Is there such a thing as red and blue music streamers? Not exactly, but this is Trump’s America, and streaming services aren’t exempt from some political sorting. To see how this manifests, I looked at data from Statista’s Global Consumer Survey, an online survey of media & other consumption habits.

This chart shows how customers of the biggest music streaming services differ from the broader U.S. population in their political alignment:

The most eyebrow-raising finding: four of the five major services—Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, and Pandora—strongly over-index among people who identify as far right. Only Spotify skews, modestly, to the center left.

This makes some sense: Spotify’s core user base is younger and skews toward urban centers. Amazon Music, Apple Music, and Pandora have older audiences in varying degrees, and Amazon’s longtime strength in country music tilts it right. (Disclosure: I worked at Amazon Music for seven years, leaving in 2023.)

Part of this comes down to how each service is built and sold. The Apple Music cohort in the survey includes people buying iTunes song downloads — which means that their “far-right” numbers might reflect the phenomenon of conservatives buying songs en masse to send them up the charts. Amazon includes Prime subscribers with Music bundled in, who may or may not be listening regularly. YouTube includes Premium users who might never open YouTube Music, or who mainly watch podcasts on regular YouTube, where right-leaning pods do especially well. In this media climate, you could also infer that people who come to services for news and opinion podcasts are more likely to identify as far right than the general population (Pandora, meanwhile, is more or less just keeping the lights on these days, as its customers get older and older.)

Some caveats: the survey relies on a self-reporting online panel, not a representative sample of U.S. adults, and some of the groups are small enough that sampling noise might have swung the outcome. A larger survey limited to current subscribers, as opposed to people who “paid for a music service or download” in the past 12 months might look different. You can read Statista’s full survey methodology here.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and theories on this, especially if you are a data head — email me at [email protected].

I went into the New York Film Festival screening of Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere with some apprehension. We’ve all seen our share of disappointing music biopics; the potential for cringe is enormous, and no Bruce fan wants that for the Boss, or themselves.

There were indeed some shaky moments, especially early on. The pretend E Street Band looked like they were playing dress-up, and the black-and-white flashbacks to Bruce’s youth veer into TV-movie territory, despite strong performances from Gaby Hoffmann and Stephen Graham as Bruce’s parents. The pacing felt a little lumpy, and while I like Marc Maron, watching him silently sit behind the mixing board at the Power Station as producer Chuck Plotkin took me completely out of the moment.

But as the movie proceeds, Jeremy Allen White settles in as Springsteen. Adapted from Warren Zanes’ book of the same name, Deliver focuses on a period so dark that Bruce gave it only a couple pages in his memoir. That gives White a way in: he knows how to play an artist trying to outrun depression and childhood trauma. A relationship with a local woman, a fictional character played by Odessa Young, runs alongside the recording of Nebraska, and it’s an effective frame. Jeremy Strong is excellent (and dead-on) as cerebral, supportive Jon Landau. OG’s will appreciate details like Landau running into Al Teller (David Krumholtz) in the real lobby of the CBS’s old Black Rock HQ. These touches weren’t an accident: At the Q&A after the screening, White and director Scott Cooper said Bruce was on set almost every day to make sure everything was on point (“I thought he might visit once or twice,” said Cooper, “That’s not how it went.”).

Cooper claimed Bruce gave him a long creative leash, which I doubt. Despite its issues, Deliver Me From Nowhere displayed enough of what we love about Bruce — emotional honesty, persistence, hope for a better life – that it won me over by the end.

Thanks for the notes on last week’s crossword — this one is both a little easier and a little harder, in hopefully the right ways. The faster you finish, the higher you score.