Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

by Liz Pelly

An unsparing investigation into Spotify’s origins and influence on music, weaving unprecedented reporting with incisive cultural criticism, illuminating how streaming is reshaping music for listeners and artists alike.

Drawing on over one hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today’s highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed.

Building on her years of wide-ranging reporting on streaming, music journalist Liz Pelly details the consequences of the Spotify model by examining both sides of what the company calls its two-sided the listeners who pay with their dollars and data, and the musicians who provide the material powering it all. The music business is notoriously opaque, but here Pelly lifts the veil on major stories like streaming services filling popular playlists with low-cost stock music and the rise of new payola-like practices.

For all of the inequities exacerbated by streaming, Pelly also finds hope in chronicling the artist-led fight for better models, pointing toward what must be done collectively to revalue music and create sustainable systems. A timely exploration of a company that has become synonymous with music, Mood Machine will change the way you think about and listen to music.

Genres: Nonfiction, Music, Technology, Audiobook, Business, Cultural, Pop Culture

12 pages, Audible Audio

First published January 7, 2025

Reviews

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I’ve talked about liking true crime but not serial killer stuff, this is what I’m talking about. This is a fascinating blend of in-depth reporting, brilliant cultural criticism, and a smooth, niche history of our modern moment. Spotify often gets left out of the “evil tech companies” schtick we’ve grown accustomed to with Musk and Zuckerberg, but the subtle, parasitic ways Spotify has captured our brains can’t be overlooked. I loved this dense little book.

[n · Rating 5 out of 5]

devastating, essential reading. get me away from here i’m dying!!

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short review:

Fuck Spotify. Cancel your account. Seriously. This book was written before news broke that they fund AI weapons and forced ICE recruitment ads on their subscribers. As if they hadn’t been bad enough already. Big tech are the fucking antichrist.



Long review:

OK, that’s out of my system, so let’s look at the more articulate distillation of my thoughts about this book.


I have been reading a ton of non-fiction related to music recently: it’s a topic I never tire of discussing and learning more about; it’s history and place in our society, the artists who make it and the industry around it, and this felt very topical because I recently shocked a colleague who asked me if I had Spotify by more or less turning red with rage and telling her I’d rather die than have this abomination on my phone.

I have earned a reputation as ‘old school’ (or maybe just old) with my (generally slightly younger) colleagues because I refuse to use streaming services. I buy albums, whether digital copies or CDs, put everything into my now absurdly massive iTunes library and I cling to my iPod Touch as if it was a holy relic (it kind of is, at this point). I make playlists, but I still think of them as mixtapes: each track is chosen with great care, the order in which they play is deliberate - and I can't conceive as to why you'd let a machine do that for you because it's fun. Having lived through the birth of pirating and sharing music online, I have been weary of how the industry compensates musicians for a very, very long time, and when Spotify started getting traction, I firmly ignored it. It just didn’t make sense to me: I listen to music in a very intentional way, it’s not just background noise, it’s a mindful activity, and the way streaming was discussed really made it sound like this would be better for people who are more casual than I am in their listening habit – not completionist weirdos who actively hunt down Japanese editions of records they already own on Discogs because they want to hear that one bonus track (yes, I have done that; no, I have no regrets). I realize that my way of consuming music isn’t common anymore, especially with people who grew up on streaming music, and that labels often work hand in hand with streaming services, which I find very weird.

Anecdote after anecdote regarding their business practices and the ridiculously small fee they pay most artists per stream confirmed that they are absolutely no better than the traditional recording industry. Reading this book showed me that they are even worst than I thought, and that they fuck over their users and the artists and that no one with decision-making power in that company actually gives a rat’s ass about music at all – and they obviously don’t care about musicians and their livelihood, contributing to the myth that exposure is it’s own reward and that producing art is not in fact, cultural labor that deserves compensation. They also do what most social media apps do, which is collect all your activity and record every click, skip and basically everything you do on the app when you use it, and sell this data to advertisers and third party companies who will do god-knows what with it: point being that they are a heavy contributor to the surveillance state machine that most tech companies are now an inextricable part of.

Personally, I was not surprised to learn any of the info I found in this book, because it all seems perfectly coherent with the way tech-bros have enshittified nice things endlessly over the past couple of decades, and Spotify just seems like the natural evolution of the pre-existing system of devaluing (I hate using that word) content and manipulating what people hear or do not hear.

The bottom line is that artists can’t make a living with distribution systems like Spotify, unless they are already huge or have a major label on their side, which means users only get exposed to stuff selected by a gamed algorithm, which rewards music that all sounds very similar to discourage skipping, making the landscape feel weirdly uniform. This means that artists now have to think of whether or not their tracks is the kind of material that will land on a high visibility playlist, otherwise, they may never get heard by anyone, so yeah, it does all end up sounding kind of the same because performers are learning what works and what doesn’t on streaming – and what works is obviously not something that’s going to be challenging or weird (there are exceptions, but broadly speaking, music made to fade into the background can’t be too unique or remarkable). And then if you add to that the fact that Spotify has ghost-artists and now AI bands that they aggressively promote because they can pay them even less (if at all), then you start seeing how fucking bleak the future of music is if we let the streaming services control the industry. They insist on selling their users the line that they are leveling the playing field, and that success on the app is a meritocracy, but nothing could be further from the truth when they have a thumb on the scale, refuse to really explain their compensation system, and now feed you AI ‘music’ that they have created themselves, essentially creating their own source of revenue and pushing it on their users – thus basically paying themselves at the detriment of human artists.

To say that reading this book pissed me off is an understatement, obviously, and I am going to go ahead with my personal piece of advice here, which you do not have to follow, but here goes anyway: I strongly believe that if you love an artist, you should buy their records (physical or digital), go see their show and buy a t-shirt. Or a button. Whatever. Because this is how they make a living. We keep saying we need art to sustain us and yet we keep coming up with new ways of underpaying artists and cheapening their labor. And if artists can’t eat and pay their bills, then they can’t make art… And at this point, supporting a platform that is actively helping an authoritarian government and putting money in the war machine is abhorrent.

I am incredibly tired of explaining this to adults. I won't even bother elaborating on the fact that Spotify has lobbyists, because of course they do, and that there is someone on their payroll whose job it was to keep Joe Rogan's podcast on the platform. Did that make you want to barf in your mouth? Because that was my reaction.

If you disagree with me, that’s great: read the book and make up your own mind. If you want to ditch Spotify, there are ethical alternatives, with options to import your playlists so you can keep streaming music without enabling warmongering, robot music and data manipulation.

(Just as I was finishing this book, I heard about iHeartRadio – a problematic organisation, but that’s another rant for another day – banning its radio stations from playing AI-generated music or using AI-generated personalities as part of a ‘Guaranteed Human’ program, and it gives me a glimmer of hope. Also, FYI, every other company on Earth, this is the right and human thing to do, and I have great respect for this decision. I encourage everyone to make a deliberate effort to support companies that have this sort of initiative unless you want culture to become uniform, colorless, dull and controlled by technocrats who don’t care about you at all.)

[casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

forgot to log this lmfaooo

now GO WATCH MY VIDEO 🔫

[Martin Maenza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Atria Books provided an early galley for review.

As a card-carrying member of Gen-X, I tend to not stream music myself. If I want to listen to things, I use playlists from my own personal music library. However, I get the appeal of these services, especially amongst the younger generations. Still, I was fascinated to learn more about the inner-workings of Spotify and thus was attracted to this upcoming book.

I was not aware that a lot of the streaming services were born out of the file-sharing piracy activities of the late 90's and early 2000's as a method to counter the use of technology in those endeavors. I also found it interesting that one of the goals for Spotify was "mood inducing" (thus the title of this book), a concept that dates all the way back to the original phonograph records by Thomas Edison and starting in the 1940's with the creation of Muzak for work places and retail stores. The discussion of AI usage to analyze and prioritize songs in playlists for listeners was very topical as well.

