Liz Pelly

With unprecedented access and unsparing analysis, this is the definitive investigation into Spotify, weaving interviews with incisive cultural criticism, and illuminating how streaming has reshaped music for listeners and artists alike.

Flush with testimony from over a hundred industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us into the inner workings of the highly consolidated modern music business and how it has become personalized, playlisted, autoplayed, and algorithmic.

With an expert’s eye, music journalist Liz Pelly reveals how Spotify’s two-sided marketplace—the listeners who pay with their dollars and data, and the musicians who provide the material powering it all—has changed music media forever. She also explores how musicians and listeners are coming together to fight this era of musical individualism and advocate for artists’ futures.

Amazon Unbound and Weapons of Math Destruction for the music industry, Mood Machine is a timely and unputdownable exploration of a company that has become synonymous with music.

 The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

Mood Machine:

Karolina

The platform era capitalized on people's impulses to want to participate in their own lives, to share their writing and photos and favourite songs, in pursuit of the human need for connection. Being able to participate does not mean that what you're participating in is fair, though. And platforms mostly only offered the illusion of togetherness. They are not public squares; they're corporate digital enclosures where your every move is tracked.

The music industry's focus on stamping out individual scammers can often seem like merely an attempt to distract from the systemic grift ofit all-of streaming, of platform capitalism, but also the oligopoly of the recorded music business, period, and how it constantly finds new ways to extract more and more from musicians and listeners. The dawn of streaming may have been, at times, a contentious collaboration between the old bosses (majors) and the new bosses (technology corporations). But it was still a collaboration. The goal was corporate profits, not establishing a fair system for artists.

Spotify's emphasis on selling the feeling of potential also reflects a broader tendency of 2010s platform capitalism: the prevalence of hope labor, a term that academics have used to frame the aspirational work that users do for free in hopes that it will lead to future work. In a sense, it is not too dissimilar from the classic assumption that artists of all types ought to be grateful to work for exposure while someone higher up the chain profits.

The internet has long stopped feeling like a town square-it feels like a shopping mall.

Emphasizing individual habits, in general, can feel weak in the face of so much consolidation and financialization—and a musical surveillance apparatus with insidious influence on the world around us, whether we participate in it or not. Collective issues require collective solutions. 

At its most potent, music helps us gave form to ideas and feelings that: previously inexpressible—fleeting moments where the ineffable becomes real, where loneliness dissipates, where the world briefly makes sense. And when music moves us in ways that we cannot fully fathom, it’s the words of music writers that can help pull us closer toward understanding. 

If we keep giving too much power to corporations to shape our lives, and we don't protect working musicians' abilities to survive. We are foreclosing that possibility for music to evoke those ephemeral unknowns. We are losing a lot of music that wil never be made. We are letting new expressions, emotional articulations, and points of connection slip away. 

There are no one-click solutions, and perhaps what music could benefit from most would be a. wholesale rejection of technological solutionism. The problems faced by musicians, like those faced elsewhere in society, aren't technological problems: they're problems of power and labor. 

Mood Machine: quotes

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