I’m not going to divulge my age, but I’ll give you some clues. My earliest musical memory is of lying on the living room floor, listening to my parents’ vinyl record of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.1, absolutely spellbound. Most of the music I encountered in my early years, though, lived on cassette: my brother and I would carry our portable tape player around the house, blasting out Beatles albums and early Britpop classics on repeat. I got my first CD at about ten years old, when my dad brought me back a gift from the States—Monk and Coltrane live at the Five Spot. By my late teens, I was downloading tracks on the household computer and porting them to an MP3 player I took to school. Then, at university, Spotify erupted. At first, it wasn’t actually that useful. I mostly listened to music on the go, but Spotify could only run on my laptop and in any case, I preferred having my whole “record collection” in one place. It was only years later, when I finally got a smartphone that could run the app anywhere, that I started leaving my MP3 player at home. Now, I use Spotify pretty much every day, for pretty much all of my music consumption.
Mine is a familiar story. Today, more than 73 percent of Brits and 76 percent of Americans say they never listen to music on physical media. Spotify has some 696 million users worldwide, making it overwhelmingly the most popular streaming platform. In just under two decades, it has completely revolutionized the music world.
Liz Pelly thinks this is a catastrophe. In her new book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Pelly whizzes through the bewildering history of the platform and tries to calculate the damage done along the way. Pelly’s criticisms concern three broad categories: Spotify’s extractive economic model and dubious business practices; its supposed manipulation and stupefaction of listeners; and the consequent dumbing down of contemporary music itself.
Pelly’s case for the first of these is pretty watertight. Spotify is notoriously secretive about exactly how much it pays artists, but the consensus seems to be something in the region of $0.0035 per stream. In practice, that means a song played 100,000 times will earn an artist roughly $350. Not great. But over time, Spotify has found various ways to pay musicians even less. All tracks with fewer than a thousand streams are demonetized completely. Artists can buy access to “Discovery Mode,” essentially a way of boosting a track’s chances of being fed into playlist algorithms, in exchange for a further 30 percent cut of the song’s earnings. And that’s not considering the so-called “Ghost Artists”: in-house musicians hired by Spotify to pad out its more popular playlists—and push out “real” artists—on the cheap. On top of all of this, Pelly details Spotify’s dubious deals with the major labels, its record of political lobbying and too-intimate relationship with the American government, and its frankly creepy forays into AI and surveillance—including securing a patent in 2021 for a form of emotion-detection technology that can decipher, by recording and analyzing the user’s voice, what mood he or she is in, thus allowing Spotify to pick track suggestions and advertisements accordingly.
You’d think, then, that Mood Machine’s case would be open-and-shut. But as the book progresses, it’s hard not to feel that Pelly—in catastrophizing about everything—actually ends up overplaying her hand.
Take, for instance, her account of the way Spotify influences our tastes. “Playlists,” she writes, “don’t just respond to users’ musical interests, but manufacture them, too.” Setting aside the use of the rather excessive scare-word “manufacture,” this is probably true. It’s in Spotify’s interest, after all, to keep us listening, and thus, when giving us recommendations, to suggest relatively “safe” picks. If we only go by what Spotify tells us to listen to, then, our listening habits might well narrow a bit over time. Perhaps this is a problem. But Pelly presents it as though the listener is almost being tortured: “At a certain point,” she writes, “a streaming listener may very well come to believe that what the machine suggests is indeed what they like, not because it’s true, but because they can see or feel no other option.” Really?
Similarly, one of Pelly’s big complaints is that Spotify subscribers often just use the platform for asinine background music—so-called “chill” playlists designed for listening to while working, cooking, or even sleeping. As I see it, this is nothing new. A sizable proportion of the population has always wanted to zonk out to undemanding music, though you could certainly criticize Spotify for making it a little easier. Yet Pelly goes full conspiratorial: “The conquest of chill reflects an industry content to profit from a world of disconnection; capitalism both alienates us and sells us tools to distract us from the loneliness of nonstop alienated labor, sickens us and then sells us the cure.” You get the idea.
Sadly, this kind of one-sided hyperbole proliferates. Personalized playlists are nothing but “behavior modification to serve a corporate bottom line”—a “deeply alienated way of learning about music.” Data is just “a way to encourage artists to minimize their own conception of their work, and maximize its machine-legibility.” The “whole point” of “Spotify for Artists,” the page that allows artists to see how their music is performing, has always been to make “artists feel better about an extractive media product that existed to enrich major labels and tech executives.” Musicians are “giving up their work for free to a platform that bulldozes scenes and treats music as an asset class for the wealthy.” Finally, there’s Pelly’s list of “the people…streaming was made by and for: major label execs, consultants, ad men, and venture capitalists, all working to get their own share of the pie.” Do we really think that listeners’ and musicians’ interests were never considered at all?
If Spotify’s single-minded dishonesty is exaggerated, so is the listener’s helplessness. No one doubts that Spotify incentivizes and reinforces certain habits. I agree, for instance, that the app’s homepage is too frictionless: I’ve certainly clicked on an album I’ve already listened to many times simply because it’s on the “Jump back in” section of the homepage, rather than stopping and searching for something I haven’t heard in a while. But Mood Machine makes it sound as though it’s simply impossible to make any decisions or discoveries outside of the app. One interviewee says, for instance, “I can’t teach my kid about jazz if they’re listening to, like, ‘Soft Jazz in the Background.’” Why not?
