It's very risky when we start letting companies like Universal Music Group and these big tech companies be determining like who is a serious artist and who is an unprofessional hobbyist who doesn't deserve to make like any royalties at all for their work.

These are really slippery slopes, I think. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and apparently we're in 2026 now.

Happy New Year. Hopefully this year will not be, you know, as bad as the one that we have just experienced.

But let me be honest, my hopes are not particularly high on that front.

But here's hoping the power of these tech billionaires gets reigned in. Countries start to seize back control of their digital infrastructures. And maybe we

even start to have some kind of concerted opposition to the effort to impose this kind of

digital world created to benefit these tech oligarchs at the expense of all of us. That's my hope. We'll see how

it goes. As I mentioned in the last episode, to start off 2026, we're actually going to look back at

some of the conversations that I had in 2025. Some of the ones that I think, you know, are probably

important to have a second look at in light of everything that has happened. And one of those that

really stood out to me was my conversation with Liz Pelly, who is a music journalist and author

of Mood Machine, a fantastic book about Spotify and streaming music in general. And not only did I

think that this conversation was really fascinating and that I think that Liz is doing really great work. But I have seen a number

of people in the past few weeks talking about getting off of Spotify in particular, some people

even talking about moving back to like physical music, however possible that is,

away from streaming services altogether.

And so I thought in light of those conversations, you know, conversations about how we listen

to music, but also how we, you know, kind of consume and engage with culture more broadly,

because I also see these conversations happening with regard to movies and video streaming

services and whether, you know, we should go back to

Blu-rays or something like that or other ways of, you know, engaging with these mediums.

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