Newspaper articles claimed that streaming, and Spotify in particular, had saved the music industry. Whether or not you share that view depends on what you understand the music industry to be.
The Spotify Play: How CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance by Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud. Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation by Nick Seaver. For all Spotify’s talk of ‘discovery’, the thing it really cares about is what Mike, the chief scientist at Willow, calls ‘the hang-around factor’. If someone skips a song, or stops listening altogether, then something has gone wrong. You mustn’t bore the listener, but you mustn’t startle them either.