The further I delved into Pelly's well-researched treatise the more I came to realize why streaming services failed to pull me in. Here they were focusing on the passive listener, the one who wanted background music that set a mood. That's not the way my music listening experiences were built growing up. I was very much about the song and by extension the album - the creative expression of the artist. The closest I'd ever get to a "mood" playlist would be bringing together tracks to supporting a night of dancing (which, while having some emotional threads is much more about physical exertion).

I certainly appreciated Mood Machine as it gave me quite a bit to think about.

[CatReader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zero, dot, zero, zero, three
Give me two years, and your dinner will be free
Gas station champagne is on me
[Music] cannot pay rent for me

(adapted from Teya & Selena's 2023 song "Who the Hell is Edgar?", which was a biting takedown of many of the frustrations modern day musicians have with the music industry, particularly streaming services. The $0.003 refers the money, in US dollars, that Spotify will pay for each stream of a song -- which doesn't go entirely to the artist but is split among composers and performers)

In 2025's Mood Machine, writer Liz Pelly takes a deep dive at Swedish music streaming service Spotify, with her main points being: 1) streaming doesn't pay enough to sustain the majority of artists, 2) Spotify has shady business practices, like negotiating deals to pay artists even less than $0.003 per stream, and boosting plays of songs that Spotify produces itself on its popular playlists, and 3) the general public's (or at least the younger generations') music consumption patterns are malleable and have been changed by Spotify's practices. All three very valid points.

Spotify is one of those services where I just don't personally see the value proposition -- I've never been a paid subscriber, and I have found my brief uses of the app to be annoying and not enjoyable. Let me explain how I experienced music culture as a teen in the '00s, which has definitely influenced my views of music today:

- the internet of the early 2000s was extremely slow, such that music streaming and concepts like internet radio were pipe dreams (and I thought Pandora was revolutionary when it came out in the mid '00s)

- I was very much a fan of teen pop, Europop, pop/rock, and small artists in the early '00s, but I could seldom find those CDs (yes, those physical silver coaster-shaped things) available for purchase in my local Best Buy or other stores I had access to without a driver's license -- so the easiest (and cheapest) ways to acquire these songs was through file sharing platforms like Kazaa, Limewire, and Napster, whereby a single 3 MB song would take anywhere between 30 minutes and 48 hours to finish downloading via peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing (super-slow uploads and downloads from other platform users) -- hence my computer was never turned off

- through years of teenage boredom/angst, I became an obsessive album completionist, amassing over 20,000 mp3 files stored on a series of external hard drives, all meticulously tagged including artwork by my favorite music organizer/player software, MediaMonkey (which still exists but is tragically not iOS-compatible; Apple Music is a poor simulacrum). The most fun part of the experience for me was in finding niche artists and researching them, listening to their entire discographies, and most of all, listening for lyrics that resonated with my overly emotional teenage self. These lyrics would provide invaluable fodder for the likes of AIM (AOL instant messenger) away messages and forum signatures, so I could leave my friends guessing as to what terrible trauma I was going through on any given day with some mysteriously ambiguous vapor trail

- I actually listened to every single song in my library at least once, rating it on a 5-star system akin to Goodreads. I created playlists of my 4.5- and 5-star tracks that I would download onto my tiny storage capacity mp3 players, and I also loved comparing favorites with my online friends with similar music tastes, acting like the refined music critics and taste connoisseurs we were

- I also ran several music-related websites and later blogs on whatever free domains offered the most storage -- so basically, GeoCities. I even coded them in HTML myself!

In summary, my music listening was very intentional (and persnickety). I seldom used the shuffle feature; I always specifically played certain songs because I wanted to hear those songs specifically. When Pandora debuted, my main use for it was to discover artists I didn't already know about so I could delve further into their discography - not for generic background music while I worked.

So Spotify perplexes me. My background sound these days are audiobooks.

So while Mood Machine is certainly compelling, I was hoping to hear more stories and experiences like mine; while Pelly discusses early prototypes of streaming music services dating back the 1940s and 1950s, it feels like she skips over the era immediately preceding streaming (aka, my favorite music era) and also doesn't specific generational attitudes and listening practices toward Spotify, other than saying it's popular among Gen Zers and Zillenials. The book can also be repetitive at times (I feel like it could have been substantially shorter without losing incisiveness).

To play devil's advocate, I also got the impression that Pelly is negatively judging Spotify customers who just put random playlists on, not really caring about the music itself, to suit their moods, as if she's implying that they have no actual music taste. Knowing how niche and sometimes odd my own music listening behaviors can be, I can't in good conscience judge people for whom music is just background vibes. To each their own.

Lastly -- and I hate to nitpick on this -- I listened to the audiobook version that Pelly narrated herself, and I wonder if it would have been a better choice to use a different narrator. Pelly's vocal fry, valley girl intonations, and near-constant upspeak got on my nerves.

Further reading: the music industry
This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas
How Music Works by David Byrne

My statistics:
Book 17 for 2025
Book 1943 cumulatively

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have never struggled so hard to actually finish a book (it usually ends up DNFed), between the interesting content (i cant resist an expose / critique of culturally big brands / companies and products i actually use) and the complete chore it was to actually read it. there were a lot of things that contributed to the fact that it took me almost 18 hours to read a 12 hour audiobook (i made it a task for myself to read some everyday so i'd finish before my library hold was up, i kept putting it on in bed and then falling asleep and so id rewind and relisten to the same parts over and over again).
- the audiobook and narration -- it was so very hard to listen to and i would highly recommend not doing the audiobook
- the structure -- difficult to follow because none of the chapters had titles (in the audiobok), each just kind of launched into an anecdote without knowing where exactly we were going / what it was about, and as the chapter went on you might kind of understand a theme, the stuff in the chapter was often repetitive and she'd talked about it before. chapters also seemed to skip around timeline wise, so it wasnt in chronological order either, and made the sequence of events (i.e., evolution of the company) really really hard to parse. + audiobook format, the whole thing was supremely hard to follow.
- it felt like a collection of discrete articles looking at different aspects of why streaming companies were bad, but sometimes repeating the same information across each to give the same context (?), without any real narrative (aside from streaming is bad and here are some critiques from every angle, some much stronger while others felt like grasping at straws), some focus on some of spotify's business practices (but far from the point of something like super pumped or bad blood or the fund, which i have come to expect) and in a mish mash way where you couldn't really chart an evolution, and given the book's already broadstroke focus on streaming (the interchangeable way she talked about streaming and spotify) / the music industry / big record companies it would have been really interesting to hear about other streaming companies too. do they have the same impact? same business practices? i also would have liked some cultural context about how people / society / consumers, not just artists, think about spotify and streaming. and why is streaming worse than what the big record labels were doing / the music industry before they came on? i am genuinely curious, and didnt get an answer from this book. i agree with many of the points and critiques she made, but some seemed borderline naive, like the criteria was "anything that anyone, especially artists of any size, could potentially say is bad about streaming" was thrown in here. that really diluted the strength of other arguments, which got lost in the length.
- there were some really informative and thought provoking chapters that kept me really engaged - 17, 14, 10, 6 (none of them have titles so i cant exactly remember what they are about, but i remember one was about "ghost" musicians, one about lobbying, and one about leanback listening + mood / vibe / lofi playlists. the leanback listening one really got me thinking about my own listening habits.)
- this gets a 3 star for the research and time that went into it, the insightful chapters above. for enjoyability, im so sorry but this would get a 1.5 star from me

[marcia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Over the years, I've read a lot of reporting on Spotify business practices so not much in this book is new to me. Still, it's a well-researched book going into the history of the company, its pivot into playlists and personalized user experience, along with its impact on the average person's listening habits as well as the music industry. The book is often repetitive, especially in regards to the chapters on playlists: Pelly has a tendency of regurgitating things she has previously mentioned without adding new research or insight. There are some chapters that honestly could've been cut. Another complaint is that the section on artist advocacy and Spotify alternatives feels half-baked and could've been more thought out.

