Latest news with #Pelly
Ammon
02-07-2025
- Ammon
Snake on a plane delays a flight in Australia
Ammon News - An Australian domestic flight was delayed for two hours after a stowaway snake was found in the plane's cargo hold, officials said on Wednesday. The snake was found on Tuesday as passengers were boarding Virgin Australia Flight VA337 at Melbourne Airport bound for Brisbane, according to snake catcher Mark Pelley. The snake turned out to be a harmless 60-centimeter (2-foot) green tree snake. But Pelly said he thought it could be venomous when he approached it in the darkened hold. 'It wasn't until after I caught the snake that I realized that it wasn't venomous. Until that point, it looked very dangerous to me,' Pelley said. Most of the world's most venomous snakes are native to Australia. An airline official said the flight was delayed around two hours.
Al Etihad
02-07-2025
- Al Etihad
Snake on a plane delays flight in Australia
2 July 2025 11:04 MELBOURNE (AP)An Australian domestic flight was delayed for two hours after a stowaway snake was found in the plane's cargo hold, officials said on snake was found on Tuesday as passengers were boarding Virgin Australia Flight VA337 at Melbourne Airport bound for Brisbane, according to snake catcher Mark snake turned out to be a harmless 60-centimeter (2-foot) green tree snake. But Pelly said he thought it could be venomous when he approached it in the darkened hold.'It wasn't until after I caught the snake that I realised that it wasn't venomous. Until that point, it looked very dangerous to me,' Pelley of the world's most venomous snakes are native to Australia. For quarantine reasons, the snake can't be returned to the wild. The snake, which is a protected species, has been given to a Melbourne veterinarian to find a home with a licensed snake keeper.
NDTV
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- NDTV
Spotify's Secret Scheme Of Ghost Artists And Fake Playlists To Slash Royalties Revealed
Spotify has been promoting ghost artists to avoid paying royalties to real artists, a report in Futurism, citing a new book, has claimed. In an excerpt from the book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, author Liz Pelly revealed that the Swedish music platform has a secretive internal programme that prioritises cheap and generic music. The programme called Perfect Fit Content (PFC) involves a network of affiliated production firms and a team of employees secretly creating "low-budget stock muzak" and placing them on Spotify's curated playlists. First piloted in 2010, PFC became Spotify's biggest profitability scheme by 2017. As per Ms Pelly, by engineering such a situation, Spotify was aiming to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. "It also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which, as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalise anonymous, low-cost playlist filler, the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely," she wrote. By 2023, the team overseeing the PFC model were responsible for hundreds of playlists. More than 150 playlists with titles such as "Deep Focus", "Cocktail Jazz" and "Morning stretch" were populated entirely by PFC content. One of the jazz musicians told Ms Pelly that he was approached by Spotify to create an ambient track for an upfront fee of a few hundred dollars. However, he was told that he wouldn't own the master rights to the track. The musician agreed, but once the track started raking in millions of streams, he realised he may have been duped. 'Soulless music' Social media users slammed Spotify for the move, with many stating that the platform was digging its own grave with such actions. "Going to be nothing but soulless AI music in a few years. That's one easy way to never pay royalties again lol," said one user, while another added: "Once you notice these artists it's pretty easy to ID them even just from listening to the music." A third commented: "I deleted my Spotify and cancelled the subscription." This is not the first instance when Spotify has come under scrutiny for its shady activities. In February, a report in The Guardian highlighted that Spotify's Discovery Mode allowed artists to be noticed by listeners in exchange for a 30 per cent royalty reduction.
