My year started with what has become a running gag: My bandmate Will Venmoed the other three of us $2.50 each, an even split of the $10 in streaming royalties our band made in 2024. For a long time, we never had our music online anywhere other than Bandcamp, knowing intuitively and through our community that streaming was an uneven playing field unlikely ever to benefit us more than paying enough for a single pitcher of Budweiser at the local American Legion post per annum. But when we switched labels (a different friend offered to take over putting our tapes out), he insisted we get on the platforms and offered to do all the work, so what the hell.
Reading Liz Pelly’s new book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, my knee-jerk reaction was that we were right to stay off of streaming: How dare these pontificating ad men make a buck off our backs? Liz and I had played the same bill once upon a time when my band came through New York, chatted when she came to play in Western Mass, and exchanged some emails about how podcasts suck and radio rules. To my delight, her years of diligent, sometimes bitingly funny reporting on Spotify in particular and streaming in general have culminated in a new book that, while rage-stoking, stops short of calling for a mass boycott of the streaming giant — although she clarified when we spoke that she does not disagree with the tactic per se. Rather, whether we’re interested in building new modes of economically valuing music or simply freeing the music we create from being reduced to “streambait,” Liz insists the answer lies in keeping our musical communities strong and organizing for a better future together. In the week before her book’s release, the two of us caught up over Zoom.
Brian Zayatz: Let me know if this seems like too heady of a question to start with, but to me, it felt like the book kind of moved around between a very materialist analysis of what happens when music is commodified in the way that Spotify does, and then some of the more downstream effects that are harder to quantify, but very noticeable in the culture and in the art that’s being made. So I wanted to ask, is there one of those frameworks that you feel more drawn to, or that motivated you more to write the book?
Liz Pelly: Yeah, it’s interesting. I definitely feel like a way I’ve been describing it to people is, there’s the things about Spotify and the music streaming ecosystem and the music business that got me interested in writing about streaming, which I think had more to do with the playlist ecosystem and playlist creators emerging as the new gatekeepers of the streaming era, and the effects of algorithms on culture. But then I think that the thing that kept me interested in it over the years was this more political perspective on the emergence of the new music labor movement, and rethinking the ways in which artists might get compensated, like the material realities of how streaming has impacted musicians’ lives.
So I definitely feel like in some ways, the series of proposals that gets pointed to towards the end of the book around the importance of public funding for music, the importance of music’s place in the public library, basic income proposals, the music labor movement — that kind of constellation of ideas about how to revalue music to me feels like the book’s purpose for existing. And to get there, I think, requires drawing readers into a conversation about how the changing dynamics of the music industry impact them. So in some ways, it kind of uses the story of how streaming has reshaped listening for the user to lead them into a conversation about how it has impacted the material conditions for musicians, if that makes sense.
Brian: This book feels sort of like half-journalism, half-manifesto, and I wondered what were you looking to for inspiration for a form like that?
Liz: That’s a great question. I think of it as reported criticism, or a reported essay. And part of that came from the broader reporting project that also has included a series of essays since 2017. I think at a certain point I really started reflecting on what the point of tech journalism is. And I just started to really believe that if there’s not a perspective to it, it’s unclear what its purpose is. Because, especially in music, at a certain point, covering streaming services and covering music technology just becomes repetitive around these kind of obvious ideas about the impact of commercialism on art. And everyone knows that the music industry is exploitative, and that commercialism is bad for creativity. So a straightforward reporting project with a more traditional journalistic approach started to feel harder to justify.
I have gotten this question a few times about the book being not just journalistic but also having a strong perspective, and I feel like, ultimately, the broader reporting project is compelled by the idea of contracting the influence of corporate power in our lives and in music. And I think that there’s a lot of journalists and journalistic institutions that feel that journalists aren’t supposed to have a strong sense of their own perspective, or bias or argument that they’re trying to make in their work, and that you should just be committed to reporting the truth. And obviously that is extremely important, but at a certain point, if you have a commitment to the truth, I think that you should also have a commitment to contracting corporate power. And if you don’t have a commitment to minimizing the influence of corporate power on culture or on journalism, I don’t necessarily know if we would agree on what the point of journalism is.
Brian: That kind of gets to another question I wanted to ask you, which is, as someone who is both a musician and a journalist, and maybe you might call yourself an activist, too, do those processes inform each other for you? And when you’re working with these ideas, what comes out in the music versus what comes out in the journalism?
Liz: I don’t think I would refer to myself as an activist, but I definitely participate in organizing projects. Like, I’ve been involved in all ages show booking for a really long time. And I feel like something I think about a lot is how to use the show space as an organizing space, whether it be putting on fundraiser shows, or inviting people to speak or table at shows, or simply just booking shows that are all ages and accessible community spaces. I definitely feel like being involved in grassroots show booking and music spaces gives you a certain lens on the importance of localism, and also gives you a certain power analysis, if that’s not too much of a stretch to say.
I don’t really write that much music, to be honest. I’m in a band. It’s part of how I stay connected to a certain sense of music community and stuff. But yeah, there are definitely connections between themes that come up in songs that I write and themes that come up in journalistic work as well.
