Latest news with #Pelly
NDTV
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- NDTV
Spotify's Secret Scheme Of Ghost Artists And Fake Playlists To Slash Royalties Revealed
Spotify has been promoting ghost artists to avoid paying royalties to real artists, a report in Futurism, citing a new book, has claimed. In an excerpt from the book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, author Liz Pelly revealed that the Swedish music platform has a secretive internal programme that prioritises cheap and generic music. The programme called Perfect Fit Content (PFC) involves a network of affiliated production firms and a team of employees secretly creating "low-budget stock muzak" and placing them on Spotify's curated playlists. First piloted in 2010, PFC became Spotify's biggest profitability scheme by 2017. As per Ms Pelly, by engineering such a situation, Spotify was aiming to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. "It also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which, as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalise anonymous, low-cost playlist filler, the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely," she wrote. By 2023, the team overseeing the PFC model were responsible for hundreds of playlists. More than 150 playlists with titles such as "Deep Focus", "Cocktail Jazz" and "Morning stretch" were populated entirely by PFC content. One of the jazz musicians told Ms Pelly that he was approached by Spotify to create an ambient track for an upfront fee of a few hundred dollars. However, he was told that he wouldn't own the master rights to the track. The musician agreed, but once the track started raking in millions of streams, he realised he may have been duped. 'Soulless music' Social media users slammed Spotify for the move, with many stating that the platform was digging its own grave with such actions. "Going to be nothing but soulless AI music in a few years. That's one easy way to never pay royalties again lol," said one user, while another added: "Once you notice these artists it's pretty easy to ID them even just from listening to the music." A third commented: "I deleted my Spotify and cancelled the subscription." This is not the first instance when Spotify has come under scrutiny for its shady activities. In February, a report in The Guardian highlighted that Spotify's Discovery Mode allowed artists to be noticed by listeners in exchange for a 30 per cent royalty reduction.
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Spotify's biggest sin? Its algorithms have pushed artists to make joyless, toothless music
In the hands of some of its most gifted practitioners, songwriting is a kind of emotional alchemy. For the past week, I have been returning to a perfect example: Every Time the Sun Comes Up by the US singer Sharon Van Etten, which was released in 2014. Its lyrics might be fractured and fragmented, but it is an almost perfect portrait of self-doubt and downward spirals: one of those songs that captures feelings so deep that they go way beyond words. I went back to that song as I read a superb new book that has both educated and profoundly depressed me. Mood Machine, by the New York-based journalist Liz Pelly, is about the music-streaming giant Spotify, and how it attracted its current 615 million subscribers, making a billionaire of its Swedish co-founder and CEO, Daniel Ek. But its most compelling story centres on what Spotify has done to people's appreciation of songs and the people who make them – much of which is down to the platform's ubiquitous playlists. Thanks to Spotify's algorithms, I recently found Every Time the Sun Comes Up in a personalised (or 'algotorial') playlist titled Farmers Market, versions of which have been saved by nearly 250,000 listeners. On mine, the song sits alongside such classics as the Rolling Stones' Beast of Burden, Mazzy Star's equally aching Fade Into You and Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, whose pathos and depth seems to have been neutralised by their new setting, summed up in the accompanying blurb: 'fresh produce, reusable totes, iced coffee and all the lovely spring things'. Such is what Pelly calls 'the relegation of music to something passable, just filling the air'. Playlists tend to mean that songs once full of power and emotion get recontextualised, and washed of their meaning. And at the same time, Spotify constantly boosts music that never had any of those qualities to start with: a type of latter-day muzak that reaches its apogee in a genre now known as 'Spotifycore'. Pelly traces the birth of this 'muted, mid-tempo and melancholy' sound to around 2018: the US singer Billie Eilish seems to have unwittingly kicked things off, and the result has become inescapable, thanks to the kind of Spotify playlists whose titles include the word 'chill'. You know it when you hear it: it initially makes you feel as if you are in a big-budget Netflix series, before you find out that there is no discernible plot. Spotify in effect encourages musicians to produce this aural wallpaper, by showing them the data that proves this is how