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Spotify's biggest sin? Its algorithms have pushed artists to make joyless, toothless music
In the hands of some of its most gifted practitioners, songwriting is a kind of emotional alchemy. For the past week, I have been returning to a perfect example: Every Time the Sun Comes Up by the US singer Sharon Van Etten, which was released in 2014. Its lyrics might be fractured and fragmented, but it is an almost perfect portrait of self-doubt and downward spirals: one of those songs that captures feelings so deep that they go way beyond words. I went back to that song as I read a superb new book that has both educated and profoundly depressed me. Mood Machine, by the New York-based journalist Liz Pelly, is about the music-streaming giant Spotify, and how it attracted its current 615 million subscribers, making a billionaire of its Swedish co-founder and CEO, Daniel Ek. But its most compelling story centres on what Spotify has done to people's appreciation of songs and the people who make them – much of which is down to the platform's ubiquitous playlists. Thanks to Spotify's algorithms, I recently found Every Time the Sun Comes Up in a personalised (or 'algotorial') playlist titled Farmers Market, versions of which have been saved by nearly 250,000 listeners. On mine, the song sits alongside such classics as the Rolling Stones' Beast of Burden, Mazzy Star's equally aching Fade Into You and Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, whose pathos and depth seems to have been neutralised by their new setting, summed up in the accompanying blurb: 'fresh produce, reusable totes, iced coffee and all the lovely spring things'. Such is what Pelly calls 'the relegation of music to something passable, just filling the air'. Playlists tend to mean that songs once full of power and emotion get recontextualised, and washed of their meaning. And at the same time, Spotify constantly boosts music that never had any of those qualities to start with: a type of latter-day muzak that reaches its apogee in a genre now known as 'Spotifycore'. Pelly traces the birth of this 'muted, mid-tempo and melancholy' sound to around 2018: the US singer Billie Eilish seems to have unwittingly kicked things off, and the result has become inescapable, thanks to the kind of Spotify playlists whose titles include the word 'chill'. You know it when you hear it: it initially makes you feel as if you are in a big-budget Netflix series, before you find out that there is no discernible plot. Spotify in effect encourages musicians to produce this aural wallpaper, by showing them the data that proves this is how to make money from the platform. Such music answers some very 21st-century needs: as Pelly reminds us, it offers solace to people who are 'anxious and overworked, engaged in cycles of trying to focus hard and chill hard'. It also helps them sleep, which is one of the functions Spotify capably delivers. And whether the platform's users are awake or slumbering, Spotifycore also has a quality that makes it perfect for endless streaming: one song blurs into another, meaning that the app can be left to tick over, requiring minimum effort on the part of the user. This is the core of Ek's business model: the idea, after all, is to keep you listening – or half-listening – for hours at a time. What does all this mean for the music itself? Those of us who are addicted to Spotify – and just to be clear, my habit extends to several hours a day, though I mostly leave its playlists untouched – know how seductive an invention it is: an almost infinite jukebox, accessible via devices that are the same size as a Twix. But using it also comes with increasingly sharp pangs of ethical discomfort, and a sense that its version of streaming has long since started transforming music in no end of unsettling ways. Though Spotify has no direct involvement in its creation, a lot of the vapid music clustered on its playlists is now made by production-line suppliers of what the company calls 'perfect fit content', or PFC – which could just as easily be made using AI. The fact that no money is paid out if a song is listened to for less than 30 seconds has come close to killing the idea of a slow-burning intro (if they were modern creations, there would be no hope for such songs as David Bowie's Sound and Vision, or the Temptations' Papa Was a Rollin' Stone). The limited public outcry about the tiny rewards Spotify offers most musicians and songwriters may be connected to the fact that the average 'chill' playlist is intended only as background music: as Pelly says, 'it follows that a population paying so little conscious attention to music would also believe it deserving of so little remuneration'. Technology always bends and re-shapes artistic creativity: the fact that the archetypal album began life at about 40 minutes and then stretched to 70 or 80 was a story scripted by the invention of the 12in record, and its eventual superseding by compact discs. But what sets Spotify apart is something much more insidious: it goes beyond alterations of music's forms into what we think music is there to do, and one of big tech's most sinister powers: the way that it sidelines dissent in such a subtle way that we only realise what has happened when it is far too late. At the risk of making myself sound ancient, I had always understood the demise of music made with guitars – the best of which came with at least a hint of countercultural rebellion – as something down to that instrument's old age. Now, I wonder whether it might also have happened because it doesn't fit the low-volume, inoffensive aesthetics demanded by playlists with titles such as Stress Relief, Soft Office and Beach Vibes. I definitely think the large-scale decline of songs that deal in social and political commentary is partly to do with Spotify's relentless muzak-ification: in the UK, the one high-profile artist who does that kind of stuff is the brilliant, Bruce Springsteen-esque Sam Fender, and his artistic loneliness speaks volumes. With Trump in the White House and the world in chaos, the absence of a pop-cultural response is striking: might it be connected to the tyranny of what Pelly calls 'sad piano ballads with weird drums', and Spotify's reduction of artists to near-anonymity: people hanging on for dear life, with no voice? And beyond anything political, does that not pose a threat to music with any real substance at all? Van Etten, I am pleased to say, is playing three concerts in the UK this coming week with her band the Attachment Theory, and returning in the summer for another run of shows. I will be there for at least one of them, soaking up her deep, powerful music in the context it was created for. My phone will be switched off, and 'chill' will not be on the menu. And like just about everyone there, I will not be giving any thought to farmers' markets, iced coffee or 'reusable totes'. John Harris is a Guardian columnist
