Books & Audiobooks
Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine pulls back the curtain on the mystery of Spotify. It takes readers through the history of streaming music’s humble (which is to say, pirated) beginnings. There was so much that I was blown away by, and learned a great deal from. It begins with the likes of Napster, Kazaa, LimeWire, and The Pirate Bay, continuing to Pandora, Last.fm, as well as Songza. It isn’t just the purpose of fun trivia that the book serves, but illuminating the way that Spotify has changed the music industry and our consumption habits as well as expectations of musicians. Being that I love libraries as much as I do, the next point highlighted the innovative and increasingly important uses of them. Pelly writes of how the Edmonton Public Library plays a significant role in bringing its local music scene (whose focus is not on Spotify but survival) together with archival efforts, resisting hopelessness in the face of the industry-levelling behemoth that Spotify has become. The book shows how and why the concept of music and musician are no longer the same.
While reading I asked myself a few times, what finding new artists was like before Spotify and downloading: going into Sunrise Records, HMV, or Music World, hoping that the newest albums du jour, or obscure but beautiful songwriters would be on the listening stations. Buying a record on a whim based on the lyrics you looked up? Only for the courageous. Though buying the CD on a whim without any clue of whether it was good, is how I learned of and fell in love with Sara Bareilles’ work. These experiences of music as creative act, rather than algorithmic polish have faded quickly from the scene Spotify has created. Pelly notes how now it’s not so much that the adventure of music and appreciation for the nuances of genuine artistry has shifted, but that the ceiling that artists must break through has become inaccessible because of Spotify, while it simultaneously advertises ease of use. The shift in production towards advertising users as the product, and individualization too, have created “silos” more than community. The further into the book I got, the more I was astounded at Spotify’s model of business. It was equally astounding to learn what they do with my listening data.
She interviews several anonymous current and former Spotify employees, songwriters, “ghost artists,” and label execs in this brilliant work of journalism. It outlines how the curator of the playlist has replaced the independent artist as the face of the music, if not the genre. From user experience design that markets Spotify as a quintessential mood stabilizer, to the infusion of flattened and faceless stock music, to the way that its goal of “saving music” betrays the way it has “shifted value away from the musicians and labels that supplied the material it relied on, and towards its own brand” according to Pelly. She notes too, how this has fundamentally shifted what we are considering music, and who is considered marketable as an artist. Spotify’s profit-driven motive and “streambait” focus also means that artists were no longer making music that mattered to them, but going so far as releasing snippets “in order to see what was reacting and figure out what songs to finish writing” because the imperative was business, not creativity. It also isn’t just that Spotify has data, but that it gives it to third parties in exchanges that are alarming at best. If the devil is in the details, knowledge of Spotify’s practices is an incredible remedying power. In an evolving world of “In Data We Trust,” Pelly tells the story of the power of the few to dictate the experience of the many. What makes it so different from bygone eras of music industry pomp and polish?
Corporations will forever and always be about their bottom line: profit. Whether the seeming demise of music, and songwriting has always been beholden to that bottom line is not in question. The issue Pelly raises is whether or not any one company should have that much power to shape an industry, and our experience of arts and culture, veritably wiping a generation of would-be musicians off the map because of how it has created a more inequitable production of our possible sonic futures. It is the taken-for-granted Democracy of Things that we seldom notice until its underpinnings are leveraged in harmful ways against us. I deeply appreciate the book’s insights that allow me to make more informed decisions about my listening habits. In the same tradition as Scott Galloway’s, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things, Pelly’s topic is the Spotify platform but its subject is power and distributive justice. Hers is also a book about democracy and big tech’s ability to rewrite the terms of our humanity by way of an algorithm programmed to ensure profit. It makes it a 2025 must-read for any discerning consumer, artist, Spotify user, and those concerned with the ongoing corporatization of democracy.