to make money from the platform. Such music answers some very 21st-century needs: as Pelly reminds us, it offers solace to people who are 'anxious and overworked, engaged in cycles of trying to focus hard and chill hard'. It also helps them sleep, which is one of the functions Spotify capably delivers. And whether the platform's users are awake or slumbering, Spotifycore also has a quality that makes it perfect for endless streaming: one song blurs into another, meaning that the app can be left to tick over, requiring minimum effort on the part of the user. This is the core of Ek's business model: the idea, after all, is to keep you listening – or half-listening – for hours at a time. What does all this mean for the music itself? Those of us who are addicted to Spotify – and just to be clear, my habit extends to several hours a day, though I mostly leave its playlists untouched – know how seductive an invention it is: an almost infinite jukebox, accessible via devices that are the same size as a Twix. But using it also comes with increasingly sharp pangs of ethical discomfort, and a sense that its version of streaming has long since started transforming music in no end of unsettling ways. Though Spotify has no direct involvement in its creation, a lot of the vapid music clustered on its playlists is now made by production-line suppliers of what the company calls 'perfect fit content', or PFC – which could just as easily be made using AI. The fact that no money is paid out if a song is listened to for less than 30 seconds has come close to killing the idea of a slow-burning intro (if they were modern creations, there would be no hope for such songs as David Bowie's Sound and Vision, or the Temptations' Papa Was a Rollin' Stone). The limited public outcry about the tiny rewards Spotify offers most musicians and songwriters may be connected to the fact that the average 'chill' playlist is intended only as background music: as Pelly says, 'it follows that a population paying so little conscious attention to music would also believe it deserving of so little remuneration'. Technology always bends and re-shapes artistic creativity: the fact that the archetypal album began life at about 40 minutes and then stretched to 70 or 80 was a story scripted by the invention of the 12in record, and its eventual superseding by compact discs. But what sets Spotify apart is something much more insidious: it goes beyond alterations of music's forms into what we think music is there to do, and one of big tech's most sinister powers: the way that it sidelines dissent in such a subtle way that we only realise what has happened when it is far too late. At the risk of making myself sound ancient, I had always understood the demise of music made with guitars – the best of which came with at least a hint of countercultural rebellion – as something down to that instrument's old age. Now, I wonder whether it might also have happened because it doesn't fit the low-volume, inoffensive aesthetics demanded by playlists with titles such as Stress Relief, Soft Office and Beach Vibes. I definitely think the large-scale decline of songs that deal in social and political commentary is partly to do with Spotify's relentless muzak-ification: in the UK, the one high-profile artist who does that kind of stuff is the brilliant, Bruce Springsteen-esque Sam Fender, and his artistic loneliness speaks volumes. With Trump in the White House and the world in chaos, the absence of a pop-cultural response is striking: might it be connected to the tyranny of what Pelly calls 'sad piano ballads with weird drums', and Spotify's reduction of artists to near-anonymity: people hanging on for dear life, with no voice? And beyond anything political, does that not pose a threat to music with any real substance at all? Van Etten, I am pleased to say, is playing three concerts in the UK this coming week with her band the Attachment Theory, and returning in the summer for another run of shows. I will be there for at least one of them, soaking up her deep, powerful music in the context it was created for. My phone will be switched off, and 'chill' will not be on the menu. And like just about everyone there, I will not be giving any thought to farmers' markets, iced coffee or 'reusable totes'. John Harris is a Guardian columnist
Telegraph
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The chilling truth about Spotify's ‘Orwellian' design
