Hello friends. Welcome to another paid subscriber-exclusive episode of The Culture Journalist. In the hours before Silicon Valley Bank imploded last week, setting off a chain of events that would send the entire tech (and finance) world into an existential tailspin, Andrea and Emilie made the somewhat excruciating decision to watch Spotify’s annual business presentation, “Stream On” — all hour and a half of it. Between the company’s new, Tiktok-inspired interface, its Black Mirror-esque personal AI DJ tool, and the expansion of its Discovery Mode program offering artists more exposure in exchange for a lower royalty rate, the event offered plenty of food for thought about the state of cultural curation — and musical gatekeeping — in 2023.
Should we believe tech companies when they say they are democratizing cultural creation and distribution — or is all that utopian language just a smoke screen for the ways they are slowly rendering human curators …