Thanks to NetGalley, Simon & Schuster, and Atria Books for a free review copy.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

A quarter of this book is very informative, the rest is biased anecdotes from jaded ex-employees and bitter musicians who never made it big, with a heavy dose of AI fear mongering. By the end of this book, the author is suffocating you with the same tired bullshit you can read on any white liberal college girls twitter feed. Full-on shaming you for not setting aside a chunk of your paycheck to artists, for not trying to organize unions, for not fighting for universal income, etc. It's so in your face that I found myself ready to email the author asking her to send me a few hundred dollars each week. You know, so I could stay home and contribute nothing to society as I dick around on a guitar.

To be fair, this is a great book if you want to learn about the mood/data curation ethos of Spotify as a whole, and their approaches towards streamlining it, if such a thing were possible. I can imagine how unsettling this may be for a music journalist, someone who in either a small or large way contributes to music curation as we've grown to know it. Suddenly the genres, the scenes, the history might be reclassified based on an algorithm rather than your experiences or journalistic integrity, or... whatever. But the main gripes on Spotify (which are the majority of the book) are pinned on algorithms, greed, techbros, and general disruption to society's musical consumption and culture. But all those things boil down to the end-user and their actions/transactions. That's why I didnt enjoy this book, but if you view the situation differently you'll probably enjoy it.

The "ghost artists" she speaks to come off as simply bitter that they agreed to a contract, to later find out they could have potentially made more money.

The reality of this power imbalance was ultimately why another musician, who made ambient tracks for a different, non-Epidemic PFC licensor, ended up ceasing his relationship with the company. “There was a fee paid up front,” he explained to me. “It was like, We’ll give you a couple hundred bucks. You don’t own the master. We’ll give you a percentage of publishing. And it was basically pitched to me that I could do as many of these tracks as I wanted.” In the end, he made only a small handful of tracks for the company, released under different aliases, and made a couple thousand dollars. It seemed pretty good at first, since each track only took a few hours. Eventually, though, as a couple of the tracks took off on Spotify, with one getting millions upon millions of streams, he started to see how unfair the deal was long-term; the tracks were generating far more revenue for Spotify and the ghost label than he would ever see, since he owned no part of the master and none of the publishing rights. “I’m selling my intellectual property for essentially peanuts,” he said.

To be clear, these are people which are making contemporary lo-fi "muzak," which Spotify capitalizes on if they can cut out the middlemen. Artists get a flat fee to release tracks under random names for the specific purpose of being background music (they're generally given a specific box to stay in and aren't encouraged free play or expression) because they know the listener (the end-user) doesn't give a shit and statistically isn't paying attention. From a business model, this is an absolute no fucking brainer. I can understand if people might be offended that consumers might not be as passionate and involved in music like they were in the past, but the people that are mindlessly listening to these ghost artists don't know or care. See, they're not the ones that would be at some underground show, supporting the (insert stupid genre name) scene. They don't know the song name or artist name. It just comes on their daymix and they enjoy when it comes on. What's the problem?
The end-user is to blame for the algorithm assuming people prefer this music. They way the average person consumes music, on Spotify at least, determines the way they are fed music on Spotify. I do not face many of these supposed issues, at least as a user, so I've also found this book to be a self-fulfilling prophecy on the authors end (She listens to lo-fi chill playlists in the background, if only for research purposes, and is surprised it starts pushing lo-fi chill beats that cost Spotify less to play).

The book seems to boil down to "you get what you ask for," and if the consumer thinks that's bad, it should be more a reflection on them than *gasp* the scary "Orwellain" future of music consumption according to data.

(One former employee recalled a specific all- hands meeting that reflected on and celebrated the success of these sleep playlists. “They were very proud of this,” the former employee recalled. “It proved to them that they’re not a music company. They’re a time filler for boredom.” “There was a moment where it all started to feel Orwellian,”)

As far as privacy/data harvesting, that's an entirely separate discussion that doesn't matter because I'm writing/you're reading this on Goodreads and Amazon owns us already. Oh and the browser you're reading this on. And the device. And don't forget your ISP.

And unlike the other good reviews, I didn't get this book for free and wish I didn't pay for it. Instead of buying this book, I could've paid for at least another month of "postbop_blackeneddeath_jazz_fusion_core" algorithms.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative, but frustrating. Wish this had a more balanced and linear approach, rather than jumping around topics and time and letting all of the excellent and extensive research serve the simple, binary notion that Spotify Is Evil, when the reality is far more complex and interesting. Wish I could have learned all the information here and drawn my own conclusions rather than be constantly subjected to snarky asides telling me what to think.

Spotify might or might not be evil, but it was definitely an inevitable continuation of a century of unchecked corporate exploitation of artists. Spotify itself is not the issue; the issue, perineally, is capitalism. Spotify is a symptom, one of many, but it is not the disease. Liz Pelly--whose feature writing I generally love--tiptoes around this reality throughout Mood Machine when it probably should have been the premise. All the content here could have been two chapters in a book about how capitalism destroys art and artists--ten chapters would be about Live Nation.

For me, the title Mood Machine evidences another major issue with the book overall. Pelly goes into granular detail about how Spotify has changed the world of ambient music, an absurdly tiny fraction of Spotify's library vs the pages spent on it in the book. Ambient music, by design, does not compel active listening. Reading dozens and dozens of pages of, frankly, messy and aimless writing about the business side of ambient is... even less compelling. Such a slog. She also makes massive generalizations about *how* people listen to music, making the assumption that the majority of people treat all music as ambient music, and blames Spotify.

Even if that theory were true, Pelly offers no evidence whatsoever to support it yet writes as if it were a given. She also frequently condescends to people who passively listen to music, as if there is a *wrong* way to listen. Hate that kind gatekeeping. Very 2008 Pitchfork-era thinking and I really thought we were way past that.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist is an informative and thoughtful work of journalism, explaining the rise of Spotify as a company and the impact it has had on the music industry. By coincidence, during the months of waiting for a copy to become available at the library I stopped using Spotify after doing so for nearly ten years. The book describes its rapacious, intrusive, and destructive business model, classic stuff for a tech company. I felt vindicated, but honestly my reason for quitting was that it runs like total shit on my fairly decrepit devices. Pelly comments that early on Spotify prioritised a fast and user-responsive interface, which I found hilariously incongruous with my experience. The app is maddeningly unstable on an eight-year-old smart phone and the website absolutely hates to load on firefox with an adblocker. These days I listen to music via vinyl, thousands of variously acquired mp3s, soundcloud, or (adblocked) youtube. It's a combination I recommend. I do not miss Spotify's autogenerated playlists, because they are by design very boring. Nonetheless, I was fascinated to learn about the rationale for its unexciting music recommendations, as well as the way the company treats artists. Pelly draws on interviews with musicians and former Spotify employees to provide insight into its operations.

It shouldn't be shocking, yet shocked me anyway, to learn that the creators of Spotify were looking for a way to deliver adverts. Music ended up being the means, but it was never the end. The company's priority is to be streaming constantly, so users will either be exposed to endless adverts or pay a regular subscription:

"I honestly think that the core of the company's success was recognising that they're not selling music. They're not providing music. They're filling people's time. And [Daniel Ek] said at a company meeting, I remember he was like, 'Apple Music, Amazon, these aren't our competitors. Our only competitor is silence.'"
The ex-employee stared off and nodded. "I definitely think people are afraid of silence," he told me. "And Spotify has capitalised on that pretty well."

