Hua Hsu on the Costs of Spotify
In today’s newsletter, a deep dive into how the streaming service upended our listening habits, and then:
File-sharing may have anarchist roots, but Spotify’s C.E.O. and co-founder, Daniel Ek, seems more interested in turning us into captive, passive consumers.Illustration by Nick Little
Is There Any Escape from the Spotify Syndrome?
The history of recorded music is now at our fingertips. But the streamer’s algorithmic skill at giving us what we like may keep us from what we’ll love.
Spotify’s yearly “Wrapped” has become a defining project for the company, with its social-media-ready graphics that allow users to connect with listeners around the world and to reflect on their year. A new book from Liz Pelly, which Hua Hsu reviews for this week’s issue, offers a comprehensive look into how “Wrapped” and other features of the streaming service have changed not just how we listen to music but what we listen to. When Spotify learned, early on, to track user behavior, it began to anticipate our habits. As a result, “we’ve been conditioned to want hyper-personalization from our digital surroundings,” Hsu writes. “The collection of so much personalized data—around what time of day we turn to Sade or how many seconds of a NewJeans song we play—suggests a future without risk, one in which we will never be exposed to anything we may not want to hear.” Read the story »
The Lede
New Mexico’s Nuclear-Weapons Boom
The laboratory at Los Alamos is growing at a pace not seen since J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. “In recent years, Los Alamos has been essential to a sweeping 1.7-trillion-dollar update of the country’s nuclear arsenal, which comes as China expands its atomic-weapons program and Russia assumes a newly confrontational stance,” Abe Streep writes. Read the story »
More Top Stories
Daily Cartoon
“Why, it’s one of those indistinguishable days between Christmas and New Year’s, sir.”
Cartoon by Niall Maher
More Fun & Games
P.S. Charles Darwin set sail on the H.M.S. Beagle today in 1831, kicking off the voyage that laid the foundation for his theory of evolution. Six years after he returned from his trip, he moved with his wife and two children to Down House, in rural Kent, England. It was there that he finished the first manuscript for “On the Origin of Species”—and had eight more children. Nine drawings by his children appear on the back of that manuscript, including an image of a green fish with pink legs and fins and a bright-blue umbrella. ☂️
Hannah Jocelyn contributed to this edition.
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