New York journalist Liz Pelly's latest book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist pries into the business practices of streamer Spotify.Felix Walworth/Supplied
Spotify and its fellow music-streaming services have been widely heralded as saviours of the music industry for a decade now. A funny thing happened over that decade: just about every other major tech platform – Meta, Google, Amazon, X / Twitter, you name it – has come under deep scrutiny over how they affect society.
New York journalist Liz Pelly has, since 2016, been one of the few writers consistently prying into Spotify’s business practices in the same way. Her work has shed light on the ways streamers are changing how music is produced and consumed. That includes market-cornering by major record labels, the evolution of passive listening, the cottage industry of “ghost” musicians creating songs to fit playlists for lower royalties, and how artists’ compensation can be suppressed.
This month, Pelly released Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist with One Signal Publishers / Atria Books, collecting and building upon her years of investigation into the company. It’s the latest long-form study into how platforms change our world – think Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber or Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: America In The Shadow Of Amazon, filtered through a critic’s lens and a do-it-yourself ethic shaped by years in independent music scenes. Mood Machine is necessary reading for anyone who cares about the well-being of the artists they listen to and about the future of creativity.
Pelly spoke with The Globe and Mail last week by phone.
Why did you decide to investigate Spotify?
I’ve always had one foot in the world of music journalism and one foot participating in an independent music scene. Being involved in independent music always involves a negotiation of what independent even really means. And in the mid-2010s, as streaming services were becoming normalized, there were questions reckoning with the relationship that music communities have with these big tech companies – especially given that major record labels were partners in creating these platforms.
We talk so much today about social platforms boosting and growing from misinformation. Do you see a parallel with Spotify apparently profiting from “ghost” artists? Does it take something away from legitimate art being distributed on the platform?
Yes. It creates a situation where the listener has to question whether the music is being created by a working musician or if it’s stock music that’s been made at a lower royalty rate. It raises the broader issue of media degradation. In some ways, Mood Machine is like a media literacy project. One of the goals is that, hopefully, users of streaming platforms will be able to approach these platforms more critically.
Could generative AI take the low-royalty strategy even further? Making some of Spotify’s most-consumed music without any human creativity?
There are a lot of valid concerns about the threat of generative AI and artists having the right not to have their music used as training data to create low-cost material to replace them. I’m also concerned about the ways machine learning and algorithmic recommendation have, for the past decade and a half, decontextualized music. One of the potential risks of passive playlist listening is the way it disconnects the listener from the artist. It does purposefully try to shape user behaviour so the relationship is more with the platform than with artists – and that does pose risks with artists. If a user listens to a chill dinner playlist every day, then to the platform, it doesn’t matter what’s on that playlist.
Record labels seem to love that industry revenue is bouncing back from 2014 lows thanks to streaming. But musicians often say they haven’t seen much income from platforms. Why is there such a divergence here?
When streaming services point to the range of income artists need to approach a sustainable career, it doesn’t take into consideration the record label taking a cut, or how many people are in a band or collaborated on a project. It suggests there’s this model independent artist in the image of streaming – a solo creator self-uploading their work.
The book notes that the rise of streaming platforms has been concurrent with the decline of independent music media and criticism. How does that play into the changes to music that you’ve written about?
The story of streaming is also the story of media consolidation more broadly and what happens when the shifting dynamics of the digital ad economy impacts smaller independent publications. Streaming services were sold to the independent world as tools for independent artists and democratizing the music industry, with shifts from old-school gatekeepers. This did not end up becoming a reality. Streaming services became new types of gatekeepers. I do think the situation for music journalism needs to change; Canada’s New Feeling Co-op is one of the most interesting models of co-op music writing that currently exists.
This interview has been edited and condensed.