If the streaming economy has contributed to any major cultural shift in recent history, it might be that it has helped champion this dynamic of passivity. And while listeners can—and many do—use the service without engaging the recommendations at all, what the interface nudges is more of a reactive mode: its model listener would just simply hit play or skip. Often, conversations about the streaming era center the way music has been financially devalued, but there is also a broader, harder-to-pin-down cultural devaluation that comes with streaming: the relegation of music to something passable,
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