Telegraph
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The chilling truth about Spotify's ‘Orwellian' design
In 1921, Thomas Edison – inventor of the phonograph, among other things – issued a pamphlet called Mood Music: A Compilation of the 112 Edison Re-Creations According to 'What They Will Do for You'. Twelve different outcomes, it suggested, could be attained by ordering records from the Edison catalogue: these were grouped under headings such as 'To Stimulate and Enrich Your Imagination' and 'To Bring You Peace of Mind'. These proto-playlists had been compiled using information sent by thousands of Edison customers in the form of completed 'Mood Change Charts', questionnaires that began by asking: 'Would you like to observe music's effects on yourself – its effects on your friends? – how potent it is in changing your mood?' A century on, the Swedish streaming service Spotify – founded in 2006 by two more 'opportunistic tech solutionists', Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon – busies itself with similar questions, equally qualm-free about using pseudoscience and marketing trickery to sell the masses on new technology. With over 600 million current users, Spotify is now a firm part of the digital architecture of daily life. Plenty has been written about the company and changes wrought by streaming technology. But Mood Machine, an excoriating new book by the US music journalist Liz Pelly, is a vital addition to the genre, and arrives not a second too soon. You might think you know, for instance, the Spotify story. Customers pay around a tenner a month, and they receive access to a colossal, instant jukebox. Musicians receive a whopping £0.0028 in royalties per song stream. The platform's founders become billionaires. This is bad enough; but the true picture is even more sinister. Pelly pulls back the curtain on the murky practices that shape and control listener behaviour: algorithmic bias, manipulative UX design, 'payola' promotion schemes, data surveillance, and playlists of real songs cut with cheap stock fodder made by 'ghost artists'. As she writes: 'It's a story of listeners being sold music more as a utility than an art form.' Spotify isn't a music company at all. It's an advertising and data-mining company that can seem, at times, almost Orwellian. Consider the 'editorial playlists' – themed playlists with titles such as 'Today's Top Hits' and 'RapCaviar', curated by Spotify's in-house editors with an increasing amount of help from AI and algorithms. There are almost 10,000 of them; they water down taste, and discourage adventurous listening. Or think of the flattening of whole genres, histories, communities and traditions into palatable, easily commodified homogeneity. Browse Spotify's 'ambient' playlists, for example, and you'll find the genre's rich history – Brian Eno 's Music for Airports, Erik Satie's furniture music, 1970s Japanese kankyō ongaku ('environmental music') – re-rendered into what Pelly calls 'vibe wallpaper': Muzak for the digital age. For Spotify, she says, musical discovery is just 'code for keeping users streaming, and keeping users within their comfort zones'. The platform encourages music as an individual rather than a communal experience, and it pushes 'functional music' and 'lean-back listening', i.e. soporific background music for mundane activities – even sleeping. In 2023, users were reportedly listening to 3 million hours of white noise a day. As Ek once declared: 'Our only competitor is silence.' Pelly has been reporting on streaming since its inception, always with scepticism – as you might expect from a music journalist with roots in the independent and DIY music scenes. She interviewed over 100 sources for Mood Machine, from former Spotify employees to musicians, industry insiders, researchers and organisers. It's an approach that humanises the cold, unfeeling world of machine learning, and emphasises an easily forgettable point: AI, algorithms and data aren't neutral entities, but reflect the biases and objectives of the culture or company from which they derive. In Spotify's case, for instance, algorithmic recommendations offer a hyper-personalised listening experience that generates engagement, and thus revenue. Compared to previous books about Spotify, Pelly gives all of her airtime to those negatively affected by Spotify – employees, musicians, listeners – generating a wealth of punchy and alarming quotes. But though Mood Machine is a manifesto of sorts, it's not a flashy moralistic read: instead, its gradual build makes the reader increasingly unsettled. As she plunges deeper into the world of streaming, it can be easy to become lost in terminology and tech jargon, no matter your level of familiarity with Spotify. Still, it's worth paying attention, as Mood Machine isn't just a niche music-industry book: it asks much bigger questions about economic power, the value of art and the atomisation of society. The impact of technology on the sound of music and the behaviour of listeners isn't a new issue: there's a through-line from Edison's phonograph to the tightly-controlled Top 40 radio playlist. But in an age of data harvesting and AI superpowers, where heads of states gather at AI summits and Ek himself has invested in military AI, it's important to remain questioning. What looks like merely an investigation into a music app also maps out the potential and troubling ramifications of these new technologies on our lives. For Pelly, 'there are no one-click solutions'. It's not simply a case of swapping out Spotify for a rival streaming platform. Rather, we should think more critically about how and why we listen to music; perhaps we should abandon such systems altogether, and return to buying records directly from artists. Edison called his 1887 invention 'the Phonograph with a Soul'. In Spotify's hands, with those playlists that purport to know you, such a claim becomes truly chilling.