In 1921, Thomas Edison – inventor of the phonograph, among other things – issued a pamphlet called Mood Music: A Compilation of the 112 Edison Re-Creations According to 'What They Will Do for You'. Twelve different outcomes, it suggested, could be attained by ordering records from the Edison catalogue: these were grouped under headings such as 'To Stimulate and Enrich Your Imagination' and 'To Bring You Peace of Mind'. These proto-playlists had been compiled using information sent by thousands of Edison customers in the form of completed 'Mood Change Charts', questionnaires that began by asking: 'Would you like to observe music's effects on yourself – its effects on your friends? – how potent it is in changing your mood?' A century on, the Swedish streaming service Spotify – founded in 2006 by two more 'opportunistic tech solutionists', Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon – busies itself with similar questions, equally qualm-free about using pseudoscience and marketing trickery to sell the masses on new technology. With over 600 million current users, Spotify is now a firm part of the digital architecture of daily life. Plenty has been written about the company and changes wrought by streaming technology. But Mood Machine, an excoriating new book by the US music journalist Liz Pelly, is a vital addition to the genre, and arrives not a second too soon. You might think you know, for instance, the Spotify story. Customers pay around a tenner a month, and they receive access to a colossal, instant jukebox. Musicians receive a whopping £0.0028 in royalties per song stream. The platform's founders become billionaires. This is bad enough; but the true picture is even more sinister. Pelly pulls back the curtain on the murky practices that shape and control listener behaviour: algorithmic bias, manipulative UX design, 'payola' promotion schemes, data surveillance, and playlists of real songs cut with cheap stock fodder made by 'ghost artists'. As she writes: 'It's a story of listeners being sold music more as a utility than an art form.' Spotify isn't a music company at all. It's an advertising and data-mining company that can seem, at times, almost Orwellian. Consider the 'editorial playlists' – themed playlists with titles such as 'Today's Top Hits' and 'RapCaviar', curated by Spotify's in-house editors with an increasing amount of help from AI and algorithms. There are almost 10,000 of them; they water down taste, and discourage adventurous listening. Or think of the flattening of whole genres, histories, communities and traditions into palatable, easily commodified homogeneity. Browse Spotify's 'ambient' playlists, for example, and you'll find the genre's rich history – Brian Eno 's Music for Airports, Erik Satie's furniture music, 1970s Japanese kankyō ongaku ('environmental music') – re-rendered into what Pelly calls 'vibe wallpaper': Muzak for the digital age. For Spotify, she says, musical discovery is just 'code for keeping users streaming, and keeping users within their comfort zones'. The platform encourages music as an individual rather than a communal experience, and it pushes 'functional music' and 'lean-back listening', i.e. soporific background music for mundane activities – even sleeping. In 2023, users were reportedly listening to 3 million hours of white noise a day. As Ek once declared: 'Our only competitor is silence.' Pelly has been reporting on streaming since its inception, always with scepticism – as you might expect from a music journalist with roots in the independent and DIY music scenes. She interviewed over 100 sources for Mood Machine, from former Spotify employees to musicians, industry insiders, researchers and organisers. It's an approach that humanises the cold, unfeeling world of machine learning, and emphasises an easily forgettable point: AI, algorithms and data aren't neutral entities, but reflect the biases and objectives of the culture or company from which they derive. In Spotify's case, for instance, algorithmic recommendations offer a hyper-personalised listening experience that generates engagement, and thus revenue. Compared to previous books about Spotify, Pelly gives all of her airtime to those negatively affected by Spotify – employees, musicians, listeners – generating a wealth of punchy and alarming quotes. But though Mood Machine is a manifesto of sorts, it's not a flashy moralistic read: instead, its gradual build makes the reader increasingly unsettled. As she plunges deeper into the world of streaming, it can be easy to become lost in terminology and tech jargon, no matter your level of familiarity with Spotify. Still, it's worth paying attention, as Mood Machine isn't just a niche music-industry book: it asks much bigger questions about economic power, the value of art and the atomisation of society. The impact of technology on the sound of music and the behaviour of listeners isn't a new issue: there's a through-line from Edison's phonograph to the tightly-controlled Top 40 radio playlist. But in an age of data harvesting and AI superpowers, where heads of states gather at AI summits and Ek himself has invested in military AI, it's important to remain questioning. What looks like merely an investigation into a music app also maps out the potential and troubling ramifications of these new technologies on our lives. For Pelly, 'there are no one-click solutions'. It's not simply a case of swapping out Spotify for a rival streaming platform. Rather, we should think more critically about how and why we listen to music; perhaps we should abandon such systems altogether, and return to buying records directly from artists. Edison called his 1887 invention 'the Phonograph with a Soul'. In Spotify's hands, with those playlists that purport to know you, such a claim becomes truly chilling.
