Laissez-Faire Listening
The Swedish tech giant has rigged the music industry against artists, mined listeners for data, and made music boring for everyone. Or is that just what the major recording labels want you to believe?
Daniel Ek, CEO of Swedish music streaming service Spotify, gestures as he makes a speech at a press conference in Tokyo on September 29, 2016. Spotify kicked off its services in Japan on September 29. / AFP / TORU YAMANAKA (Photo credit should read TORU YAMANAKA/AFP via Getty Images)
It was all the fault of Scandinavian social democracy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Sweden became a global centre for music piracy largely through a perfect storm of universal and high quality broadband, well-funded music education, and assertive personal privacy laws. Something had to be done. Record industry CEOs talked about the Nordic […]
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