Spotify Newsletter #163

Your Weekly Dose of Spotify News

May 26

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Hello …… happy Friday and thanks for reading the latest issue of the Spotify Newsletter.

I like to pretend I’m some playlist guru who can weave together a unique, seamless collection of songs that will transcend the listener to an audio nirvana.

That does sound nice!

But really it’s just me adding 8-9 songs I really like at the end of each newsletter because of I believe in spreading the joy of great music.

The playlist that wraps up each issue has also served as an ‘in memoriam’ for musicians I/we love who have recently left us.

It’s terribly sad because we’ve hit a spot on the timeline when so many of the absolute greats of the past are moving on to the great gig in the sky. It seems like almost each week I’m adding an extra section to the playlist to honor an artist I love.

So here we are in the wake of Tina Turner’s passing. She was a favorite of mine for as long as I can remember. The rock n’ roll queen.

But considering this is a Spotify-focused newsletter, I would like to make mention, again, how music streaming - like Spotify, among others - is so ideal for such a personal moment when a music icon has left us, and we want to quickly immerse ourselves into their work.

With music streaming… the connection to the music is immediate.

It was mere moments from when I read the headline of Tina Turner’s passing to when I dialed up her discography on Spotify - and jumped in hip deep.

The speed of consumption. Its not hard to grab a CD, or pull out the vinyl. But at my desk, in the flow of the day, what a treat - a technological privilege - to quickly click and listen to the music.

That’s one of the many reasons I love music streaming, in general, and Spotify specifically. I bet lots of folks are listing to Tina Turner this week, which is great.

★In the SPOTlight★

️⭐️ Brad Paisley, Brothers Osborne, Lady A & More to Perform at Spotify House at CMA Fest

Dierks Bentley, Mickey Guyton, Hailey Whitters, Ingrid Andress, Old Dominion & more will also join them June 8-11.

⭐️ To Monopolise Our Ears: What Spotify Wants

Daniel Ek originally conceived of Spotify as ‘the future of the record store’. People already knew what they wanted to hear; Spotify’s job was to help them find it. But in the early 2010s, the authors of Spotify Teardown write, as the likes of Apple and Amazon launched streaming services with equally large libraries, Spotify ‘began to transform itself’. It would no longer be ‘a simple distributor of music’. It was now ‘the producer of a unique service’: recommending music.