Play It Again, Spotify

Countless luxuries have become such commonplaces that we thoughtlessly forget them. We can control the temperature of our rooms with the click of a button, get deliveries of fresh food right to our door, and we have basically every song ever made, from every corner of the world, at our fingertips, ready to blast out of a crisp sounding speaker whenever we fancy. Gone are the days of illegally streaming music through a virus-filled desktop, or, God forbid, going out and buying a CD.

If you’re like me, Generation Z and too late to save when it comes to algorithms seeping into your oblivious brain, you probably haven’t thought about this since the last days of LimeWire. You probably didn’t notice your last day of making a real effort to acquire music or your first day of streaming it. Unlike Netflix and other video streaming services, which have noticeably lowered the standards of film and TV in my lifetime by incentivizing quantity over quality, the repercussions of music streaming services like Spotify on the actual artistic quality of what they deliver to us so seamlessly has always seemed negligible. I’ve always had great music taste, so unique and against the grain, right? Spotify just gives me a helping hand. It turns out this is wrong, at least according to Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist by music journalist Liz Pelly.

Pelly's examination into Spotify starts with a simple question: What happens to music when it becomes not about artistic expression and more about stock prices? And through anonymous interviews, insider gossip, and stories of pissed off Swedes—where the company is headquartered—she concludes the answer to this question is music that is "just inoffensive enough not to get shut off." The playlists pushed on us, Pelly explains, are largely centered on mood—Wake Up Happy, A Perfect Day, Feeling Down, Drifting Apart, Sad Beats, Devastating, etc.—and allow the company to flood the listener with cheap, monotonous songs that all sound alike. There are multiple reasons for this, the primary one being "to collect and sell the data of how we are feeling to advertisers, allowing them to target ads on Spotify by moods and emotions."

Pelly also alleges a lot of the "filler" songs that do well under this model aren’t real songs recorded by real people at all. The company, she writes, is "filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts." Spotify denies this, and hit back with a statement claiming "we do not and never have created ‘fake’ artists and put them on Spotify playlists."

Pelly’s case is compelling, however. Her findings reveal around 20 songwriters are behind the work of more than 500 "artists," and that thousands of their songs on Spotify have been streamed millions of times. But according to industry insiders, it is more probably the case that creators have caught wind of these milquetoast tunes getting millions of streams, and they want in on the action. Real creatives no doubt react to the general soundscape around them, Spotified as it is, too, which exacerbates the same effect. They wouldn’t be the first to take advantage of the algorithm. Songs in general are getting shorter because artists are financially incentivized to make them short. Singer Mark Ronson told the Guardian in 2019: "All your songs have to be under 3:15 because if people don’t listen to them all the way to the end they go into this ratio of ‘non-complete heard,’ which sends your Spotify rating down." Considerations like this sound more like those of a videogamer working on his stats than an artist deep in the process of creative expression.

Is it that surprising a $100 billion company wants to get in our brains and get their smutty hands on our data? Did anyone ever believe Spotify’s claim that they were in the business of "saving" the music industry from piracy? Not really. In the words of the president, "everything is computer." What is more surprising, perhaps, is the story Pelly tells of the inception of Spotify, and how it was created by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon in 2006, originally as an advertising platform. Lorentzon himself has told this story: "I had knowledge of ads from Tradedoubler. But the traffic source we were debating. Should it be product search? Should it be movies, or audiobooks? And then we ended up with music. We had no clue about how hard it would be to reach the record license agreements."

"At what point does a recommendation system stop recommending songs and start recommending a whole idea of culture?" Pelly asks. This is a big question, and one that hits hard. And while Mood Machine isn't the Luddite rejection of progress I was expecting, it is an emotional plea for some humanity in our algorithms. But I will say one thing: We as consumers should take some responsibility. We don’t have to use Spotify as anything other than a CD rack, searching out and playing our favorite tunes at our own leisure, and turning off the dopamine drip whenever we have had our fix.

And one more thing: I deleted Spotify years ago, when my now-husband was sending me links to songs on Apple Music as a way of flirting with me. Now we live together in a house with shelves full of records, many of them full of songs by Pink Floyd or Bob Dylan that are more than 10 minutes long, and others full of classical concertos. So when Pelly quotes Daniel Ek’s saying that "our only competitor is silence," that isn’t quite true.

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist
by Liz Pelly
Simon & Schuster, 288 pp., $28.99

Kara Kennedy is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.

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