A chunk of the book is devoted to exploring the implications of what Spotify terms 'Perfect Fit Content' (PFC), or 'music commissioned to fit a certain playlist/mood with improved margins'. This is generic muzak created to order for low cost to pad out playlists and avoid royalty payments to real artists or major record labels. Increasingly, AI is used to further reduce the need to pay human beings at all. Pelly goes into a lot of detail about this, providing views from inside and outside Spotify about PFC. The name sounds like a carcinogenic pollutant and the stuff itself is homogeneous and unintrusive background sound, prioritised by recommendation algorithms in order to increase profits.

"Data is described as this pure source that is untainted by culture or opinion or location or anything like that," [musician Taja Cheek] continued. "It's just not true. Algorithms are made by people and people have biases. There is nothing pure about data at all. It's just a way of describing something from a particular viewpoint."

As I've spoken to artists and independent labels over the years, many have agreed that there is something profoundly off about the way that Spotify maps, charts, and packages music, and in turn, creates meaning in music. Perusing Spotify's playlists over the past decade, it has at times felt like a bizarre parallel world has taken root, beyond just the ghost artists and streambait.

When the recommendation systems are optimising for extended listening sessions, when they are filled with made-up genres, when music that sounds like other music is what's most data-blessed, the reality of what we're hearing on the playlists and AI DJ streams isn't music culture, it's Spotify culture. [...] It's music culture writ large recast as fodder to fuel streaming-friendly one-click buttons for different moods and lifestyles, a whole environment that meets music in the context of only data; captured, commodified, and managed.

It's not that Spotify is in any way unique as an avatar of surveillance capitalism, gathering immense amounts of data on users in order to target and sell ads. Pelly carefully explains how this overarching business model specifically deforms music, which is not only an industry but also a basic human art throughout recorded history and likely long before. She also makes a point that I haven't seen articulated this clearly before:

I find issues of privacy and surveillance to be deeply important, but I also suspect that Spotify seriously inflates its own capabilities. Was criticising their invasive, surveillance-driven advertising practices actually contributing to the hype? It seemed like a lose-lose situation. If the company is capable of all the hyper-invasive practices it boasts about, that is obviously harmful. But it if sells advertisers on targeting it is not actually capable of, that also seems harmful, because it contributes to the normalisation of surveillance and deception. How do you simultaneously say its recommendations are bad and the surveillance is too invasive?

Actually, the question itself gets to the core of the issue. The very fact that we don't know proves that these companies have violated our privacy. "There is a problem of asymmetry," [data protection lawyer Stefano] Rosetti told me. "Because they know a lot, and you don't know what they know, and you don't know what they're doing with what they know."

When in the past I used the Spotify app on my smart phone, the advertising was very annoying but also hilarious. Of particular note, I repeatedly received ads for child custody lawyers, remedial GCSE-level maths classes, and joining the army. My hypothesis is that I got assigned unemployed deadbeat dad due to habitual late night drum n bass listening, despite being a childless female statistician. Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist inspired me to request my data from Spotify, which apparently takes them 'up to 30 days' to provide. I look forward to finding out which advertising segments they tagged me with.

On the artist side of the equation, Spotify is equally manipulative. Musicians are offered 'promotional opportunities' like greater likelihood of inclusion in a popular playlist, in return for sacrificing part of their royalties. Data on their listeners is presented in a dashboard and their use of it monitored:

Spotify has long referred to itself as a 'two-sided marketplace', where on one side it sells a product to listeners, and on the other side it sells a product to musicians and podcasters. This conveniently overlooks its business selling advertisements and user data, which arguably comprises a third 'side' to the marketplace, commodifying attention harvested through the other two 'sides'. [...]

What Spotify doesn't actively emphasise to artists is that in the process of guiding them through their 'audience segments, it also logs their own behaviour on the Spotify for Artists app, from which it in turn creates its own 'segments' of artists, too, tracking patterns so it can figure out how to best sell Spotify ad space to them.

As Pelly concludes, Spotify is a case study of surveillance capitalism infecting the music industry. It has changed how and what people listen to, in the course of extracting profits by undermining the livelihoods of musicians. Some artists are trying to fight back by forming alternate structures for making and sharing music:

Like the burgeoning music labour movement, collectives and co-ops help contribute to a music world in which there's more solidarity, a necessary ingredient to finding more sustainable ways forward. The problems with music streaming are problems more broadly of culture under capitalism - where decontextualisation and historical amnesia make it so people do not look backward, forward, and around, but just flounder in their atomisation. Collectives and co-operatives work to counter exactly that by creating the conditions for people to be in more direct collaboration with one another. It is hard work - the polar opposite of the frictionlessness that platform optimised tech culture imposes. But friction is part of how real connections, and ultimately change, happen.

This point reminded me of Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, which attempts to articulate a theory of how the arts under late capitalism are losing context, mediation, and collectivity. In the Spotify context, immediacy can also refer to the literally instantaneous access to music (or at least sounds) with minimal thought or decision required. The ideal Spotify user clicks on a playlist with some vague name like chill vibes, which then plays an endless string of homogeneous ignorable pap. No need for further clicks that might cause inconvenience. I always felt like I was fighting Spotify to listen to what I genuinely wanted, as the autogenerated playlists seemed like an empty and unenjoyable way to interact with music. I love tracking down a particular song that has popped into my head, making my own specific playlist for a long journey, or undertaking the tiny ceremony of putting a record on the stereo. Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist only increased my conviction that music is far more pleasurable outside the confines of this tedious streaming platform.

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile] · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why does your listening data matter?

A fascinating look at Spotify and how late-stage capitalism steals from artists, workers and consumers for ever-increasing profits.

Those vibey playlists? Those cute yearly wraps? Universes of music, available at the tap of a screen?

Unfortunately, all these seemingly innocuous things come at a steep—if hidden—cost.

Pelly makes a case for how Spotify is part of a slow-moving creep into Big Data and the eradication of the right to privacy of individual consumers, in addition to Spotify's exploitative use of generative AI and human artists in a bid to "bring music to the masses." The struggle of content curation versus artistry, the homogenization of sound, and the lack of a one-size-fits all solution to an issue that is dynamic, ever-changing and exceedingly complex.

I really liked the call to support music workers, and the call to think about our consumerism, even in something as seemingly harmless as streaming music platforms.

While some chapters felt a little repetitive, I really enjoyed the latter chapters, where Pelly focuses on privacy, workers' rights, the need for transparency in big corporations and government, and thinking locally and radically (there is a huge shout out to libraries in this book).

There is not ethical consumption under capitalism.

It doesn't mean ditch the Spotify subscription, necessarily, but think more about consumption, and support musical artists in the forms they ask to be supported. Stand up for worker's rights, always.

[Kurt Neumaier · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm excited to check out the streaming library that my local library has with local musicians :)

[Cav · Rating 2 out of 5]

"From the app’s European launch in 2008, to its U.S. arrival in 2011, to the stock market listing in 2018, Spotify reinvented itself repeatedly: as a social platform in 2010, an apps marketplace in 2011, a hub for what it called “music for every moment” by the end of 2012..."

The rise of algorithmically-curated playlists; be they on Spotify, YouTube, or other online applications is an interesting story. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy this telling of it. Mood Machine was way too long and dry for my tastes. More below.

Author Liz Pelly is a writer and editor based in New York.

Liz Pelly:


The book gets off to a bit of a shaky start with a lackadaisical intro. The author drops the quote above, and it continues:

"...The next year came its big move into curation, hiring a staff of full-time editors to compile playlists themed to moods and activities, followed by its 2014 investment in algorithmic personalization tech. All of this so-called innovation was going to “level the playing field” for artists, Spotify obsessively promised."

