Germany's "Dexit" Party -- Serious Threat To The EU -- January 17, 2025

Locator: 44701GERMANY.

Sounds like a few Germans upset with the trajectory of their country (two years of recession). 

Link here. 

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Spotify

The playlist power broker. 

Absolutely fascinating.

Link here.

The lede:

Every day, no matter where she is, Sulinna Ong puts away her phone, turns off all notifications and lies down on the floor for three hours to listen to new songs.

Ong oversees 130 Spotify employees doing what the service’s powerful algorithms can’t: discovering the best new music and carefully introducing it on playlists to the listeners who are going to devour it. Getting new music into Ong’s ears can rocket an artist’s career.

Ong’s team has been including pop singer Chappell Roan on playlists since 2020, including the top slot in Gen Z favorite “Lorem,” helping position her for a breakout year in 2024 and a Grammy nomination for best new artist. Ong has also championed Doechii, a rapper nominated in the same category, over the past four years. This past week, Doechii had three songs, including “Denial Is a River” and “Nissan Altima,” on a playlist focusing on women in rap called “Feelin’ Myself.”  

Ong calls her music-discovery routine, which she’s done daily for the past three years, “structured music listening.” She sifts through new music that artists or their representatives submit, looking for songs to populate the thousands of playlists her team publishes each week. Her job isn’t so much about having a singular, influential taste as having a vision of what will work where, when and for whom.

Streaming, now ubiquitous through Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and social-media platforms like TikTok, has fragmented the listening experience, with fans able to delve into niches that may not be broadly popular. Long gone are the days when Top-40 radio hosts and MTV VJs set the agenda for the public at large.