The Guardian
05-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Mood Machine by Liz Pelly review – a savage indictment of Spotify
In November and December last year, Spotify's chief executive, Daniel Ek, sold 420,000 shares in the music streaming company, earning himself $199.7m (£160m). One wild rumour that circulated on social media suggested Ek's eagerness to divest himself of stock in the company he founded was linked to the imminent publication of Liz Pelly's book Mood Machine, as if Ek feared the revelations contained within it would adversely affect the share price. That was obviously a fanciful notion. Ek started cashing out Spotify shares in July 2023, and has continued doing so into 2025. At the time of his last transaction, a month after Pelly's book was published in the US, Spotify's share price was at an all-time high. And yet, you can see how people who had a preview of Mood Machine's contents might get that idea into their head. It may be the most depressing and enraging book about music published this year, a thoroughly convincing argument that Spotify's success has had a disastrous effect on pop music. Pelly also alleges a catalogue of alarming corporate behaviour, indicative of a company that, one former employee suggests, has 'completely lost its moral centre'. The question is whether it ever had one to start with. The favoured origin story around Spotify's founding involves Ek, a Swedish tech millionaire and 'music nerd', electing to save the industry from the scourge of online piracy by providing an alternative: an all-you-can-eat buffet of music on demand for a small monthly fee. Pelly suggests this is basically tripe. Ek's speciality was in selling online advertising: his big idea was that some kind of streaming service would be a good way to do it. In its initial iteration, Spotify wasn't even specifically intended as a music provider: the concept was to stream movies, until Ek and his co-founders realised that the size of the digital files involved was prohibitive. The picture that emerges is not of a munificent fan but a very different and familiar archetype: the guy who's good with computers and neither understands, nor places any value on art. Certainly, Spotify seems to have gone out of its way to denude musicians of earnings. Major labels were paid enormous advances to license their catalogues to the service, with no obligation to share any of the money with the people who had actually made the music. Spotify's system of royalty payments is both byzantine and patently unfair. Artists aren't paid simply by the number of streams their songs achieve, but by the percentage of total streams they account for in each country: not for your work, but how well your work is doing compared with that of a handful of megastars. One of Pelly's interviewees calls it 'forced consolidation': not everyone who makes music wants to compete with Ed Sheeran, but this is a world in which you're automatically obliged to do so. If you're willing to forgo a further percentage of your earnings, then there's Spotify Discovery, which adjusts the app's much-vaunted algorithm to promote artists who accept a reduced royalty rate. Meanwhile, in the early 2010s, the company shifted its focus from 'music enthusiasts' to what it calls 'lean-back consumers', effectively the kind of people who would once have turned the radio on in the morning and left it burbling in the background all day. The purpose of the playlists it designed to target them – 'chill vibes', 'mellow morning', 'mood-booster' – was, and is, to provide unobtrusive background noise or, as Pelly suggests, a latter-day equivalent to muzak: nothing striking, unusual, out-of-the-ordinary, or indeed any of the things one might reasonably want music to be. The message that quickly filtered through to artists was that the more beige your sound, the more likely it was to find a place on a Spotify playlist and earn some cash. Hence the rise of a homogeneous genre dubbed 'Spotifycore', which you've doubtless heard even if the term seems unfamiliar. It's a bit ambient, a bit electronic, a bit folky, a bit indie, a nonspecific wish-wash possessed only of a vague wistfulness, the sonic equivalent of a CBD gummy: music 'for any place, for anyone', as one producer put it, that ends up being 'music for no place, for no one'. Spotify encouraged it, developing an 'optimisation tool' called Spotify4Artists that urged musicians to examine the data, see what is doing well and tailor their music to be more like that. Given how hard it is for musicians to make a living in the 21st century, you can understand the pressure on artists to join this particular race to the bottom. 