The audio version I have was read by the author. Now, this is usually a nice touch that I appreciate. However, this author has an extremely grating habit of up talking. There is a virtually never-ending stream of constant tiny little verbal inflections throughout. Her narration got under my skin after the very first sentence, and managed to thoroughly irritate the shit out of me as the book progressed (sorry, not sorry.)

At the heart of the writing here is the concept of Spotify's algorithm. Instead of being organically driven and based on real-world feedback from its aggregate users, the people behind the curtain have been sneakily tweaking the dials:

"...What we actually got, though, were playlists heavily dominated by major label acts, endless feeds of neo-Muzak loaded with ghost artists—anonymous, stock music commissioned at a discount—and a series of pay-to-play schemes.
Those include the controversial Discovery Mode program, which sells (mostly independent) artists and labels algorithmic promotion in exchange for reduced royalty rates, and frames it as an “opportunity.” This cost-saving initiative is a move popularly regarded as a new type of payola, the term that emerged in the 1950s to describe the process of record labels making under-the-table cash payments to radio stations in exchange for airplay. For artists trying to figure out how to survive these shifts, there have for many years been more questions than answers."

The idea that the algorithm is being manipulated is going to have wide-ranging knock-on effects, from lesser user satisfaction, to lower revenue for artists on its platform. In this short bit of writing, the author talks about how big music streaming companies have become:

"As of this writing, streaming accounts for 84 percent of recorded music revenues, with Spotify, the largest of all services, capturing 30 percent of the market, with over 615 million users and 239 million paying subscribers. And as the public discourse on the relationship between AI and creative labor has taken hold, the whole streaming conversation now takes place under this looming cloud: how tracks created with generative AI software are flooding the streaming services and the effects this will have on working musicians and aspiring artists alike. And while the potential of generative AI feels urgent, it’s also important to remember the less flashy ways that artists and listeners have been impacted by different systems of automation and machine learning over the past decade-plus, as artists’ careers have become increasingly managed by algorithms, and listening has become more and more mechanized. At a moment when the very future of music can feel at stake, the time feels right to take a serious look both backward and forward."

The tl;dr version of this book could be summarized as Spotify fucks over its users and artists.

Unfortunately, as touched on above, I did not like the overall style of this one. It was way too long, for starters. The audio clocks in at a bulky ~12 hours. If you're going to write a ~12-hour book, it had better be engaging. Sadly, this one was not. There were way too many long-winded tangents, and I found my finicky attention wandering many times here.

My reviews are always heavily weighted towards how readable the book is (or is not). Say what you will, but please don't bore me. There is almost nothing I detest more in a book than long-winded, arduous, and monotonous prose. Sadly, I found this one to be mostly that.

Finally, there was also the shoe-horning in of assorted leftist nonsense and jargon here that really put me off. The book contains a baffling amount of leftist rhetoric for a book about computer algorithms. She's got talk about "cis white men," "marginalization," and "representation;" among other leftist buzzwords/phrases. I can't stand when authors cram their shit political takes into books they have no business being, and my ratings always reflect this.

********************

I didn't really enjoy this one, despite being interested in the subject matter. The book is in dire need of a rigorous editing. A good ~30-60% of the writing here could have been removed with no overall loss to the finished product.
I wouldn't recommend it. Remind me to take a pass on anything else this author produces.
1.5 stars.

[Lily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m a bit ambivalent about this book, which I’ll explain why, but regardless, this really is a must-read.

I say I’m ambivalent because I thought frequently while reading the book that the writing felt amateurish. While editorializing isn’t forbidden in a nonfiction book, I felt that the author was way too eager to insert her opinion or make clear her disapproval of certain characteristics of contemporary music or circumstances without proper elaboration or analysis following the opinion. I laughed a bit when she described Laufey as “a young artist merging viral jazz and TikTok literalism” with no further discussion. Thinking about it a bit, maybe it is true that Laufey leans toward a trendy version of jazz and avoids metaphor like the plague, but I found the author’s distaste for apparent Gen Z music trends because of those trends’ parallel development alongside streaming a little bit of a blind spot on her part, as if not worthy of diving deeper there.

Or even when the facts were there and not just her input, it started to feel a little condescending as the reader to have the author constantly reinforce that this is how I should feel about what I just read. Was it an attempt at humor? A stylistic choice? Either way, I found it at times had the opposite effect, detracting from the gravity of what I just read.

This of course is just my list of grievances about the writing itself. Content-wise, this is such an important read for anyone who streams music and/or is invested in the current and future state of music and the arts. I went into this knowing Spotify is Bad, but I actually know the details of that now. Reading this really has me thinking more deeply about my own relationship with music, how I consume it, and the decisions I’ll make regarding music consumption moving forward. The future is looking bleak in general, but for the arts even more so, but I appreciate how she ends the book on a hopeful note, exploring current efforts to counteract the bosses of the music industry and to move the arts toward something publicly-funded that will last lifetimes.

[Read By Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spotify fucking sucks and I feel so validated for always hating it

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Serendipitously, I'm writing this review as I sit on my porch listening to someone play jazz covers across the street. Today is Open Tuning, a free neighbourhood music festival where musicians set up performance-shop on front yards and sidewalks. I'm watching pedestrians wander into the vicinity of a makeshift stage, stay, chat with one another, vibe, and pay attention to the talent and skill of the artists in front of them.

Spotify would rather all of that not exist.

Why? You already know the answer -- 'profit' -- but Liz Pelly's book demonstrates that the collateral damage of it is even worse than you think.

Spotify, for anyone who doesn't know and as you'll learn early on in Mood Machine, was born out of a desire not to revolutionize music, as is often touted -- but to make a fuck ton of money selling ads. Music ended up the traffic source, and the success of Spotify as a company has had massive impacts across the music industry. These impacts, or some of them, are catalogued deftly and thoughtfully, with sources from Spotify, the music industry, and artists themselves.

It's a big project and Pelly does it well, if a little densely at times. I couldn't help but compare it to the exceptional How Music Got Free -- in many ways, this is a direct sequel to that book, picking up almost exactly where Stephen Witt leaves off. What makes Witt's book so excellent, though, is his ability to weave a story and bring the characters to life while still jamming the narrative full of important information and commentary. Pelly doesn't quite pull off that fifth star, but the information is well-expressed and extremely important, so...who cares, read this.

I don't think it's a spoiler for anyone who spends any amount of time thinking about music that Pelly's overall point ends up being: Spotify is a symptom of our hypercapitalist world, and to change the music industry requires changing our world. She offers hope at the end, in the guise of organizations working towards better conditions for artists and workers at large, but it's all pretty depressing in the context of a current US presidency so favourable towards the interests of big tech (AMONG OTHER THINGS).

But, Pelly reminds us, and it's worth repeating: "Music is too important to be left solely to the marketplace." It is. And it, and other art forms, always will be.

Because, amidst the glut of takes on AI and how it's coming for all of us, I just keep coming back to the fact that humans want story. We want art. We might not always be able to tell the difference between what's entirely human generated and what isn't, but the lines there have been blurry for a long time. Our pop stars and biggest authors all follow a formula -- is it so different? Some might say yes, and that opinion has merit.

But -- there has always been a tension between those who make money off of their creations, formulaic or not, and those who don't. And I'm NOT in any way saying any of what Spotify or the industry at large does is acceptable -- it's not, and we need to push for better legal and financial protections for our artists and musicians.

But, despite how bleak everything seems right now, I guess I remain ever the optimist, because several dozen people are clapping across the street right now, and I can hear another concert happening a few streets over, and everyone is curious, everyone is present, no one is on their phones, even (shocking!) -- they're all watching, talking to each other, and moving to the rhythms and melodies.

Music is fundamental to our species. Algorithms aside, I believe the majority of us will always want to protect it. Mood Machine tells us not only why that's important, but why our engagement with streaming services is reshaping how we listen to it. And while I don't think the core of our desire for real, live, community-creating music will ever go away -- there's a better path forward than the one we're heading towards. Read this book and let's push for it.