Elsewhere, some of Pelly’s attempts to spook the reader feel comically forced. Early on, she quotes an “anonymous pop music manager” interviewed by The New York Times in 2002—four years before Spotify was launched!—about nascent attempts by major labels to stream music online. The manager complains: “It’s becoming very obvious to me that we’re becoming victims of what is a huge conspiracy.” Pelly jumps at this a little too eagerly: “It should give readers pause,” she writes, “that ‘a huge conspiracy’ was one of the first phrases used to describe music streaming in the mainstream news media.”
Anything remotely positive about the Spotify story must be immediately shot down. Interrogating founder Daniel Ek’s banal claim that he was “a musical teenager who liked to play guitar,” Pelly concludes: “Sources from Rågsved, though, explained to me that robust local music education programs meant this was typical—it is common for young people there to play music.”
Ironically, it all feels a bit manipulative. It doesn’t help that the book makes frequent use of theoretical jargon—the kind of thing that social scientists use to give the impression of gravitas, but that often strikes me as politicized and propagandistic: “streaming justice,” “platform gaslighting,” “hope labor,” “taxonomic misinformation,” “Big Streaming,” “the solidarity economy,” “cultural laborers,” “platform capitalism,” “delinking from harmful systems,” “erasure.” Pelly’s interviewees, too, often have a stilted way of speaking—as if unthinkingly reeling off the catchphrases from some political manifesto: “It’s especially incumbent upon artists that we deeply analyze and be very critical of the current paradigm.” They complain about the “men in suits” and the “neoliberal project.” It’s hard not to conclude that the overriding message of the book is simple: plucky musicians good, big corporations bad.
But these things are complex. Spotify has made some things better, some things worse. I am sure Daniel Ek genuinely thinks he has done a lot of good for musicians and music fans. I suspect he also tricks himself into believing that some of his company’s more questionable decisions are justified by the ruthless demands of the markets, or somehow necessary for the greater good. Insofar as Mood Machine is a critique of capitalism, it lacks this sense of tragedy: that life is full of trade-offs, and that the same failings of human nature we all suffer from—pride, greed, self-deception—can, when scaled up, massively distort the shape of an entire industry.
This doesn’t mean Spotify should be excused. Pelly’s central concerns about the platform’s economic model and business practices are legitimate, and they can—and should—be addressed. In the last couple of chapters, she explores a range of ways we might try to fix streaming. You get the sense that her preferred solutions would be rather drastic: “We’re not having a serious conversation about the future of music,” she writes, “unless we’re talking about public funding, cooperatives, unions, and international solidarity and unless we realize that the fight for a more liberated and de-commodified cultural sphere is part of the broader struggle for a better world.”
Nonetheless, she offers some interesting ideas. To my mind, the most compelling is something relatively simple: a streaming platform that allocated a proportionate amount of users’ subscription fees directly to the artists they listen to each month. Over the last four weeks, for instance, I’ve probably spent about 70 percent of my time on Spotify listening to a band I recently discovered called Mamalarky. This month, then, they should get 70 percent of the $22 I pay to subscribe, perhaps after, say, a 20 percent cut from Spotify. It’s not perfect, and I’m aware that major labels currently pose a barrier to such a model. But if it could be enacted, the band would pocket something like $12, which is fairer than—by my rough calculations—the 70 cents I’ve actually earned them.
A final thought. At one point, Pelly talks of a widespread sense among musicians and listeners that “Spotify was turning everything into ‘emotional wallpaper’…. [I]t felt like music was just becoming totally flattened out in the era of platform capitalism.” Under economic pressure to make their tunes as big-playlist-friendly as possible—since that was where the streams were at—artists were playing it safer and safer, converging on the same few inoffensive musical tricks.
This is a pretty universal refrain. Though they don’t always blame Spotify specifically, everyone seems to think music is in crisis. Producer Rick Beato talks about the “regression of musical innovation.” Moby calls modern pop “heartbreakingly terrible.” Elton John says today’s songwriters are “awful.” In a 2014 CBS poll, 42 percent of respondents picked the 2010s as the worst for pop music. But I just don’t think it’s true. Whenever I see these kinds of complaints, I can’t help thinking: Do you actually care enough about music to go looking for the good stuff?
Because there is so, so much good, original, exciting new music being produced every year. In fact—and I’m being deadly serious here—I genuinely think the last decade has been the best in pop music history, by some margin. Sure, a lot of the chart-toppers and playlist-bait might be vapid (and yes, I do think that’s a problem), but beneath that crust of dross is a rapidly expanding world of rich, brilliant, creative new material. What’s more, I’ve discovered much of it on Spotify.
Maybe Spotify has helped in some ways, and also hindered in the ways Pelly documents. But even if it hasn’t helped, I’m not convinced it’s ruining the music world in the way she thinks it is. We do need to find ways to give musicians a better deal (again, I think the bargaining power of the major labels might be the biggest problem here). But don’t be too gloomy just yet: we’re living in a golden age of music, if you only go looking for it. If you like, I’ll make you a playlist.
Mood Machine
The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
Liz Pelly
Atria/One Signal Publishers
$28.99 | 288 pp.
