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Hey, y'all, it's the Sam Sanders show from KCRW, your weekly guide to entertainment and pop culture.

Thank you so much for checking out the show.

This week, Spotify.

It's a service I use every day that I have paid for for years. Spotify in many ways

has become the soundtrack to my life. And I am not alone. Spotify is the biggest streamer in the world

with more than 675 million users. But there's a new book out and it argues that Spotify may not be as nice

and as democratic and as altruistic as the company wants you to think. Liz Pelley's new book is called

Mood Machine, the rise of Spotify and the cost of the perfect playlist. And she says Spotify hasn't just

made it easier to listen to music. It's also devalued music in our culture and devalued the

artists who make it. Liz and I break down her thesis in this chat and then later we'll be

joined by a real live DJ to hear her take on how

Spotify has changed how she thinks about music and how she thinks about her job.

All right, let's get into it.

There's so much in the book that I want to unpack, but I want to talk about a phrase you use that really

just stuck to me and gave me pause and made me kind of scared. You said that Spotify makes us

treat music, quote, more as a utility than an art form. That sounds bleak.

What do you mean by that?

I think that this is a turn of phrase that a lot of different critics and researchers have used over the years, either to argue like four or against this concept.

But I think when people talk about the way in which streaming has centered this idea or put forth this idea

...