'To be sustainable,' says one indie record label executive dolefully, 'you have to put out records that are going to get repeat listens in coffee shops.' But there was more bad news for those that did. If you were dealing in music for no place and no one, it might as well be made by nobody. Spotify started buying in what it calls PFC, or 'perfect fit content' – blandly nondescript 'stock' tracks from companies that specialise in background music, made by session musicians paid a flat fee to crank out dozens of tracks at a time – and packing its playlists with them. PFC, usually hidden behind fake artist names and made-up biographies, proliferated through official Spotify playlists. The company has dissociated itself from direct involvement in PFC, stating 'we do not and never have created 'fake' artists and put them on Spotify playlists'. It remains a secretive world and Pelly gets almost nowhere investigating it, although she does track down some of the musicians involved: grateful for the cheque and frank about the 'brain numbing … joyless' experience of battery-farming music 'as milquetoast as possible'. It's a relentlessly miserable story that one suspects will get more miserable still. The rise of AI presumably means that even the faceless session musicians will soon be out of a gig. Pelly reports that Spotify has experimented with an idea called Soundscape, an endless AI-generated 'personalised' ambient stream (though the product has been put on 'indefinite hiatus'). Its dream seems to be a world of entirely passive consumers who don't choose what they listen to, but simply press play and let Spotify choose for them. She ends by attempting to suggest alternative futures – in which consumers switch to small, cooperative streaming services run by musicians, or go out of their way to buy direct from artists, replicating the 'indie' economy of small labels and DIY gigs that once supported leftfield musicians – but her worthy ideas feel like sticking plasters on a gaping wound. Streaming now accounts for 85% of the music market in the UK: Spotify is the market leader, with the sharpest practices, but, as Pelly notes, its competitors aren't much better. One suspects that for most consumers, Spotify's convenience – and it is convenient – trumps whatever damage its rise has inflicted on music and musicians thus far, which means it's only going to get bigger and more powerful. What that means for music and musicians going forward remains to be seen, but Mood Machine doesn't leave you filled with optimism for the future. Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Yahoo
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Paradox of Music Discovery, the Spotify Way
Your preferred video-streaming service depends largely on what you want to watch—but what you want to watch won't always stay in view. Series and movies hop from platform to platform as rights lapse or get awarded to higher bidders; even streamers' homegrown offerings can disappear to free up bandwidth or save on licensing fees. By comparison, music-streaming services are bastions of stability—and because music streamers generally offer the same catalog, barring the occasional protest, they have to differentiate themselves in other ways. Tidal and Qobuz trumpet their hi-fi offerings; YouTube Music infuses its catalog with the output of the world's largest video site; Apple Music offers a karaoke mode. And Spotify has its playlists. In Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, a new book from the journalist Liz Pelly, the playlist is the locus for many of Spotify's troubling practices. Pelly began her project after a music-industry contact suggested that she investigate how the company's official playlists were shaped by the major labels. The book's title suggests a critical corporate biography, but it's more like a siege campaign, with Pelly pounding away at nearly every aspect of Spotify's business: its rosy origin story, its entanglements with the big recording companies, the power dynamic of its relationship with independent artists. Her biggest swings are aimed at Spotify's recommendation framework: the back-end machinations that silently power the playlists available to its 600 million users. You may not agree with Mood Machine that Spotify's mixes are an existential threat to the way people discover music, but you may marvel at how much effort goes into recommending a song that sounds like a different song you liked three months ago. The company brands itself as the ultimate curator, which is amusing considering that, for years after its 2006 founding, Spotify had little interest in playlists at all. Initially, Pelly says, the company was content to let its subscribers (and a galaxy of third-party music-discovery services) churn out genre guides and road-trip soundtracks. By 2013, Spotify users had created 1 billion playlists. That year, Spotify acquired the playlist company Tunigo, registering a shift in its marketing strategy. On top of access to its library—which, again, was practically the same as its competitors'—Spotify was now offering expertise. Millions of people started to follow professionally curated playlists such as Viva Latino and RapCaviar, which were constantly updated with the buzziest tracks. In 2015, Spotify rolled out Discover Weekly, its personalized recommendation playlist; the next year, users began receiving up to six personalized playlists a day. All of this may have felt like a bounty to anyone who came of age