[Luke Kono · Rating 4 out of 5]

✒︎4 stars

I listened to this book for a YouTube video I'm working on right now and it was definitely helpful for me.

Mood Machine is filled with a ton of information on the history of the music streaming platform Spotify, including the platform's obsession with turning music into a "mood machine" by hiring ghost artists to create background music for Spotify, and making music further commodified through "mood" playlists. Pelly explores various aspects of the business side of Spotify as well as the impact that streaming as a whole has had on artists.

Pelly's reporting was truly great. Her investigation into Spotify's "ghost artists" alone is commendable. I appreciated the information she provided about Spotify and music streaming in general. I learned a lot of new things reading this book and even gained more insight into aspects of Spotify and streaming that I already was informed on.

All of this being said, the book could have been shortened. I understood the value of each chapter, but some of them just hammered the same thing into your head over and over in just a slightly varying format. For a whole book, I feel like it would've been a lot stronger if more of the same was cut down. It is also very dense with the business side of things, and with both of these things combined, the book felt like a drag at times. While I agreed with her on most of her points, her messaging can feel very heavy handed, with not much acknowledgements of the (albeit few) positives of streaming.

On another note, I listened to the audiobook version of the book and I think a different narrator may have been better. Pelly's inflection was off and it made the audio sound choppy. It basically was obvious that she is an amateur speaker and narrator.

While the book can be a bit repetitive, the information provided by Pelly's reporting is vast and extremely important, so I'd urge anyone to check it out.

✂︎----------

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[Sam Wescott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really good and utterly infuriating. I’m not a particularly musical person and apparently I do not listen to music the way Spotify wants most people to. I never use music as background sound and it usually takes a far backseat to listening to podcasts or audiobooks (actively, I will insist. The only background sound I use is ASMR to sleep). However, my spouse is a musician. My spouse’s band is on Spotify. I knew from experience that the current music model is unsustainable and that streaming was a horrible system for artists.

But man, this book made me even more frustrated than I already was. Pay to play, ghost musicians, algorithms, and AI, UGH. It was so frustrating to hear the same old story of every tech company and extractive, surveillance-fueled marketing tool and how they are actively making our world worse. It’s a dense, information-filled book, but the information will ruin your day, let me tell you.

The reason I had to dock it a star, though, is actually because of the audiobook performance. I understand the author’s DIY roots and hate to complain, especially since I usually consider accusations of vocal fry and upspeak to be rooted in misogyny, but I almost put down the audiobook because the upspeak was so bad. I was actually struggling to tell when sentences ended and had to re-listen to passages once or twice. I really appreciate the author’s writing and reporting on this topic, but I do wish a professional voice actor had been hired. I’m not going to be able to recommend this book to anyone who would prefer to listen to it than read a print or ebook copy.

[Anjana V. Nair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liz Pelly pulls back the curtain on Spotify’s empire, revealing a dystopian reality where music isn’t art - it’s data. With chilling precision, she dissects how the platform’s algorithm-driven playlists don’t just cater to moods; they manufacture them, conditioning listeners while quietly crushing artists' autonomy. The book exposes Spotify’s pay-for-play schemes, ghost artists, and the transformation of music into sonic wallpaper designed to maximize engagement, not creativity.

This isn’t just a critique of streaming - it’s a wake-up call about the future of music itself. Pelly argues that Spotify isn’t a neutral platform; it’s a machine that dictates taste, controls exposure, and reshapes how we experience sound. The real shock? Artists, often left with pennies, are increasingly forced to play by its rules - or disappear into algorithmic oblivion. Hands down, one of my best reads of 2025 - loved it and would highly recommend reading this!

[Squolle]

Mood Machine ist eine ziemlich minutiöse Geschichte von Spotify und den Folgen des Streamings für Musiker und Musik-Hörer.
Ich glaube, wenn man ein bisschen Ahnung von großen Plattformen wie Amazon, Spotify, Meta etc. hat, wird einen hier wenig überraschen. Wenn man allerdings kein wirkliches Bild von der Arbeitsweise eines solchen großen Tech-Konzerns hat, sollte man zu einem Buch wie diesem greifen und lernen: sobald ich mich auf einer dieser Plattformen bewege, spielt ein Algorithmus gegen mich Schach. Warme Empfehlung.

[Madeleine · Rating 5 out of 5]

liz pelly writes a courageous and smart investigation into how streaming changes conditions for the listener, and worst of all the independent artist. pelly brings history and specificity back to a time where "indie" is shorthand for a "vibe," genre, or aesthetic as opposed to the material conditions surrounding an artistic practice.
it's a real pleasure to read these investigations into spotify from someone who has dedicated their life to the diy music scene. pelly mentions her own expertise and intimacy with the scene shockingly little, which feels in line with the broader project to combat the hyper-individualist demands on artists.
reading this made me reflect on my own listening habits over the past decade of spotify use. i was disturbed to realize how the self-reinforcing cycle of the spotify recommendation has whittled down my own experience of music. i remembered how i used to find artists: opening for acts at now-defunct diy venues, music blogs, rifling through my friends' collections, bandcamp. i hadn't realized what a loss my increased reliance on spotify has been for my own relationship to music.
i also found the text fascinating for exploring the marketing and revenue models behind a platform that claims to be "for music". pelly's original reporting surfaced many gutting business practices, from reducing royalties in order to be listed on a "discover" playlist to enlisting fake artists to license lots of music under varied names for cheap to claiming to invent hyperpop to analyzing the emotional and affective connections of individual users' playlists to identify an algorithmic "vibe."

[Rxmee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned so much from this book! Beyond being sort of aware that we gleefully participate in Spotify's surveillance of our listening habits (Wrapped), I really did not know much about the streaming business model and its effects on artists livelihoods and our tastes! I've been chatting recently about the flattening / homogenization of cultural aesthetics, and this was excellent context and history to understand that through the music industry and how it connects to late stage capitalism, atomization of the individual, labor and power. Realized why I feel such an innate urge to gatekeep party 4 u and the entirety of Mitski's discography - yall don't understand the context!!!

Most enlightening for me was learning about and understanding playlisting - and how this sets up artists into a winner take all scenario while also encouraging sameness and "lean-back" listening. I appreciated the history lesson on muzak/Muzak and thinking about what we deem as successful and functional music. Spotify encourages and rewards music that can be "smoothed over" and played in the background without notice, at the expense of albums and work that is challenging and not intended for endless replay. I was a big POLLEN listener in 2018 and had no idea the purpose or intent!!

Reading about PFC music and pay for play payola-style Discovery Mode has made me really uncomfortable as a Spotify user. I need to rethink other ways to come across and discover music. I appreciated the conclusion chapter which discussed UBI, cooperatives and public libraries, organizing, and discussions on how we want our cultural landscape to look, but still kind of feel at a loss for where to go from here. Definitely going to be purchasing more records and merch and understanding it's incredibly meaningful. I recommend to anyone - it's an important story on the cultural effects of hyper-capitalism and technological solutionism. It really feels like the first step is being aware and moved to be part of the conversation.

[Charlie Lincoln · Rating 5 out of 5]

Music is too important to be left to the market.

Spotify has been the vanguard, innovating the algorithmic tech flattening of all culture.

Diverse independent musical ecosystems have been swallowed up into the same winner-take-all corporate marketplace engineered and dominated by big tech and the major label oligopoly.

It is very simple: the fewer resources going to cultural producers, the less culture will be produced. If you have been disappointed by the inability of culture to meet/reflect/define our moment, this is why. Artists cannot be creative if they can't pay the rent.

The endgame of the Spotify model is the end of music as a cultural force in our lives.

