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.

Yeah. Hello and welcome to Sack Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Sparks, and this week my guest is Liz Pelly. Liz is a music journalist and the author of

Mood Machine, the rise of Spotify, and the cost of the perfect playlist. Now, Liz has been on the show

in the past. When I was preparing for the show, I was imagining, you know, it was probably a couple

years ago, like maybe 2022. But then when I got on the call with Liz,

she reminded me that actually she was on way back in 2020 in the first year of the show to talk

about Spotify with me. And on one hand, I couldn't believe it was that long. But on the other,

it was a reminder of how long I've actually been making Tech Won't Save Us and however coming

coming up on the fifth year anniversary of this show. So I was super happy to finally have Liz on after all of those years,

apparently, to go through her new book and to discuss these really important things that she found

in reporting out this story about Spotify, its impact on artists, and its impact on the way that we listen to

music. The first episode we did this year was with Will Tavlin talking about Netflix and the impact

of the Netflix model on film and television. So I think that this is a really good accompanying

episode to a conversation like that, right? Instead of looking at film and TV, looking at the music industry,

and, you know, what this kind of streaming model, and particularly how Spotify has implemented

it, has really meant for music and, you know, how we consume and how we experience this really

important art form. I'm sure you've heard about how Spotify, you know, doesn't pay artists

particularly well. We obviously go over that in this conversation, but there's a much

deeper story to be told here about how Spotify works, about how it impacts music, about, you know,

the impacts of, you know, this model of collecting all this data on us and, you know, supposedly

...