when discovering music was much more difficult. Before the internet, the methods of finding new sounds were decentralized and not equally accessible: terrestrial radio, cable television, music magazines, cool older sisters. Maybe your town could support an alt-weekly with a robust arts section; maybe it had at least one independent record shop. But any approach would cost money and time. Often, you would hear a cult artist or album praised in the most compelling language—and because you couldn't actually find the music in the real world, it would remain an object of speculation for years. Spotify wasn't created for this type of obsessive. Initially, it wasn't created for any music fans. As Pelly notes, the business started like many other 21st-century tech companies: as an ad service looking for a delivery mechanism. ('Should it be product search? Should it be movies, or audiobooks?' Spotify's co-founder Martin Lorentzon, who made his fortune in affiliate marketing, is quoted as recalling.) Other streaming services such as Imeem, PressPlay, and Spinner had tried countering the pay-to-own model of Apple's iTunes Store. The major labels negotiated tentative treaties with these early players, capping monthly streams and making only some of their content available. But by the mid-2000s, it was clear that these were merely half measures. Spotify settled on its model at just the right time: Reeling from plummeting CD revenue and the rise of file sharing, the music industry was suddenly open to software offering access to tens of millions of songs, engineered to play tracks instantly and without limits. The major labels signed over their libraries in exchange for massive concessions: dedicated advertising space, guaranteed minimum revenues, shares in Spotify's business. The biggest labels—Sony, Universal, and Warner—were betting that Spotify could make a product more compelling than piracy. The bet paid off. As Spotify became the most successful music streamer on Earth, the American music industry stanched the bleeding, and revenues rebounded to pre-internet levels. Once Spotify built its audience, it wanted to keep users on its app as long as possible. According to Mood Machine, the company's data indicated that a huge portion of its streams came from 'passive listening,' an increasing percentage of which involved functional music: songs designed to enhance everyday activities—meditation, answering emails, even sleeping—without sticking out too much. Where other services had experimented with exclusives from pop A-listers, Spotify's playlist editors began churning out 'chill' mixes populated with songs from mostly anonymous ambient- and instrumental-hip-hop producers. These artists found that placing the right song on the right functional playlist could pay their rent, though a 'hit' rarely implied an active fandom outside the platform. Playlists enabled musicians to earn a living without cutting in record labels or PR pros, one former editor tells Pelly, 'but that didn't help them fill a one-hundred-fifty-cap venue or sell merch.' [Read: The diminishing returns of having good taste] The great chill-out boom is just one stop on Mood Machine's fascinating history of Spotify's official playlists. At first, they were made by professionals hired for their taste and judgment. In 2017, Spotify introduced 'algotorial' playlists, a slightly knotty process through which the company's algorithms generated a pool of songs based on their particular emotional and sonic qualities, editors whittled these songs into a manageable playlist, and the algorithms then sorted these editor-selected songs into an ideal order. Noting the popularity of TikTok's 'For You' feed, Spotify leaned even harder into algorithmic recommendations. Click on a mood-focused or genre-specific mix, and you'll usually get a version that was 'picked just for you.' In practice, this means tracks that share enough of those characteristics with tracks you've already played. In a data-drunk era, this is what passes for discovery. Like so many other products influenced by machine learning, Spotify's playlists can't generate something new—say, a wholly fresh and unheard sound—for its users. They instead offer the flash of recognition, rather than the mind-scrambling revelation that comes only when you hear something you'd never expected. Because they're all drawing from the same massive catalogs, the music streamers are conduits—between artist and listener, or listener and song. In a library north of 100 million tracks, you'd think it would be easy work finding candidates for playlists such as 'lofi autumn beats' and 'Bossa Nova Dinner.' But around 2016, as Mood Machine details, Spotify developed the Perfect Fit Content initiative, partnering with licensing companies that paid studio pros to bang out easy-listening ditties for the streamer—in essence, replicating popular playlist sounds on the cheap. (Spotify has not disputed the existence of the PFC program.) In recent years, Spotify developed its Discovery Mode program, in which labels exchange a portion of a song's royalties