Over Christmas, two articles were released that felt like harbingers – if not full-on sirens – for the direction of travel of popular culture. There was Will Tavlin’s piece for n+1 about Netflix’s less-than-stellar film output, which was briefly touched on in last week’s newsletter. And in Harpers magazine, there was an extract from music journalist Liz Pelly’s new book on Spotify. It focuses on the streamer’s Perfect Fit Content (PFC) programme, which pays production companies to create cheap, generic music by “ghost artists” in order, Pelly alleges, to populate Spotify’s playlists and reduce royalty payouts to real artists. (In Pelly’s book Spotify acknowledges the existence of the Perfect Fit Content programme but denies that it is trying to increase the share of streams of Perfect Fit Content.) Both are eye-opening reads, depicting the two companies as industry disruptors with little or no care for the thing they’re disrupting, and making their respective industries worse in the process.
But if Netflix and Spotify are cast as the villains of these stories, it is clear that we, the consumers, have a degree of complicity. Both streamers are, after all, simply adapting to, and profiting from, our viewing and listening habits. Two striking details from those articles underline this. Tavlin, in his piece, claims that screenwriters for Netflix movies are being asked by execs to include scenes where characters “announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along”. Meanwhile, Pelly notes in her piece that Spotify’s “internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack … listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing.”
