“Perhaps Spotify understood the stakes—that when it removed real classical, jazz, and ambient artists from popular playlists and replaced them with low-budget stock muzak, it was steamrolling real music cultures, actual traditions within which artists were trying to make a living. Or perhaps the company was aware that this project to cheapen music contradicted so many of the ideals upon which its brand had been built. Spotify had long marketed itself as the ultimate platform for discovery—and who was going to get excited about ‘discovering’ a bunch of stock music?”
“[Spotify’s] model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process.”
“Vibes predate the digital world, but technology is part of their story. It is tempting to frame vibes as the deep, mysterious business of being human resisting a technology financially incentivised to mine us for information, but vibes mirror the digital world as much as they resist it. It is no coincidence that vibes have expanded to take up space in our lives and in our culture during exactly the period in which smartphones, social media and algorithms have conspired to suck out the oxygen.”
“Vibes are both bone-deep and ephemeral nonsense. They are new and they are also ancient. They are precious fairy dust to keep the all-seeing algorithms from sinking their vampire teeth into our culture, and yet they are a modern marketing tool.”
“This is, in the end, the most convincing argument for minimalism: with less noise in our heads, we might hear the emergency sirens more clearly. If we put down some baggage, we might move more swiftly. We might address the frantic, frightening, intensifying conditions that have prompted us to think of minimalism as an attractive escape.”
brettworks 
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