The alternative is not Apple, Amazon, Youtube, or any corporate service that provides the illusion of all the world's music for $10 a month. Individual consumer choices will not be enough to fix the system but directly supporting the artists who have enriched your life will do some small part to stave off the ever-present precarity and financial ruin threatening all independent artists.

Musical culture does not occur automatically. It is the product of human labor, creativity, and dreams. And it will not continue to exist if the breakdown of musical meaning, context, and value pioneered by Spotify is allowed to continue unabated.

[Erik Bonkovsky · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the words of Cody Z. “It should have been an article”

[Vicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow—this is the book I have been looking for. It scared me, but the conclusion also excited me. I felt like Alice falling into a deep nightmareland of the inner workings of Spotify, streaming, its origins, its impacts, learning about sub-worlds I didn't know existed, ghost artists manufacturing stock music, packaged into lo-fi study beats and etc. like that. So well-researched. So well-written.

I attribute my disconnect from music to the moment Spotify started taking over sometime in the 2010s, and there were many things I felt skeptical about, or could never quite get into (like my "Discover Weekly" playlist) but I didn't know why. Since a couple years ago, I started looking for ways to STOP STREAMING MUSIC, or just completely re-organize my approach to listening + discovering music. I feel newly motivated to try again.

🎶

Conclusion / 11:40:24
Sat, Jan 18 | 4:27:02 PM
GO BACK LATER TO TRANSCRIBE THIS PART OF THE CONCLUSION, exciting about music, re-engaging

Conclusion / 11:07:21
Sat, Jan 18 | 9:20:43 AM
Libraries!!

Conclusion / 10:59:02
Sat, Jan 18 | 9:12:08 AM
Streaming service: serving mindless consumption

Conclusion / 10:51:21
Sat, Jan 18 | 9:04:09 AM
Catalytic sound co-op and collective (improvisation group)

Chapter 17: The Lobbyists / 10:08:47
Fri, Jan 17 | 2:52:34 PM
The arrogance. Have you thought about what will happen to your wealth after you die? “I don’t want to die” with expectations to live until 120 with guidance from longevity experts. Ok.

Chapter 17: The Lobbyists / 09:58:42
Fri, Jan 17 | 12:02:33 AM
IRONIC lol Daniel ek

Chapter 16: This Is… Payola? / 09:23:44
Thu, Jan 16 | 12:01:49 AM
Spotify employees on slack speak like aliens

Chapter 15: Indie Vibes / 08:43:11
Wed, Jan 15 | 9:41:50 PM
Issue with measuring success by how well it “scales”

Chapter 14: An App for a Boss / 08:11:23
Wed, Jan 15 | 9:09:46 PM
Influencers turn their whole lives into advertisements 😰

Chapter 14: An App for a Boss / 08:11:13
Wed, Jan 15 | 9:09:10 PM
The “creator” is related to, but not the same as, the “influencer”

Chapter 14: An App for a Boss / 08:01:15
Wed, Jan 15 | 5:50:55 PM
“Hope labor”, aspirational work that users do for free in hopes that it will lead to future work (youtuber, influencer)

Chapter 13: The First .0035 Is the Hardest / 07:21:19
Wed, Jan 15 | 8:57:39 AM
Don Giovanni records and anti-streaming (my intro)

Chapter 12: Streaming as Surveillance / 07:17:26
Wed, Jan 15 | 8:51:56 AM
Daniel Ek has used his Spotify profits to invest in A.I. militarization

Chapter 12: Streaming as Surveillance / 07:13:30
Wed, Jan 15 | 8:47:19 AM
Like when a “music app” begins tracking our voices and our off-app searches

Chapter 12: Streaming as Surveillance / 07:13:13
Wed, Jan 15 | 8:46:37 AM
Surveillance creep: sure we think streaming is just to recommend us our next song. For now. But its later uses include things we couldn’t have foreseen.

Chapter 12: Streaming as Surveillance / 07:02:58
Wed, Jan 15 | 8:35:36 AM
Ok, student loans for textbooks are using Spotify concert ticket data???

Chapter 12: Streaming as Surveillance / 07:01:59
Wed, Jan 15 | 8:34:15 AM
Spotify also partners with ancestry and 23andme…

Chapter 12: Streaming as Surveillance / 06:57:47
Tue, Jan 14 | 5:47:51 PM
lol love Liz pelly’s sarcastic voice reading advertisement claims

Chapter 12: Streaming as Surveillance / 06:48:05
Tue, Jan 14 | 5:37:57 PM
Wow at the data on us we can request

Chapter 11: Sounds for Self-Optimization / 06:11:50
Tue, Jan 14 | 4:59:22 PM
Ok wow. Boomie wasn’t banned by Spotify for their artificial intelligence “music” but more because it was using artificial listeners to boost streams or something. This just goes so deep.

Chapter 8: Listen to Yourself / 05:02:12
Fri, Jan 10 | 10:53:05 AM
“What do you want when you listen to music?” Thinking about how I will re-listen to PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE in full again, maybe this June, on a long walk by myself

Chapter 8: Listen to Yourself / 04:57:21
Fri, Jan 10 | 10:47:11 AM
Keep users streaming, keep them in their comfort zone (“customer retention zone”)

Chapter 8: Listen to Yourself / 04:51:42
Fri, Jan 10 | 10:41:07 AM
The AI DJ is sooooooooo bad when I tried it 🤣

Chapter 8: Listen to Yourself / 04:50:05
Fri, Jan 10 | 10:39:14 AM
Yeah I NEVER felt like Discover weekly was “a best friend making me a mixtape” lol

Chapter 8: Listen to Yourself / 04:48:53
Fri, Jan 10 | 10:37:44 AM
Discover Weekly, a new breakthru that came out of an internal hack day at the company

Chapter 7: Streambait Pop / 04:29:15
Fri, Jan 10 | 10:18:20 AM
“Affordances”: JJ Gibson, the way objects are designed and built informs the way people use them (GCHAT)

Chapter 5: Ghost Artists for Hire / 03:20:20
Thu, Jan 9 | 10:06:33 AM
Generic stock music. Spotify knew it would tarnish its brand since it built itself upon “discovery”. Sooo stripped of context, history, tradition, all determined by metrics. Entering genres historically dominated by artists of color. Black and brown artists losing spots to a couple of Swedish guys.

Chapter 5: Ghost Artists for Hire / 02:52:45
Wed, Jan 8 | 6:33:26 PM
People are paying subscription fees to listen to cheap stock music produced by ghost artists.

Chapter 4: The Conquest of Chill / 02:24:18
Wed, Jan 8 | 6:04:27 PM
But I love the idea of lo-fi girl studying all the time, cozy.

Chapter 4: The Conquest of Chill / 02:21:39
Wed, Jan 8 | 6:01:31 PM
Playlists that are “pure vibe wallpaper” shudder

Chapter 4: The Conquest of Chill / 02:18:32
Wed, Jan 8 | 5:58:08 PM
Check out Brian Eno’s airport music and manifesto. Ambient. Inspiring reflection between artist, listener, and surroundings.

Chapter 4: The Conquest of Chill / 02:11:48
Wed, Jan 8 | 5:51:12 PM
Muzak has such a long history. Got rebranded to Mood Media. Bought out by SF company.

Chapter 4: The Conquest of Chill / 02:07:47
Wed, Jan 8 | 5:46:27 PM
Wow. BBC’s music while you work was supposed to boost the mood of workers in weapons factories.

Chapter 3: Selling Lean-Back Listening / 01:57:11
Wed, Jan 8 | 5:35:24 PM
Spotify’s success is realizing Apple, Amazon, are not their competitors. It’s silence. They’re not selling music. They’re selling space fillers to take up your time.

