Mood Machine, by Liz Pelly (Atria, 241 pages)
Spotify is in the news this month, having recently reported that 2024 was its first profitable year, with 675 million monthly active users and climbing. That made investors happy, but what are the costs? That’s the subject of music journalist Liz Pelly’s timely examination into the rise of the music streaming company, founded nearly 20 years ago in Sweden.
Spotify, of course, is the Godzilla of streaming services, eating the lunch of most of its competitors, although Apple and Amazon also have strong shares of the market. The business model sprang vaguely formed from the forehead of Napster, the digital music-sharing platform — notably illegal — that freed consumers from actually paying for music.
While today’s streaming services, of course, are not free, they remain a mind-boggling value. As Hua Hsu wrote for The New Yorker, “Adjusted for inflation, a monthly subscription to an audio streaming service, allowing convenient access to a sizable chunk of the history of recorded music, costs much less than a single album once did.”
Musical artists and their associated companies, however, have contended that the change has come at their expense, and it’s been a slog to get to the point where most everyone is satisfied. Count Pelly among those who are still pushing back against the changes that streaming has wrought.
Spotify’s goals, apart from making money, are ostensibly to make what Pelly calls “self-driving music” — the ability for a subscriber to “simply open the app, press ‘play,’ and instantaneously get the perfect soundtrack for any given moment or context, without having to search, click, or think.”
But in achieving this on-demand nirvana, Pelly argues that Spotify and other streaming services have helped give rise to a “dynamic of passivity” among consumers, who are spoon-fed what algorithms have determined they will like. Spotify playlists “worked as a flattening, making a scene that was previously sprawling and complicated into something commodified and palatable, cutting out many original voices along the way.”
At the same time, music has become background noise in modern life, and “it follows that a population paying so little conscious attention to music would also believe it deserving of so little financial remuneration,” Pelly writes.
These are all interesting cultural changes worthy of reflection, but Pelly comes to this book as a nuts-and-bolts journalist, not as a philosopher. She tracks the minutiae of Spotify’s ascent, which she was covering in real time, and reports with detail on the inner workings of the company, aided by both named and anonymous employees, some of whom have since left.
That sourcing adds, of course, to pervasive cynicism about Spotify throughout the book. Pelly and her sources are not dispassionate observers, but people with a take, and that take is that streaming, while great for consumers, is not great for artists, who are paid fractions of a cent per stream. And how big the fraction is is virtually impossible to figure out, given the many variants possible, which include the type of streaming plan (free, standard or family?) and even what country the consumer lives in.
“This is all to say: the digit on an artist’s royalty statement is much more complicated than a per-stream rate. And artists are almost always systematically shut out of any sort of transparency around the calculations creating their livelihoods,” Pelly writes, explaining how the digital age has led to a music labor movement.
To be fair, she notes, with every change in technology, the industry has had to adapt. In the 1920s the rise of the phonograph was seen with the same sort of concern that musicians have had about digital music. Musicians went on strike in the 1940s over LP records; they feared unemployment, believing that people were less likely to go see a live performance if they could hear the music in their living rooms. Of course, that’s proved not to be the case; witness Taylor Swift’s proceeds from her Eras tour.
Still, Pelly sees the problem of artist compensation as something all of us should worry about, even arguing that music, like libraries, should be seen as a “public good,” with public funding and protections. Some people in Europe are even arguing for what amounts to a universal basic income for musicians. In fact, that’s even been tried in Ireland, which experimented with a “Basic Income for the Arts” that gave 325 euro each week to 2,000 artists for three years. France has also experimented with a system that gave artists their own unemployment system, in order to make up for the irregularity of their work.
In her conclusion, Pelly asks, “What’s the ethical alternative to Spotify?,” which is not a question the average American consumer will want to entertain, and Pelly admits there are no easy answers. For those who are not inclined to worry about artist pay — or to consider that “our shared music cultures would be so much more compelling and diverse if so many [musicians] did not need to abandon the arts for jobs with health insurance” — Mood Machine may seem like so much hand-wringing, interspersed with sometimes mind-numbing detail on things like hyperpop and Discovery Mode.
Ultimately, while well-reported, Mood Machine is more a book for insiders than the general public. But insiders and struggling musicians will love it.
B- —Jennifer Graham
Featured Image: Mood Machine, by Liz Pelly
