Music Book Review: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly
What Pelly’s book does a fantastic job of uncovering is how Spotify just does not care about music.
Liz Pelly’s MOOD MACHINE: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist is an impeccably researched, thorough, well-written and incisive case for the gross harm that’s been propagated against popular music by capitalism in the form of Spotify. Pelly carefully, methodically lays out the evidence that proves beyond all doubt that Spotify does not care anything about music and only cares about extracting as much money as they can from artists and listeners.
The only conclusion you can reach at the end of MOOD MACHINE is the absolute certainty Spotify will never, ever, ever do the right thing and compensate artists fairly. That’s because Spotify doesn’t care whether you discover new music or not, it only cares that you listen as much as possible because that is how they are able to make themselves incredibly rich. It took me as long as it did for me to finish this book because I’d get halfway through a chapter and get so incredibly furious at their wholesale pillaging of music culture in every genre as well as their giant Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man attempts to force the entire culture to change in order to serve their bottom line.
Yes, it is about how they pay musicians less and less. That is absolutely, unequivocally not up for debate. They do everything they possibly can to avoid paying actual musicians and then find every possible way to avoid paying them a fair rate. I do not mean to diminish that essential fact but the combination of theft as well as generational damage that we will feel for the rest of our lives is probably not something the average music fan is aware of. Somewhere on social media, someone opined (this is a paraphrase) “This is a very good book and she’s absolutely right, but most music fans just won’t care.” The problem with that statement is the term “music fans.” Because the person who cares deeply about their lofi beats and chill playlist isn’t a music fan. But we’ll come back to this.
Spotify has convinced themselves that what listeners want is to push one button and hear the exact kind of music that the listener wants to hear at that particular moment, and then to keep feeding them the correct music based on everything they’ve ever listened to on Spotify before that moment. There’s a lot of conversations in the book about “low touch” approaches, how they want to keep listeners on one page and not give them options to go elsewhere and explore, if you want to explore you should be using search.
Which is not exploring. It is searching.
There is definitely a wide opportunity for providing some kind of curated experience, because instead of people viewing Spotify as “omg I have access to the entire history* of popular music” they are overwhelmed by it. There are ways to get some kind of direction that’s not a Spotify screen that presents you tunes with no context (and do not point to the “album information” button because it’s inadequate at best but that’s not their fault per se, it’s the fault of the state of metadata around music, which is a different essay).
And that points to how Spotify was able to be successful, because they know that people are nervous about silence and if they can feed them sounds in their ears 24/7 then some people will always be listening whenever possible, and to a certain extent there’s evil brilliance in that realization, but it’s also just making that problem worse. I have known people who always had to have music on but those people were deliberate and intentional and they always had to have music on because they just loved it so much they couldn’t imagine not listening to it. I have also shared offices with people who were at first happy to be moving in with me because I was “someone who really liked music,” only for me to tell them that if they wanted to listen to music while they worked, they would be continuing to use their headphones.
What Pelly’s book does a fantastic job of uncovering is how Spotify just does not care about music. They care about money, music is a way for them to make money, the way they make money is to get as many people listening for as long as possible, preferably to the music it costs them the least in terms of royalties. If they can hire someone to make lo-fi chill beats that they then own then they don’t have to pay the musicians who make music that fits that description. They claim to be “beyond genre” when all they mean is that they frame genre differently. They claim to be about personalization when personalization isn’t necessarily a quality music listeners asked for. They claim to be a lot of things they are not.
Spotify is aimed at people who want background music, who don’t want to have to think about or look for or engage with new music. They don’t want to hear anything they don’t like, which is probably the most important part of being a music fan. Whenever I am buying music for young music listeners I tell them that I do not expect them to like everything I have bought them because figuring out what you don’t like is almost more important than figuring out what you do like. All those hours in my teens and 20s spent driving with one hand on the radio taught me that.
[This is another essay entirely, but if it was easier to put music on your phone, people might not depend on Spotify so heavily. Right now it’s really hit or miss whether or not I can get an album I have bought and downloaded or ripped onto my phone. This will never get fixed because They don’t want that. Last week, when I bought the latest Springsteen live archive release, even nugs dot net -- who I will argue seem to actually like music and music fans -- is doing everything they can to get me to sign up for a subscription to their streaming service instead of just letting me buy the FLACs (or whatever your format of choice is. The issue at hand is not MP3 vs FLAC.)]
But we wouldn’t care so much about Spotify if they were compensating musicians fairly. We would not be having any of these conversations if they paid people, but that’s never going to change. They’re basically just pirating the culture for spare parts and will keep doing it as long as it makes them rich. And I think the issue isn’t that music fans don’t care, it’s that they’re dwarfed by the population of music listeners who want a low-friction way to avoid silence at all costs. It’s not a test of fandom, it’s not a test of engagement, but it is definitely out there with people who think they can go to a concert and then continue the conversation they were having at dinner at exactly the same volume while the concert is going on.
MOOD MACHINE is an important book. It’s highly readable, it’s well-researched and documented but its target audience aren’t academics. If you are a regular reader of my work, you will appreciate the book. You will likely want to throw it across the room on the regular because of what Daniel Ek and his minions have done to strip mine the music business. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it and bear witness.
[Full disclosure: I still pay for Spotify because I use it for work. It is a lifesaver for a music journalist who is in the middle of a piece and needs to listen to a record that I don’t have. I would like to move to Apple Music or Tidal but I don’t trust Apple Music won’t bork on the ginormous quantity of live sound files on my hard drives and hundreds of individual sound files that have the same title because I have hundreds of live shows from various artists on said hard drives. I am incomprehensible to Spotify’s algorithm so I am just going to be a small chaos agent until there is a better solution and I have time to accurately assess what if anything I will lose by moving.]
Caryn Rose
