The Chatterbox

In this episode we are joined by Rob Arcand to discuss his work on Spotify, streaming, and the financialization of culture. We begin with Spotify's emergence as a supposed democratizing force for working musicians, even as its model relied on surveillance and data-trawling. We explore how this data-driven promise — that listener analytics could be leveraged for touring and merch — reshaped the relationship between artists and audiences, often in ways that reinforced precarity rather than alleviated it.

From there, we turn to Arcand's comparison of Spotify's ambitions to Uber and Airbnb, situating streaming within the broader logic of platform capitalism. We discuss how corporate consolidation has shaped the power dynamics of the music industry over the past several decades, and how subscription and ad-supported services emerged from a moment of crisis as neoliberal adaptations to instability.

Our conversation also examines how disenfranchisement has paradoxically opened space for new labor struggles within the culture industries, and what a more equitable path forward might look like in an industry dominated by monopoly capitalism. We trace Spotify's shift from search-centric functionality to playlist curation, its "Music for every moment" strategy, and its rebranding from a "celestial jukebox" into lifestyle accessories for individual listeners.

Arcand helps us unpack Spotify's editorial logic — from "chill" playlists to hyperpop — and how mood-based categorization blurs the boundaries between artistic expression, consumer mood management, and financialized cultural assets. We consider the assimilation of subcultural genres into profit-seeking structures, the emergence of "Spotifycore," and the recalibration of genre itself for algorithmic infrastructures.

Rob is a writer, editor, web developer, and PhD candidate at McGill University in Montreal. He's a former staffer at Pitchfork and SPIN, and has published work on music, visual art, books, film, and technology with outlets like n+1, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Artforum, Art in America, The Nation, The Fader, Rolling Stone, Vice, and more. Twitter: @robarcand

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The Same Stream Twice by Rob Arcand

With the 2026 World Cup just weeks away, France once again enters the tournament as one of football’s superpowers — but what does the French national team actually represent in modern France? In this gripping episode, co-hosts Guy Burton and Francesco Belcastro sit down with Bangor University's Senior Lecturer in French (Studies), Jonathan Ervine, to unpack the explosive intersection of football, politics, identity, race, religion and nationalism in French society. From the myth of the 1998 “Black-Blanc-Beur” champions to the rise of the far right, the tensions of secularism, and the political symbolism of stars like Kylian Mbappé and Zinedine Zidane, this episode reveals why French football is about far more than what happens on the pitch. 

The discussion explores immigration, the banlieues, anti-racism campaigns, homophobia in Ligue 1, the hijab controversy in women’s football, Ramadan debates and the growing pressure on players to speak out politically. The hosts also look ahead to France’s World Cup chances, Didier Deschamps’ expected departure and why Zidane’s likely appointment could become one of the most politically charged moments in recent French sporting history. Essential listening for anyone following the 2026 World Cup, European politics or the deeper forces shaping global football today.

Jonthan's various publications associated with French football include "Negotiating Breton Celtic identity on and off the pitch: contemporary football in Brittany" (with Paddy Hoey), "Football and antisemitism in France: visibility and invisibility," "France - Les Bleus and the Republic: Diversity, Difference and Discrimination" and "Nicolas Anelka and the Quenelle Gesture: A Study of the Complexities of Protest in Contemporary Football."

At a hillside gathering in Watt Town, Jamaica, drums, prayer, and song converge in a living tradition that reaches beyond the island and across the generations to Africa. Kirt Henry is part of the community of revivalists who worked to secure Unesco recognition for a practice long misunderstood and marginalised. In this intimate journey into Jamaican spiritualism, scholar and practitioner, Kirt, reflects on faith shaped by memory, resilience, and ancestral connection. Through stories of healing, trance, ritual clothing and the sacred language of the body, Kirt explores a spiritual world where the boundaries between the earthly and the unseen are fluid. Revivalism emerges, not as a relic of the past, but as a way of life, one that carries the weight of colonial trauma while offering belonging, continuity and hope.

When Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism was published in 1974 Freudianism was seen by most feminists as ineradicably patriarchal and inimical to the women’s movement. Mitchell’s brilliant exegesis, drawing on Lacan and Laing as well as Freud himself, instead sees Freud's asymmetrical view of masculinity and femininity as reflecting the realities of patriarchal culture, and seeks to use his critique of femininity to critique patriarchy itself.

To mark a new edition of her seminal work from Verso Mitchell revisits its arguments in conversation with curator, art historian and writer Frances Morris who was, from January 2016 to February 2023, director of the Tate Modern.

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Should you judge a book by its cover? Victorian historians and their readers did; and through examining the decisions that went into binding, titling, annotating and prefacing historical works, we can recover some of the anxieties and labour that went into creating the image of the historian we have today.

This is Elise Garritzen's task, in 'Reimagining the Historian in Victorian England: Books, the Literary Marketplace, and the Scholarly Persona': a work which draws on over 500 nineteenth-century publications to shed light on the struggle to impose a respectable order on the chaos of history. Hosted by Joshua Shortman

Why does Warsaw look so different from every other European capital? In this episode of Talk Eastern Europe, Nina Panikova speaks with British writer and journalist Owen Hatherley about the dramatic history that shaped Poland’s capital – from wartime destruction and communist-era rebuilding to modern skyscrapers and experimental urban planning.

They discuss Warsaw’s modernist housing estates, socialistrealist architecture, the iconic Palace of Culture and Science, and why the city remains one of Europe’s most misunderstood capitals. Is Warsaw chaotic, visionary, unfinished – or all three at once?

If you’re interested in architecture, urban history, Central Europe, communism, post-socialist transformation, or the future of European cities, this episode is for you.

Places in Warsaw (and beyond) mentioned in the interview:

Żoliborz, one of the northern districts of Warsaw.

Narkomfin building,  a block of 25 flats known for its constructivist architecture in Moscow, Russia.

Praga, a district of Warsaw, Poland. It is on the east bank of the river Vistula

Constitution Square, a monumental urban square in Warsaw built in the 1950s as a flagship project of socialist realism.

Muranów, a special area in Warsaw’s history located adjacent to the Wola and Śródmieście districts. Most of it was incorporated into the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War.

Palace of Culture and Science, a notable high-rise building in central Warsaw, Poland. With a total height of 237 meters, it is the second-tallest building in both Warsaw and Poland

Nowy Świat (New World Street), one of Warsaw’s most famous and vibrant historic streets.

New Belgrade (Novi Beograd) is the largest and most modern district of Belgrade, Serbia

Central Department Store, ‘Smyk’, a modernist building in Warsaw.

Koło Housing Estate of the architects Szymon and Helena Syrkus.

Sady Żoliborskie, a celebrated modernist housing estate and sub-district in northern Warsaw.

Palace of the Soviets, was a project to construct a politicalconvention centre in Moscow on the site of the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. It was never built. 

The Palace of Parliament ( previously People's House ), the seat of the Romanian parliament and the heaviest building in the world.

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Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Kitchen (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Marissa Nicosia asks what Shakespeare’s works can tell us about Renaissance culinary recipes, and what these recipes can tell us about Shakespeare’s works.

Dr. Nicosia explores how Shakespeare’s works reveal tensions not only within early modern food culture about who should eat, what to eat or serve guests, and when to preserve foods, but also how to undertake the embodied processes of cooking, baking, and serving. The chapters include both analysis of plays and poems, as well as updated historical recipes ready for cooking. Nicosia prepares the recipes that permeate the canon—from Falstaff’s beloved capons to the cakes that invite festivity in Twelfth Night—demonstrating how the physical act of cooking can transform our understanding of once familiar texts, and asking what we can learn about food history by recreating historical recipes with twenty-first-century ingredients and tools.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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