"Bootleg Podcasts Are a New Frontier for Unlicensed Music on Spotify"

Pitchfork:

Scrolling further down Spotify’s top music podcasts last week, you’d find “Bantal Empuk,” a self-described “collection of songs that aren’t available on Spotify,” featuring various non-album tracks by rappers Juice WRLD, XXXTentacion, and Lil Pump. Like all of the podcasts in question, it functions essentially like a playlist, with each song represented as a single “episode,”

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Like so much about contemporary culture that seems inexplicable to those over 30, the proliferation of all this unlicensed flotsam among professionally produced and distributed podcasts like “Song Exploder” may be partially attributable to every teenager’s favorite Chinese video-streaming app.