Liz Pelly's 'Mood Machine' is a comprehensive exploration of Spotify's impact on the music industry, revealing how the platform transformed the way artists create and consumers listen to music. Pelly's insightful analysis delves into the history of Spotify, its business model, and the cultural shifts it has engendered.
Art and commerce are unholy bedfellows, and nowhere more so than in the music industry — never a savory business, not in the mob days and not now. Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine, a dive into the history and workings of Spotify, is a useful guide to the way the streaming platform has altered the business of being an artist, but it’s one that avoids the conflicts between being a consumer and a patron of the arts. Mood Machine is a combination of reportage, history, and analysis.
Its great strengths are its interviews with Spotify employees, use of internal Slack messages, and bringing into English for the first time details from a number of early Swedish articles about the company. Spotify was initially designed as an advertising company; its paid tier was the result of a concession to major labels in early negotiations over streaming rights. This may come as something of a surprise to people who’ve listened to Daniel Ek, over the years, pitch Spotify’s founding as something done for love rather than money. 'Spotify hit on the idea of playlists, a way of curating songs to be background music' The music industry in 2006 was desperate, having been kneecapped by piracy — first Napster, then a host of file-sharing applications. (Apple’s introduction of the iPod two years before the existence of the iTunes store arguably inflamed and worsened piracy.) Though Ek would occasionally publicly align himself with that history of piracy, he also hired Fred Davis — lawyer to Britney Spears, son of that Clive Davis — to introduce him to the labels. Pelly really reaches her stride in her chronicle of “lean-back listening,” the end result of a cultural process that began long before streaming. Radio as background music had been common for decades. Muzak had infiltrated stores. Moby’s Play (1999) reached hit status through aggressive licensing, including in commercials. In its quest to grow past early adopters and music enthusiasts, Spotify took things a step further, diverging sharply from iTunes, and not just in its focus on subscriptions over one-time purchases. An iTunes listener was active, deliberately selecting what they wanted from a library of songs they’d (ideally) purchased. Instead, Spotify hit on the idea of playlists, a way of curating songs to be background music in life, just as they were in movies and commercials. Pelly quotes a former Spotify employee saying its main competition wasn’t iTunes, but silence. Well, maybe. This is one of the places I find Pelly’s analysis lacking — she repeatedly quotes sources who claim people are afraid of silence without noting that silence is increasingly difficult for the average person to find. A white-collar worker no longer has an office with walls or even a cubicle — but they can drown out their too-close, too-loud coworkers with headphones that play inoffensive songs that won’t break their concentration. The noise of a coffee shop, a coworking space, or subway commute could similarly be obliterated, especially with noise-canceling headphones. A sleep playlist might be preferable to the sound of a neighbor’s newborn shrieking through the wall or the rager in the dorm room next door. But to recognize this, you’d need to spend more time thinking about the Spotify consumer. This is maybe why “chill” became the word that was most important when it came to these playlists; the point was inoffensive background noise. Even mainstream music wasn’t immune: Pelly points specifically to Billie Eilish’s career as an example of how the chill playlist conquered pop. 'The playlist model meant listeners didn’t have a relationship with artists' Playlists created totally different economic incentives than songs or albums. Spotify used small “feeder” playlists and then “graduated” hits to major playlists if enough people didn’t skip the songs. These playlists were exploited by major labels as marketing tools, and landing on one became desperately important to some smaller labels. Perhaps unsurprisingly, sleep playlists were particularly popular. The playlist model meant listeners didn’t have a relationship with artists — they had a relationship with playlists. As a result, some labels stopped focusing on musicians’ careers and more on the playlist experience, Pelly writes, especially those concerned with “lofi beats.” This may explain why the percentage of older songs played on streaming services has been steadily rising since 2020; playlist-centric listening and label inattention make it harder for new music to compete with music people already know. It was a short hop from there to one of the most compelling — and damning — parts of the book: ghost artists, also sometimes called fake artists. To feed its playlists, Spotify began commissioning “perfect fit content” (PFC) music that matched those playlists but was cheaper for Spotif
MUSIC INDUSTRY SPOTIFY STREAMING PLAYLISTS ART COMMERCE TECHNOLOGY CONSUMERISM
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