Can Spotify Be Stopped?

There’s a playlist on Spotify, curated by the platform’s in-house editors, called “Lorem”—a title that doubles as a cruel joke, though it’s hard to tell on who. Lorem ipsum is a placeholder phrase, a bit of mangled-Latin gibberish that is supposed to get filled in with actual content later. The playlist’s description leans into this empty promissory quality—“Newsletter coming soon”—and the ever-changing tracklist calls to mind the Urban Outfitters mix CDs of the 2000s: a marketing executive’s idea of what’s cool, designed to diffuse in the air like a fragrance while you try on different versions of yourself. As of this writing, more than 1.1 million users have saved Lorem to their library.