Chapter 3: Selling Lean-Back Listening / 01:38:10
Wed, Jan 8 | 5:14:31 PM
I’ve never enjoyed Spotify’s playlists…

Chapter 3: Selling Lean-Back Listening / 01:32:37
Wed, Jan 8 | 5:08:45 PM
Streaming surveillance. Spotify tried to position its playlisting like an intimate mixtape.

Chapter 3: Selling Lean-Back Listening / 01:20:39
Wed, Jan 8 | 8:11:34 AM
Spotify’s strategic shift breakthru: discovering that there passive listeners who wanted background music and to let Spotify do the work while they just put something on

Chapter 3: Selling Lean-Back Listening / 01:17:56
Wed, Jan 8 | 8:07:01 AM
Yes I remember being able to follow Pitchfork on Spotify in a different way

Chapter 3: Selling Lean-Back Listening / 01:16:49
Wed, Jan 8 | 8:05:29 AM
Napster guy helped out Spotify

Chapter 2: “Saving” the Music Industry / 01:13:08
Wed, Jan 8 | 8:00:27 AM
NAXOS, the big classical music label, threatening to pull all its tracks

Chapter 2: “Saving” the Music Industry / 01:09:49
Wed, Jan 8 | 7:56:50 AM
2010, golden age of music blogs, shifting after Spotify launched in U.S. in 2012

Chapter 2: “Saving” the Music Industry / 01:03:06
Tue, Jan 7 | 8:11:21 PM
Mystery re: how independent labels got sucked into Spotify

Chapter 2: “Saving” the Music Industry / 00:57:52
Tue, Jan 7 | 8:05:53 PM
So weird to hear last.fm cited as a key player because of how neglected it is now. Ghost town.

Chapter 1: The Bureau of Piracy / 00:40:17
Tue, Jan 7 | 7:48:04 PM
The two founders of Spotify were just advertisement executives who wanted to sell ads using music.

Chapter 1: The Bureau of Piracy / 00:36:42
Tue, Jan 7 | 7:45:02 PM
Understanding how Spotify could have started in Sweden. In the 90s, the government provided high-quality public broadband for much of its population, allowing file sharing + privacy law preventing IP address attached to a name.

Introduction / 00:14:42
Tue, Jan 7 | 9:47:23 AM
Spotify wants us to listen to their recommendations because it’s cheaper for them to produce

Introduction / 00:10:00
Tue, Jan 7 | 9:42:03 AM
BLEAK, the illusion of participation for our human need to connect. These are not public squares, but “digital corporate enclosures”.

[Angie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 I am personally and professionally interested in how we discover and shape our taste when it comes to art of all kinds, and this book is not only an account of Spotify and its business practices, but also sometimes an examination of our relationship to music itself, which is the part of the book I found most intriguing. On that front, Pelly talks about Spotify's ways of talking about and curating music related to moods and soundtracks for different moments and experiences. The availability of on-demand listening options like Spotify and our multi-tasking nature have us hearing more music than ever, but are we listening? The demand for more ambient music and mood-based listening has some ramifications on the business side as well, as Pelly talks about the "ghost musicians" churning out content. Add algorithms and AI to the mix and things get even murkier. I also was unaware of the historical context of other efforts to define and shape music listening by mood and I wanted more details about that!

On the business side, this reads a little like a true crime book like Bad Blood by John Carreyrou or Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe. (Is the problem just capitalism, or the people who exploit it and benefit from it?) One tidbit from Spotify's origins really illustrates all the business decisions to come: Spotify was primarily founded not as a music company, but an advertising one, with music just the chosen platform. All the bad things you might expect are here: how little revenue actually gets to artists, the prioritizing of the big labels dictating the market for everyone else (the little guy/indies get screwed), all the ways Spotify is tracking the data we freely give up and the way it is being used, how what makes it onto a playlist has a lot to do with how much it costs Spotify or makes money for it.

This book is informed by Pelly's long-standing attention to Spotify and the sources she's cultivated both within it and the music industry, but it can also be a little repetitive and judgy in places, especially when it comes to user's listening practices.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whew!!!!! what a perfect opportunity to use my new favorite phrase— digital panopticon! wow, this book made me feel my big emotions, Mad and Sad, both for our forced participation in profit driven surveillance and for artists who deserve to be able to survive off of their music. I hadn’t really thought much about how creating music in the streaming era requires thinking about data driven insights as a significant part of the creative process (EWWWWW). Product managers loveeeee to prove that they can and will always choose evil (and i can say that). btw, if you’re still not convinced, daniel ek is now leading an AI military startup 🙏❤️ anyways..support independent radio

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this has challenged me to revisit my understanding of music streaming and my own relationship with music- will be thinking about this for a long time.

[Hunter Gierhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

An absolute must read for anyone working in the record industry - Mood Machine touches on almost every recent issue I’ve noticed as an industry professional and a music fan. I wrote my senior thesis in college about how I thought the streaming model was good for both musicians and fans alike, but now my view has been tempered.

This book primarily changed how I view Spotify as a company - it’s not a music-first platform, nor was its origins an answer to digital piracy like Ek’s historical revisionism led me to believe. Rather, Spotify is an advertising company. Selling other services to listeners, its own products to artists, and our data to others. When viewed in this lens, every business strategy Spotify has made makes more sense. It does not prioritize the value of artists or their work like I initially wanted to believe, that all must fall to the wayside in order to generate more profit for the business like it would any other.

The Spotify algorithm that I used to love has also flattened our tastes and our moods, not expand them. The algorithm only tells us what we listen to most, not what we enjoy the best. Its focus on only a few key metrics does a disservice to artists and listeners. The Spotify playlist eco-system has also had the unintended effect of not just addressing consumer behavior, but influencing it. The lean back nature of playlists and their power over artist’s bottom lines has encouraged them to change their sounds to fit this environment. And while music and artists have responded to these platforms in the past (radio, vinyl, etc), what’s different now is that “listening” has given way to “hearing.” The algorithm doesn’t measure nor care about how music affects you beyond how long it gets you to listen and not skip. Even worse, this algorithm wants to predict and dictate how you feel within its neatly identified buckets when human emotion is much messier. More rigorous listening experiences aren’t valued, rather the longer, more passive ones are. Spotify’s competitors aren’t Amazon and Apple, it’s silence.

The algorithm is also for sale too, as evidenced by Discovery Mode and the “ghost artist” program, where Spotify prioritizes music that its gets for cheaper in order to pad its bottom line. Discovery Mode harms the listener experience by cramming the same music into every personal mix and pushes artists to give up better royalty rates, while the latter program works counter to the very idea of Spotify as a way to uplift artists for discovery. They would rather promote ghost artists for greater profit instead of supporting the real ones it claims to champion.

Spotify has also not countered stratification and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few, but entrenched it. Even more nefarious is how Ek’s wealth has been built on the backs of musicians, and he uses it to support causes like AI in military technology.

My (only) quarrel with the book is that the book’s anti-Spotify and anti-major crusade is rarely tempered. While those entities absolutely deserve their fair share of criticism, there are few moments where an opportunity to punch at them isn’t taken. When a more balanced view is introduced by one of the sources along the lines of “this is how it has always been,” Pelly often doesn’t grapple with those perspectives as much. Reading in between the lines is a sense that previous industry models were better for listeners, musicians, and for music in general, which doesn’t necessarily strike me as true.

Despite this, I feel galvanized to support musicians and their objectives now more than ever. To dream of a world where musicians are supported with unemployment or universal basic income (which is, to my pleasant surprise, already the case in some European countries like France) I’ve always struggled with the idea that my work at a major label profits off of this labor without sharing in the risk that musicians have to take. I could be doing more to put my money where my mouth is and support musicians directly and through policy advocacy - like the Living Wage for Musicians Act!

‘Mood Machine’ is incredibly well researched and detailed, with its accounts from Spotify employees current and former, indie and major label professionals and artists to create what is in my view the definitive account of the state of the record industry in the 2020s.