‘One minute it’s “would you like to listen to Galaxie 500?”, the next humanity’s enslaved’: can anyone escape Spotify?

As a new book skewers Spotify's effect on music, two Guardian music writers spent a week assessing the limits of living with and without it

Laura Snapes, deputy music editor I was set the task of not listening to Spotify for a week, but Alexis, your task was much worse: only listening to Spotify-created playlists, and the songs it suggested to you based on your listening history. How did that go?

Alexis Petridis, chief rock and pop critic One day in the car I just listened to nothing instead of facing it again. When it plays me songs I like, it's not what I want to hear at that moment. That's not to say the music it was recommending wasn't good. One morning it played Schizophrenia by Sonic Youth. I love that song but I didn't want to hear it then. It played me Billie Holiday's Riffin' the Scotch followed by My Bloody Valentine, which clearly demonstrates the great breadth of my music taste - but just because I like it all doesn't mean I want to hear it all together. I didn't like that it was untouched by human hands. I always think that the amazing thing about a record collection is that it doesn't make sense to anybody other than you. And yet when it's presented like that, I find it really jarring and difficult - it's all over the place.