Mood Machine – Liz Pelly

Spotify has been in the news more than usual this year, well ahead of the usual flood of coverage around the time their end of year Wrapped summaries come out, because this year marks their 20th anniversary. So, it was the perfect time to pick up Mood Machine, music journalist Liz Pelly’s take on “the costs of the perfect playlist”.

At the time of writing Mood Machine, Spotify had 615 million users, representing 30% of the music streaming market. Pelly undertook more than 100 interviews with industry experts and Spotify insiders to uncover the consequences of the ‘Spotify model’ of music streaming, and how artists are responding to changes in the way music is valued.

As per page 10, she starts from the premise that Spotify is ultimately an advertising company, not a culture company – music is simply a convenient vehicle for delivering advertising to a captive audience.

With that motivation comes a laser focus on metrics: how to get more listeners, keep them listening for longer, and sell their time to advertisers while keeping the costs of their attention to a minimum. This model has led to what Pelly and her interviewees call the gamification of music creation. Creators are encouraged to make art that responds to consumer metrics and meets KPIs, rather than art that’s intrinsically motivated by what moves them.

This model didn’t disrupt the major labels, as the most optimistic in the industry had hoped. Capitalism did as capitalism does, and streaming music became a race to the bottom (who can produce the most inoffensive, passive background noise for as little money as possible). Pelly doesn’t even pretend to be presenting a “balanced” view of Spotify. Mood Machine is a polemic.

I might have been spoiled by non-fiction writers like Patrick Radden Keefe, because I found Mood Machine a little dry. It’s an interesting and relevant subject, with fiercely held opinions and good points made by Pelly, but it lacked a strong narrative thread that would have made it a truly gripping read.

For all its facts and figures, the main thing I learned from Mood Machine is that I am not a typical Spotify user. The listener Pelly describes opens up the app and chooses from a range of Spotify-supplied playlists apparently curated to their tastes, and lets these playlists run with very little manual intervention. I can count on one hand the number of times I have listened to a playlist that Spotify’s editors or algorithms have curated for me. I create my own playlists, and listen to them exclusively, with the “repeat all” setting on so that Spotify doesn’t just play what they think I want to hear next. I open Spotify to listen to specific songs or artists that appeal to me, not to discover what it recommends I’d like. Judging by the stats in Pelly’s book, I’m in a very small minority. There is big, big business in the platform’s curated playlists and “discovery”.

I also got a bit of a reality check. As a long-time Swiftie, I expected at least a chapter to be dedicated to Taylor Swift famously (in my mind, anyway) removing her entire catalogue from the platform in order to pressure Spotify to pay artists more fairly. I thought that was a big part of Spotify’s history, a watershed moment in the streaming era. In Pelly’s account, it gets half a paragraph. Taylor Swift barely rates a mention, despite being the most-streamed artist in Spotify history.

For Spotify users with a specific interest in the history and machinations of the platform, especially those with a personal stake in the prevailing winds of the music industry, Mood Machine will be a fascinating and galvanising read. For the general reader looking to be gripped by a non-fiction book, it probably shouldn’t be first choice.

Read Mood Machine on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Mood Machine:

• “chapter after chapter of unrelenting pearl-clutching about the lack of artistic authenticity in music” – D.H.
• “Anyone paying $10 per month for unlimited access to all of the music in the world can’t realistically believe that they are putting food on the table for anyone.” – R. Snell
• “This book was written for socialist progressives who believe it’s a crime for a corporation to turn a profit” – Scientific K
• “Did they get Paris Hilton to narrate this book? The vocal fry and up speak makes it very hard to take anything this author says seriously. Then again if you like books narrated by valley girls, the audiobook is for you.” – Robert M. Joseph