Reply All: #183 The Venova King

March 11, 2022 7:30 PM

This week, a Super Tech Support: a listener's Spotify Wrapped is dominated by a mysterious artist she's never heard of and swears she's never listened to. And the songs she supposedly played are even weirder. Emmanuel investigates.

Spoilers: the call was coming from inside the house!

Additional material:

Peter Slattery's series on spotify scammers
Check out Drumkoon's music, including a new genre of music he calls "Venova Fusion" on bandcamp

posted by pwnguin (4 comments total)

This was a fun episode, but (I say half in jest) that sure was a lot of product placement for their corporate parent!

(While listening, it felt to me like they were aware of this and were trying to downplay it a bit: making sure to mention the corporate relationship, but not in a way that felt like a disclaimer; and then also what I thought at the time was a curious decision not to interview anyone from Spotify about the algorithms in question.)

(Though I recognize that the episode functions more or less similarly to other episodes about, say, Twitter.)
posted by nobody at 6:12 PM on March 14, 2022

Listening to this in the car, which I rarely do. . . I discovered that my phone responds voice commands that I've never used and thought I'd turned off. (Maybe before the last OS update.) I wonder if the producers and hosts knew that they'd cause their listeners' phones to turn on vice commands twenty times during the episode. It's a pretty good bit if so. (It's harmless and funny if not.)
posted by eotvos at 10:58 AM on March 21, 2022

This is the last Gimlet podcast I listen to, as I'm not following them to Spotify exclusives. After the long break I'm deciding if I want to drop Reply All, and neither this episode or the next have really done anything to encourage me to stick with them. I'll give one more episode to be sure, but I think I'll be dropping them from my subscriptions.
posted by jazon at 12:23 PM on March 22, 2022

I'm starting to feel the same, Jazon.
posted by rebent at 2:48 PM on April 12, 2022