Spotify has evolved in its roughly 16-year history. While initially functioning as a free, unlimited iTunes library, the app started creating in-house playlists in 2013, and from there began to invest more into algorithmic programming. But through it all, the company has earned criticism for the paltry sums it pays out to the artists; significantly less than a penny per stream, usually. But Spotify has also gained criticism over the years for filling playlists with its own licensed music, effectively excluding artists from one of the few revenue streams. Now, in an excerpt of her forthcoming book published in Harper's, author Liz Pelly goes deep on the subject. 

In Pelly’s investigation, she found that Spotify had been working with stock-music companies like Epidemic, which offer music that tends to be played in the background rather than music that is wholly focused on. Think jazz, electronic, lo-fi beats to study/relax to. This led to the Perfect Fit Content (PFC) program; since most of Spotify’s revenue was going to paying royalties to major labels like Sony and Warner, there was an incentive for Spotify to find cheaper music for these background playlists.

Pelly also speaks with some musicians hired to create some of this stock music for dinner playlists, who liken the experience to taking a standardized test: there are a few right answers in making this, but far more wrong answers. The goal for these musicians is not to arrive at a pure artistic expression, but to provide unobtrusive musical wallpaper. “This kind of felt like the same category as wedding gigs or corporate gigs. It’s made very explicit on Spotify that these are background playlists, so it didn’t necessarily strike me as any different from that,” one musician said. “You’re just a piece of the furniture.” While the pay for these gigs can be decent, musicians don’t earn residuals or royalties for these tracks, often losing out on money in the long run. 

Of course, the Harper's article goes into far more detail on the subject, and explores why “an artist and the business of background music are increasingly entwined,” in Pelly’s words. You can check out the whole article here.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has unveiled stricter criteria for food manufacturers to label their products as "healthy," marking the first major update to the definition in 30 years. The new rule requires products to meet specific thresholds for nutrients while limiting sodium, saturated fat and added sugars. Under the guidelines, foods must contain minimum amounts of nutrient-dense ingredients like fruits, vegetables, or whole grains. Saturated fats cannot exceed 5% of daily recommended value, while sodium is capped at 10%. Manufacturers have until February 2028 to comply with the regulations.

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Steam users spent only 15% of their total gaming time on new releases in 2024, according to the platform's year-end review, an increase from 9% in 2023 but below 2022's 17%. Legacy titles dominated playtime, with 47% spent on games released in the past seven years and 37% on titles older than eight years. New online games like Helldivers 2 and Black Myth: Wukong helped drive 2024's modest uptick in new game engagement across Steam's library of over 200,000 titles, while established service games like Counter-Strike and Dota 2 maintained their long-standing popularity.

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The internet is filled with facts, both true and otherwise. In Film Trivia Fact Check, we’ll browse the depths of the web’s most user-generated trivia boards and wikis and put them under the microscope. How true are the IMDb Trivia pages? You want the truth? Can you handle the truth? We’re about to find out.

Claim: A few weeks before [The Lion King] opened, Sir Elton John was given a special screening. Noticing that the film’s love song had been left out, he successfully lobbied Jeffrey Katzenberg to put the song back. Later, “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” won him an Academy Award for Best Original Song. [Source: IMDb]

Rating: True

Context: The Lion King needs no introduction but gets one anyway. Still, “Circle Of Life” is not the centerpiece, Oscar-winning number on Elton John and Tim Rice’s stampeding soundtrack. That belongs to “Can You Feel The Love Tonight,” and of all the film’s numbers, it’s the one that Lion King co-director Rob Minkoff said had the “most diverse history” on a 1995 commentary track. It’s that “diverse history” that never stopped changing, its legend growing and shrinking with each telling. That’s the circle of life for you.

“Can You Feel The Love Tonight” had a difficult birth. On the 1995 Laserdisc commentary (later unceremoniously dumped and hidden on the 2011 Diamond Edition Blu-ray), Minkoff claims that lyricist Tim Rice, a frequent collaborator of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Elton John, wrote some 18 versions of the lyrics. Meanwhile, Disney’s team of animators struggled to find the right way to present the unabashed romance of the track. The process reveals the tricky balance of talking animal movies: How to represent chaste desire between creatures that don’t express emotions with their faces like humans, all in a way that won’t disgust and alienate children. 

