You Can’t Outrun Spotify
As a consumer-facing product, Spotify has sucked for years. Whatever utilitarian elegance the platform might’ve had in its early days has given way to a confusing, ugly algorithm blob of videos, podcasts, and audiobooks you don’t want as you mosey about trying to find the music you do. As I write this, my “Home” tab is being dominated by an autoplaying tech-bro clip about artificial general intelligence, which Spotify has decided to shove in my face because it’s “trending.” It’s a clear indication the Swedish company is well in the midst of the tech-platform cycle writer Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification.” Specifically, having captured a massive user base and facing pressure to actually make money, Spotify no longer worries about its quality as it tries to suck as much marrow from the user’s bones as possible.
But is the worm finally turning? Though Spotify is still music streaming’s resident behemoth with 626 million users, last month’s Wrapped, often a marketing boon for the company, was more muted than ever. Users expressed sharp disappointment with the lack of data specificity they were accustomed to getting in the past. Some observed what seemed to be the use of sloppy generative AI, which looks even worse against the context of Spotify’s continued layoffs. Meanwhile, some notable musicians, including RAYE and Amy Allen, have announced that they won’t be attending the company’s Grammy Songwriter of the Year party in protest of the streamer’s paltry royalty rates. That comes on the heels of the National Music Publishers’ Association filing complaints with the Federal Trade Commission over Spotify’s use of its members’ lyrics in podcast and remix features, which they claim are copyright violations, and effort to bundle music with audiobooks in new subscription plans, which they argue will further drive down royalties.
All of which is to say, the release of Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist is well timed. I was hungry for a book like this. Pelly, a veteran music journalist, was early in treating Spotify with sober skepticism. Here she draws from over a hundred interviews with a mix of former Spotify employees and actors from different corners of the music ecosystem to produce a work that illustrates, through the lens of the company’s ascent, what the streaming world it helped usher in has done to the broad ecology of musical creation writ large but also to the culture of music consumption. Plenty has been written about the rise of Spotify, including 2019’s Spotify Teardown and 2021’s The Spotify Play, both of which Pelly cites. But Mood Machine stands out as the definitive book on how we should think about Spotify as a phenomenon, not necessarily because her account is the most comprehensively reported, but because Pelly provides a sustained look at how the company has affected, and continues to affect, the world it took over.
Pelly’s resulting image is apocalyptic. At a time where the music ecology around Spotify continues to wither away, its bid to become an all-consuming platform means growing potential for the complete collapse of an engaged music culture and its replacement by a parallel world where music is just filler. “The suggestion that the businesses of pop music, mood-enhancing background sounds, and independent art-making ought to all live on the same platform, under the same economic arrangements, and the same tools of engagement, is a recipe for everything being flattened out into one ceaseless chill-out stream,” she writes. Pelly’s most striking contribution is her observation of where Spotify’s incentive structure seems to be pushing us: toward some sort of cyberpunkean cultural future where the platform fully recontextualizes music as means for passive mood regulation, which, as Pelly illustrates, is pretty much how it’s viewed music for years. It doesn’t take too much of a stretch to see how the rise of artificial intelligence makes this all far worse. In addition to “ghost artists” the company is accused of deploying to pack playlists with stock music and further reduce royalty rates, Spotify is already littered with white-noise streams made by platform-gaming actors that box out actual music; imagine what’s going to happen when that technology allows them to scale their efforts further.
Of course, Spotify isn’t singularly responsible for the degradation of music ecologies. And to be sure, you can tumble down a deep rabbit hole around how the pre-streaming music industry was far from a good one; there are endless stories of how commercial radio and the corporate consolidation of music labels upheld a grossly unfair system to begin with. But Spotify is responsible for carving out its own dominance off a business model that has further devalued both the production and consumption of music down to an atomic scale. Pelly cites the musician and writer Damon Krukowski, who wrote a recurring column on artist royalties in the streaming era for Pitchfork: “When I started making records, the model of economic exchange was exceedingly simple: make something, price it for more than it costs to manufacture, and sell it if you can. The model now seems closer to financial speculation.” What’s also different is how Spotify has fully captured those incumbent corporate actors in the service of a marginally new system that deepens and accentuates the crappiness of the old one, with the same overarching issue of a small number of winners being powerful enough to set the tone of not really wanting anything else. Spotify has its competitors, certainly, like Apple Music and Tidal, but they’re not really alternatives so much as lesser expressions of the same problem.
Was it ever a good deal? Sure, the affordances of tech platforms are such that it’s easier than ever for an artist to get noticed. But it’s never been harder to make a living off each individual work of art. And while Spotify might give me access to almost every song I can think of, the experience of overabundance has the tendency to produce a siloing effect. We’re losing other things, too, like a sense of a work ever existing in its own context. I’m not what you’d call a music person — my biography isn’t tied up in sifting through record stores — but music is still important to my life. In other words, I am a fan of the art form in the way most people are, so it’s notable that my primary exposure to any music education lies in little boxes containing brief nuggets of description, vetted to match Spotify’s corporate-friendly disposition, which are shoved somewhere in the tight real estate of the app when I hit play on a song. Absent a vibrant music culture, and faced with an internet where Google has grown unreliable in pointing you to credible independent information, those boxes are increasingly the default points of knowledge. This is a terrible thing. “It’s an era where we can’t agree on basic facts of history in general, and then we’re giving corporations the power to create their own versions of culture, and therefore their own version of history,” Taja Cheeks, a musician who performs as L’Rain, tells Pelly.
Further complicating matters is Spotify’s ever-growing expansionary ambitions. Driven by a profit-seeking structure that nudges it to continuously find new ground to conquer, the company has spent much of the past few years trying to diversify its supply chain. I came up writing about the podcast world, and a good chunk of its recent history tells the story of Spotify’s incursion as it works to become a one-stop shop for all audio products. Recently, it’s even started to try to cross over into digital video, hungry to chase the ad dollars dominated by YouTube. All these machinations are in service to the core metric they have to chase, which is time spent on platform. Pelly cites a former employee who recalls CEO Daniel Ek musing that the company’s “only competitor is silence,” illustrating the hubristically expansive terrain that Spotify views as its entryway into the consumer’s life. The statement reflects Spotify’s totalizing ambitions, echoing a rather similar thing Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos made back in 2017, gassing up the platform’s potential to investors: “When you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night,” he said. “We’re competing with sleep, on the margins.” This echo makes sense, as Spotify and Netflix are specific expressions of how tech platforms in general have successfully colonized our entire lives.
So, how do we get out of this hellhole? Pelly prompts us to think beyond placing our hopes in some new technical innovation or start-up to “fix” music streaming, let alone the music industry, because it is the larger systems of business, politics, and culture that have led us to a place where we as a society have allowed music, and art, to be devalued so thoroughly. “We can’t just think about changing music, or changing music technology,” she writes. “That’s not enough. We need to think about the world we want to live in, and where music fits into that vision.” In essence, she’s arguing for revolution, and she peppers Mood Machine’s concluding chapter with various examples of how people around the world are trying to lay down the seeds of that revolution with immediate localized projects, like public libraries serving as archives and the formation of music co-ops. It’s a hopeful note that inevitably feels way too small, perhaps precious, given the overwhelming scale of the structural problem. But you have to start somewhere, and in any case, there’s a through-line to the projects she highlights: They all emphasize turning away from the screen in favor of engaging with real-world communities and spaces. Perhaps that’s the clearest articulation of the answer. To get out of this digital hellhole, you should probably literally leave it.
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