Illustration by Laura Lannes Welcome to New Retro Week, a celebration of the biggest artists, hits, and cultural moments that made 2012 a seminal year in pop. MTV News is looking back to see what lies ahead: These essays showcase how today’s blueprint was laid a decade ago. Step into our time machine. When Spotify hit the United States in the summer of 2011, it arrived with a cavalcade of enthusiasm. “Finally” and “at last” were used in headlines announcing its launch. An NPR explainer laid out why the moment marked a milestone in the digital music era, describing Spotify’s “huge catalog of music that can be streamed, combined into playlists and accessed from any computer with an Internet connection, all for free.” The New York Times went much pithier: “New Service Offers Music in Quantity, Not by Song.” Through its first few years of operations in the U.S., Spotify both restructured and rattled the music industry. It also came to define what it means to experience and share music in the 21st century. A top hits playlist the platform published to close out 2012, for example, features one song that’s since amassed over a billion streams (“Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye and Kimbra) and others with hundreds of millions more (“Call Me Maybe” and “We Are Young,” obviously). But Spotify had its detractors from the very beginning. And in the wake of its largest reckoning yet, its future may depend on revisiting them. 2022 began with Neil… Click below to read the full story from MTV News
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A Decade Under Spotify’s Streaming Influence