“At times, we had the whole thing with their mouths open on screen; at times, we had Pumbaa and Timon sing the whole song, which was really funny,” Minkoff says. This latter idea was the version Disney first screened for Elton John, and he was not amused. “Elton said, ’Wait a minute, you don’t understand. I always loved the point in Disney movies when the prince and the princess get to sing about how they feel about each other. I wrote this song thinking it was going to be a classic Disney love song.’”

Minkoff’s version paints a kinder picture of John’s reaction to Pumbaa’s baritone singing voice. In 2017, Ernie Sabella, who voiced Pumbaa, elaborated on what happened to his vocals in an interview with Cinemablend. “We recorded the whole song. It didn’t show up because Elton John said, ‘I don’t want a big, stinky warthog singing my love song!’”

John must have jettisoned this memory of a “big, stinky warthog” crooning his song. In his subsequent tellings of the story, “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” was excised entirely. In 2016, he recalled that he saw a finished version of The Lion King without the song and appealed to then-Disney studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg, questioning its whereabouts: "I said, ‘Jeffrey, what’s happened to the song?’” Katzenberg told John that the filmmakers couldn’t find the right place for it, but he eventually acquiesced. Katzenberg picked the song up from the cutting room floor and found a spot for it at the end of the second act. In later interviews with John, Katzenberg gets cut from the tale. 

“The whole Disney team came down to Atlanta and showed me a rough cut of the nearly finished film, and there was no ‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight,’” John said in 2024. “So I asked, ‘Where’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”‘ And they go, ‘Well, we just couldn’t find a place for it,’ and I go, ‘It’s a love song. Every Disney animation film has a great love song. You really ought to reconsider this.’”

In the end, John was right. The love song made the cut, it still featured a bit of Timon and Pumbaa bookending the scene, and the circle of life spun on. “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” reached number four on the Billboard charts and won a Grammy and an Academy Award, setting John a course for his EGOT completion in 2024. However, Sir John does not consider “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” The Lion King’s signature song. That still belongs to the “Circle Of Life.” 

“Because it’s the song of The Lion King,“ John said. “The Lion King starts, and you hear the ‘Circle Of Life,’ and you think of The Lion King. To me, that’s the song that makes The Lion King, but I’m not going to complain.” Well, unless a warthog gets caught singing it.

Remember when instead of giving Americans $2,000 for the third stimulus check, President Joe Biden sent out $1,400 (so that the final two stimulus payments totaled $2,000)? Yeah, if that made you mad back in 2021, you are not going to want to hear about what the music industry was doing with COVID money. A new Business Insider investigation reveals that numerous wealthy stars took advantage of a law called the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant to pay for hotel rooms, private jets, high-end fashion and more—all on the taxpayer's dime. 

The Shuttered Venue Operators Grant was "established as a lifeline for struggling independent venues and arts groups during the pandemic," per BI, but the accountants and money managers for the stars realized that some major musicians would be eligible for grants "via their loan-out companies—corporate entities used to handle the business of touring." In other words, rich and famous people were granted up to $10 million each that was meant for "ordinary and necessary" expenses for their entertainment businesses. 

As you can imagine, these rich and famous people—which includes Lil Wayne, Chris Brown, DJ Marshmello, and members of Alice in Chains—were not using that money for "ordinary and necessary" expenses. For instance, Lil Wayne spent "nearly $15,000 worth of flights and luxury hotel rooms for women whose connection to Lil Wayne's touring operation was unclear, including a waitress at a Hooters-type restaurant and a porn actress," BI reports. Marshmello's entire $9.9 million grant went right into his own pockets. Chris Brown paid himself $5.1 million dollars and separately threw himself and $80,000 birthday party. (Again, this is all on the dime of taxpayers, of which Brown is historically not one, having recently settled millions in debt with the IRS.) Many of the artists investigated paid themselves and their lawyers, managers, and accountants, with little money going to the roadies, techs, and other touring professionals whose livelihoods were most threatened by the pandemic. 

It's worth noting that the grants did do good for some of the live entertainment professionals it was actually intended to help (at least one of them, the founder of an acting school, is interviewed in the piece). But some sources inside the Small Business Administration who worked on the program were appalled by the fraud that took place and felt shut down when they tried to raise concerns. "I was never so disappointed in my fellow man than in that program. The graft was unbelievable," one of the source told the outlet. Most of the artists declined to comment; according to BI, when "Reached by text, Lil Wayne made a sexually explicit overture to a reporter and did not respond to questions." You can read the full, upsetting report here.

"We’re all in this together, and when we push, things move"

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