We know that Big Tech and Spotify have reshaped music listening – and at a cost. But that impact is often hidden inside a black box, closely guarded by its masters’ secrecy and mythmaking. Liz Pelly is one of the few people who managed to get inside that black box, meaning her upcoming book will be essential.
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist is set to arrive on January 7, with preorders available now (including signed copies via Greenlight Books in Brooklyn, NYC, if you want to support an independent bookseller).
What makes this special is that Pelly has managed to go behind the curtain at Spotify, with extensive interviews with former Spotify employees and inside music and the music industry. This is a new payola, essentially, but because so many of the industry have vested interests in Spotify itself, it was often hard to get to how it actually worked.
I was lucky enough to get to join Liz Pelly on a panel at Münchner Kammerspiele hosted by the New Models series, then focused on AI, back in 2019. It’s incredible to think how much has happened since then, as AI-powered musical slop has filled up playlists. I’ve not read this book, but I’m requesting a review copy now to get at it straight away and I have no doubt you’ll need to read it – so more on the contents soon.
But what’s also notable is how long Pelly has been saying this. From 2017:
The Problem with Muzak: Spotify’s bid to remodel an industry
2019:
Big Mood Machine: Spotify pursues emotional surveillance for global profit
Or also from The Baffler, 2018:
Streambait Pop: The emergence of a total Spotify genre
She also wrote about how Spotify could reinforce gender stereotypes and sexism.
There’s also this talk from 2019:
And from HKW:
This is probably the best recent update (though it’s also fun to listen to Liz Pelly on Spotify, of course, just for kicks):
A lot of this work was based on understanding ad practices at Spotify back in the mid-2010s, as in this AdAge interview or Spotify’s 2016 partnership with advertising firm WPP. There’s also a direct connection to surveillance tech. (Also at CTM, I invited Cambridge University’s Jason Rentfrow – who proceeded to explain that some of the same Cambridge Analytica techniques applied to the 2016 Trump campaign could also work with music analysis.)
I used some related arguments to say that AI’s evolution in music was closely related to Muzak in 2019, too – well, partly because I’m always a fan of some media archaeology to understand new trends, maybe just because I’m a tech history nerd, in an article originally for CTM Festival:
Minds, Machines, and Centralisation: Why Musicians Need to Hack AI Now
Anyway, that’s not to promote my writing so much as explain why this so keenly interests me. The important point is that few people have gotten into how Spotify actually works, apart from just speculation, other than Liz Pelly.
It’s not all doom and gloom in this tome. As she’s done in her past writing, Pelly “finds hope in chronicling the artist-led fight for better models, pointing toward what must be done collectively to revalue music and create sustainable systems.”
So if you have some connection to creating digital music in some way (can’t imagine why you’re here), yes, this book should be next on your list.
More soon.
For kicks, let’s try embedding some nice Bluesky action too while we’re at it –
This book is genuinely going to blow the lid off Spotify’s shit internal practices. Explosive exposé you aren’t ready to be this mad.
— Peretsky (@peretsky.bsky.social) November 30, 2024 at 12:35 AM
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