenge the dominance of Spotify that have emerged in recent years, as both musicians and listeners seek to find ways to create music communities and to preserve and curate music history - practices that Spotify's dominance has severely eroded.

You can listen to Spotify unwrapped w/ Liz Pelly online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Spotify unwrapped w/ Liz Pelly is an episode from Politics Theory Other by Politics Theory Other.

This episode is 01:36:23 long.

This episode was published on Dec 3, 2025.

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