Review:
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
By Liz Pelly
Published by One Signal. 274 pp. £22
FROM the perspective of a music fan, streaming is, unfortunately, a spectacular product: the universal jukebox! If some have a twinge of discomfort about the ethical compromises that enable its convenience - as when they use Amazon, or Uber - the uneasiness can be ambient and unspecific enough to keep them from changing their usage: Are the alternatives really any more righteous? For musicians, though, Spotify has been a more existential threat than the file-sharing revolution that spawned it, because it has the veneer of legitimacy. Meanwhile, says Liz Pelly, the company leaches profits from working musicians while preparing the ground to replace those musicians with AI-generated neo-Muzak.
Since she first wrote about Spotify in 2017, Pelly has established herself as the most lucid and rigorous critic of the rot at the heart of an apparently magical service. Her new book, ‘Mood Machine,’ promises to become a new standard text for tech-sceptic artists. It expands on essays that she published in the Baffler and elsewhere, and does to the company what Robert Caro did to Robert Moses’s public works (in about a thousand fewer pages than Caro took in ‘The Power Broker’): It identifies patterns of behaviour behind the scenes of what can seem like an inevitable product of mass convenience and exposes their consequences.
The broad strokes of the indictment - the neo-payola promotional schemes; the minuscule royalties paid to artists, not to mention the royalty-free “ghost artists”; the designation of huge swaths of artists as royalty-ineligible “hobbyists”; the investments in podcasts, military technology and aural wallpaper repackaged for wellness culture - may be familiar to those interested in the issues confronting musicians in the 21st century. But it’s invaluable to have the brief for the prosecution in one place, narrated in plain language with a sense of righteous outrage.
Pelly builds her tendentious but convincing case on internal Slack transcripts, anonymous interviews with disenchanted current and former employees, the company’s changing narratives of itself, and some door-knocking in Stockholm, where Spotify is headquartered, to present a bruising portrait of the company that has become as synonymous with streaming music as Xerox is with copiers.
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The roots of Spotify can be found in the anti-globalist protests of the early 2000s, when activists in Sweden - in the anti-capitalist, “copyleft” spirit of “information wants to be free” - set up what they called the Bureau of Piracy, which evolved into the Pirate Bay file-sharing behemoth and made Sweden a global hub for copyright infringement. As one of the bureau’s founders told Pelly: “I don’t mean gratis,” as in cost-free, but “more like libre. Actual free culture that is not based on financial incentive... but on actual love for culture itself.” In this context, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek reads like a millennial analogue to the Jann Wenner portrayed in Joe Hagan’s 2017 biography of the Rolling Stone founder: both beneficiaries of a generational idealism vulnerable to blithe, opportunistic chancers.
Sweden and the United States present opposing visions of music as a core cultural good. Sweden has been historically distinguished by public support of musicians (Ek himself benefited from “robust local public music education programs”) and lacklustre copyright protection; the United States is shorter on the public support and much more protective of copyrights. But both Stockholm and the Bay Area appear to share the slippery optimism of tech entrepreneurship (Pelly’s book, among other things, is a storehouse of the inadvertently self-parodic names of tech start-ups: Boomy, Suno, Songza, Udio, Lenddo, Acxiom and more). The Spotify portrayed here sees music the way Amazon initially saw books: as a Trojan horse to give it an exploitable foothold in customers’ lives, “more as a utility than an art form”.
For musicians, though, Spotify has been a more existential threat than the file-sharing revolution that spawned it, because it has the veneer of legitimacy
The recipe for Spotify’s aural supremacy relies on increasingly specific, homogenous and automated playlists (the company’s term of art is “algotorial,” a combination of algorithmic suggestion and editorial hand). The idea isn’t new; Pelly situates the playlist in the lineage of both active and passive listening: the user-driven mixtape (abetted by the emergence of the cassette tape and the Walkman) and the top-down sameness of corporate commercial radio. Likewise, Spotify’s blockbuster “chill” playlists amount to a rebranding of the concept of “easy listening”, or a conceptually barren imitation of Erik Satie’s “furniture music” and Brian Eno’s “ambient” sound: artistic and intellectual developments, Pelly writes, now doomed to “going the way of punk and folk - traditions that started out rooted in philosophies of musical relationships, now flattened to the point that many listeners hear them solely as aesthetics”. Spotify, Pelly writes, encourages the making of music “just inoffensive enough not to get shut off”.
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The habits of both listeners and musicians are distorted by the gravitational pull of Spotify’s market dominance. Listeners encouraged to approach music as purely functional - for sleeping, studying or wallpapering a public business - have no particular investment in individual, identifiable artists, which has allowed Spotify to populate playlists with inexpensive soundalikes. Ironically, for a platform that markets its capacity to enable “discovery,” the company’s primary effect, Pelly writes, is “keeping users within their comfort zones (or as Spotify thought of it, customer retention zones)” and pushing artists to stay within them as well, to avoid the dreaded skip button.
This customer-service model of creativity leads to aesthetic stagnation. Some producers and songwriters call the result the “Spotify sound”: “muted, mid-tempo, and melancholy” - “streambait pop” made by entrepreneurial “solo creative[s]” who are hyper-attuned to listener metrics and willing to give up 30% of their royalties for preferential placement. Music journalists, too, may feel themselves sidelined by automated recommendation and curation, even aesthetic taxonomy: Former Spotify engineer Glenn McDonald took it upon himself to invent names for “data clusters” of listeners and stylistic tags that, he thought, indicated nascent micro-genres.
“At what point does a recommendation system stop recommending songs and start recommending a whole idea of culture?” Pelly asks. She refers to the composer Pauline Oliveros’s distinction between passive hearing and active listening - Spotify prefers that you engage as passively and distractedly as possible. As in politics, panoptic superstructures work best when their subjects aren’t paying too much attention. As Ek once put it, “Our only competitor is silence.”
Franz Nicolay is a musician and the author, most recently, of ‘Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music’
—Washington Post
