Each December, journalist Liz Pelly observes Spotify Wrapped day with a mix of horror and hope. For the past decade or so, Pelly has been writing critical essays and investigations into Spotify and its practices for publications like The Baffler. She feels horror, because Spotify Wrapped day — when listeners post their corporate-provided metrics of their year of listening — can feel like being confronted with relentless free advertising for a corporate behemoth.
And she feels hopeful because, over the past several years, Spotify Wrapped day has also become an occasion to critique the practices of a company that, as Pelly argues in her new book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, has materially harmed the lives of countless musicians and listeners alike by, she writes, treating music “more as a utility than an art form.” This year, those critiques surfaced more than ever. Over the years, Spotify Wrapped day has become, to Pelly, “a reminder that it’s not a niche perspective to be critically considering the issues that listeners and musicians face in the streaming era.”
These issues are at the forefront of Mood Machine (out tomorrow), which is, in part, an investigation into the company’s internal practices. But the book is also a treatise — using Spotify merely as “an entryway into a broader story,” as Pelly puts it — on big-picture issues of power, politics, labor, and surveillance capitalism.
“Writing the book has made me realize that this isn’t a debate over what the most ethical streaming service is,” says the author. “It’s not ‘What is the cool new app someone can download as an alternative to Spotify or Apple Music or Amazon Music’? The broader question is ‘How do we contract corporate power in music and culture? How do we minimize the influence of corporations in our lives?’”
For a large chunk of the 2010s, Pelly was part of the independent-music community she writes about in Mood Machine while living and working at the Brooklyn arts space and venue Silent Barn. Anyone familiar with Pelly’s writing about streaming will not be surprised by the book’s general stance on the company, and of streaming at large. “The story of Spotify,” Pelly writes in Mood Machine, “is the story of the 21st century’s overeager and opportunistic tech solutionists, of billionaires and their overhyped machines, looking around for problems to solve, arrogantly disregarding the social problems left in their wake.”
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Pelly’s writing has long helped shape discourse about these bigger questions. Mood Machine is no exception: Before the book has even been released, its initial excerpt in Harper’s caused no less than Jack Antonoff to comment that Pelly’s writing about how streaming services devalue music “sums it up perfectly.”
Rolling Stone spoke with Pelly about her book.
What was your experience dealing with, or not dealing with, Spotify? Did you speak with the company while reporting the book?
It’s really important to shine a light on perspectives that don’t often get reported on in the mainstream media, whether its musicians, organizers, researchers, people who work at independent record labels. They don’t always have the same platform as, maybe, the press person for Spotify. I wanted to tell a ground-up story and really get the perspective of how this company has affected musicians and listeners. There are so many examples already out there of Spotify sharing its own story on its own terms. I have a note at the end of the book where I explain, for readers who are interested, where to find more of Spotify’s own telling of its story.
I also know, from working in the media, that oftentimes when you speak to publicists for large corporations, they’re not always going to be forthcoming about the internal reality of the organizations they represent. I was trying to use my precious 90,000 words to tell a different type of story.
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How did your own experience and background in DIY communities and spaces shape your perspective in writing this book?
I am definitely of the belief that no matter how much a journalist tries to pursue objectivity, what is important to you is always going to come through on the page. One of the things that was interesting to me about this topic was how embedded in independent culture streaming services were becoming despite the fact that they were so mysterious. Not a lot of people really know how they worked, and one of the values, I think, of independent and DIY music is pursuing a sense of transparency and demystification of systems. Part of what made me interested in this reporting project was this question of what it means to be independent in an era where corporate platforms that are at odds with the supposed values of independent-music culture are woven into our lives.
With streaming platforms and algorithmic culture, there’s this very pervasive attitude of resignation that, to me, recalls a broader political perspective that I think independent-music culture has always fought against: This idea that alternatives aren’t possible. For a lot of people, independent-music scenes provide these spaces where people can be exposed to alternative systems that lay out how untrue this myth — that alternatives aren’t possible — really is. Being part of independent-music culture requires interrogating centers of power in order to provide space to negotiate what it means to be independent.
What did you learn about the company that genuinely surprised you?
The so-called fake-artist story is something people have been talking about since 2015 or 2016. I had kind of just assumed it was these DIY hustlers trying to game the system, and I’ve never been particularly interested in stories about individual scammers on streaming services. Focusing on individual scammers always seemed like a distraction from the systemic grift of it all. So to learn that the so-called fake artists are actually an organized program within Spotify, and that they actually have a whole small team internally that interfaces with these specific licensors, and that there’s a name for the program and everything, that was extremely surprising to me.
At the risk of asking a dumb question, did you learn anything “good,” for lack of a better word, about Spotify during your reporting?
Because Spotify is an app that over 600 million people use to listen to music, it makes it an important lens through which to look at the issues faced by listeners and musicians today. But it’s not like they’re the only company in the music business deserving of such critique. Hopefully, this book could motivate further reckoning with other powerful forces in music.
Another thing is that it actually was important to me to not only talk to musicians who had a hard time in the streaming era. I talked to a decent number of musicians who had actually made a lot of money from streaming. But it’s not only musicians who aren’t making money that have criticisms of streaming. There’s also this other category of musician that actually does make a decent amount of money from streaming, but because of that, they feel really beholden to these platforms and have different criticisms that are shaped by their experience.
If a reader who doesn’t know much about streaming picks up your book, what would you hope they would take away from it?
It’s a book about music streaming, but I also have been thinking about Mood Machine as a book that’s about how power works. If the book inspired someone to think more deeply about their daily listening practices, that would feel meaningful because our lives are better when we practice deep listening or connect to music in a way that’s more meaningful than just listening for pure vibes.
Contemplating the impact of commercialism on art is something people have been doing for a really long time. My book is just another entry on a long line of inquiry that has existed long before and will continue existing after it. I’m happy with that.