for priority status on an algorithmically generated playlist—with no disclosure to the listener. Pelly argues convincingly that this is the streaming version of payola: the illegal practice of promoting songs on the radio without disclosing the payment. (Payola laws apply only to terrestrial radio stations.) But in a crowded marketplace with fewer revenue streams, enough artists enrolled that, according to Pelly's reporting, Spotify's internal Slack channels were lit up with glee. Mood Machine is at its most compelling when peeking into Spotify's internal strategies and its employees' real-time reckoning with their implications. This is also where Pelly overplays her hand. In the conclusion, she analyzes two alternatives to the Spotify model: streaming services run by public libraries, and cooperatives of independent musicians. Spotify's playlists—atomized, contextless—clearly run counter to her ethos, which is rooted in community building and intentional listening. 'At a certain point, 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,' she writes. But less clear is whether the company's playlists are truly changing how the median listener approaches music discovery. Users are still generating hundreds of millions of their own playlists, mined from one of the largest collections of songs available in history. Mood Machine persuasively demonstrates how Spotify guides its users down certain roads—but it's not impossible to choose a detour. [Read: Spotify doesn't know who you are] Today, Spotify boasts that one-third of its users' discoveries come 'via personalized recommendations in algorithmic contexts.' Like video streamers' triumphant press releases about how many hours were spent watching their 'hit' movies, the statement strains credulity. Is a discovery a song the user favorites—or just doesn't skip? And how could Spotify possibly know if someone had never heard a given song before? In any event, the company's cited percentage is eerily similar to one given in its 2018 IPO filing, which Pelly summarizes: 'Spotify-owned playlists, both editorial and algorithmic, then accounted for over 31 percent of users' listening'—less than half of all listening done through playlists. In raw minutes, that's a staggering sum. But even by Spotify's accounting, it's just one part of the streaming user's diet—often supplemented, still, with radio and physical media. At one point, Pelly gives a potted history of Muzak, drawing sharp parallels between Spotify and the bygone mood-music purveyor: their self-serving audience research, their tendency to generate palatable versions of the now sound. Anonymous label owners share concerns about Spotify promoting 'emotional wallpaper' and 'the watered down pop sound'; Pelly accuses the company of merely 'filling the air to drown out the office worker's inner thoughts.' The possibility that this office worker might click on a playlist of more interesting sounds—say, amapiano or noise-pop—is not the book's concern. Neither, for that matter, are some of Spotify's more controversial programming decisions that go beyond music—such as its nine-figure deal with the wildly popular podcaster Joe Rogan. (However objectionable prefab piano jazz may be, Rogan's critics would argue that his 'just asking questions' conspiracism has done far more to hurt society than cheap music has.) Still, it would be disingenuous to claim that cloud-based listening hasn't altered music discovery. For the obsessives, the streamers are a sort of last-mile service: a way to dig into something you encountered off-platform. Yet those encounters are becoming rarer. Music-video budgets have tightened, radio playlists have shortened, alt-weeklies and newspapers have closed, and no one's publishing the kinds of comprehensive reference books that used to come from AllMusic, Rolling Stone, and Spin. Some streamers offer openly human curation—Apple's radio stations, Tidal's blog—but that's just one aspect of their role as warehouse, marketer, broadcaster, and guide. There's never been this much music available to this many listeners; the ecosystem for discovery shouldn't feel this fragile or be this centralized. Mood Machine casts Spotify as the apex predator of this new ecosystem, which, according to Pelly, has the same old vulnerabilities. 'The problems faced by musicians,' she writes in the concluding chapter, 'aren't technological problems: they're problems of power and labor.' She's correct that Spotify is not a town square but a walled garden. Although your average music fan will always tend toward legible rather than challenging sounds, a functional cultural scene depends on well-maintained, materially rewarding, and diverse avenues for finding new music. Barring a global data-center failure—admittedly not a remote possibility, with the widespread implementation of AI sucking up more and more energy—the streaming model may be with us for the foreseeable future. We are surrounded at all times by an ocean of sound, but Spotify is content to leave us stranded on our islands. Article originally published at The Atlantic
