How Spotify is Built On Artist Exploitation

Paris Marx is joined by Liz Pelly to discuss how the Spotify model of streaming music continues a long trend of exploitation in the music industry and why musicians need to organize around a vision for a different world of music.

Liz Pelly is a freelance writer and critic who has spent the past decade working with community arts spaces. She is also a contributing editor and columnist at The Baffler. Follow Liz on Twitter as @lizpelly.

• Liz’s work looks at many aspects of Spotify, including the model it’s pushing on musicians and increasingly on podcasters
• Paris has written about how consolidation and the emergence of streaming is having similarly negative effects in film and television
• Naomi Klein explains how New Deal arts programs funded 225,000 musical performances which reached 150 million Americans — and much more
• Cherie Hu tweeted a diagram showing how different streaming and music companies have stakes in one another
• The Verge obtained Sony Music’s contract with Spotify
• How Galaxy 500 and Pavement had random songs take off on Spotify
• Spotify CEO says artists need to record music more frequently
• Henderson Cole’s proposal for an American Music Library
• The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers launched the Justice at Spotify campaign

• Art is More Than Ones and Zeroes w/ Nika Roza Danilova
• What the History of TV Can Teach Us About Netflix w/ Tom Evens
• How Spotify Tried to Take Over Podcasting w/ Eric Silver
• How Spotify Remade the Music Industry w/ Liz Pelly