Brian: Yeah, there’s a joke in the Narks that every song has a song version and an article version, between Will and I both being journalists. But I think your songs are a little less literal and pointed than ours are.
Liz: That’s some of my favorite kind of music. While I was working on my book, I became really obsessed with the debut cassette by this band called Sunday Compost, whose lyrics are about similar themes to things that I write about in some of the chapters of my book. And I don’t know, I love when you listen to a song and it’s almost kind of like, “Oh, this song could be a book.”
I do take a lot of influence from certain musicians in the writing. When you’re a writer, sometimes people will be like, “What music do you listen to when you write?” And for me, I feel like it’s less about what music I listen to when I write, and more music that I turn to for the sort of political perspective that I’m hoping to embody as a writer. This article that I wrote about Spotify for the Baffler started with a Priests quote, and the other day, someone was interviewing me, and they were asking me about that, and I thought that was cool, that somebody remembered that.
Brian: I won’t say playlist here, but is there going to be a Mood Machine mixtape that we can expect to accompany the book?
Liz: I actually did a show on 8 Ball Radio that was kind of exactly that, like music that speaks to the spirit of the book, or music that has inspired me in my thinking about culture. But it’s kind of funny because there also definitely could be a mix of music that’s more sort of like the sound of the book, because the book does discuss a lot of music, whether it be chill playlists, or lo-fi hip-hop or hyperpop or whatever. I actually really like a lot of hyperpop, but it would be quite a different soundtrack. I made the mix for 8 Ball, that was sort of like songs that inspire me, and it almost felt like, I don’t even know if this makes sense as an accompaniment to this book, because it doesn’t really reflect the story that’s being told in the book.
Brian: It’s kind of making me think of Jeremy Atherton Lin — he wrote a book called Gay Bar and he did one or two NTS shows that were sort of pairing passages with the from the book with some of the club scenes that he’s talking about during the second half of the 20th century. With your book, you could almost take a more scientific approach, like, “This is what hyperpop sounded like in 2015, versus after the Spotify genre label got applied to it.”
But I wanted to ask, too, about some of the things you didn’t include in the book. I’m thinking of your previous reporting on Spotify’s foray into the podcast world, and some high profile moves by artists like Neil Young that amount to what feel like fumbling attempts to break free of Spotify or go some different route. I think, especially in the latter case, these can be some of the things that break through to people who might not follow this issue so closely. So what went into the choice to steer clear of those topics in the book?
Liz: I think I really specifically wanted to write a book about music, not podcasting. But I do think it’s really interesting that so many of these high profile celebrity boycotts of Spotify have been tied to issues of misinformation and investments in the podcast ecosystem, and not quite in response to the poor treatment of artists, or the minuscule payments for the vast majority of musicians. I question the effectiveness of celebrity boycotts anyway, but I do think it’s kind of interesting. I feel like maybe the most effective thing would be if a really famous musician joined UMAW or something like that. That would be more interesting to me at this point than a really famous musician being like, “Delete your accounts,” or something.
I think that any sort of call for boycotts or changes in consumer behavior really does need to come from an organized effort on behalf of musicians. It’s not really something that I would ever call for if a musician’s union of some sort wasn’t calling for it. I think it would be kind of strange for an individual writer to suggest something like that.
Brian: That makes total sense. I also wanted to ask about “Perfect Fit Content,” which is what your Harper’s piece was just about, and is in the book. The thing that I’m not getting is, what is the economic impetus to create so much slop? I don’t know if you would use that word, but it feels like people are talking a lot about slop these days across all kinds of media. And I guess I would put it under that umbrella. I wonder if you agree, and feel like you have an understanding of why there’s so much constant doubling down on it. And where is that headed?
Liz: Well, at least for Spotify, this type of content being created by their PFC partners [contracted musicians creating “vibe”-based music] is being licensed to them at a lower royalty rate, so they’re saving money by having people stream this content instead of having them stream music at the full royalty rate negotiated in their licensing deals. So it’s a pretty straightforward cost-saving initiative on their part.
I guess to me, what’s more interesting is the extent that they’ve gone to keep it hidden from the public, because there have been think pieces and online accusations against Spotify for engaging in these practices for almost a decade and they have never felt compelled to be transparent about where these recordings are coming from, or the terms under which they’ve been licensed. Which tells you that, in some ways, they know that the public might take issue with the fact that they’re being served music that is made by these ghost artists, or under pseudonyms.
In some ways, it kind of goes against a lot of the narratives and mythologies upon which Spotify has shaped its brand as the ultimate discovery platform. Because who is going to be excited about discovering a bunch of stock music? But that’s essentially what it is, and it’s deceptive to listeners, in that it’s not labeled as such. Since the beginning, Spotify has referred to its playlists as editorial and in any other context, if something that was referring to itself as editorial included recommendations that were impacted by secret commercial partnerships, that would be considered misleading, or it would be considered editorially shoddy, at the very least.
Brian: Totally. I was just reading it wondering, are they going to have enough of it at some point? If it’s not something that people actually want, and it’s supposed to be for people who are listening absent-mindedly, it feels like we’re headed towards some kind of bubble in terms of these big streaming platforms, whether it’s music, TV, movies, social media, producing things that people don’t actually want.
Liz: This is more speculative, but something that has come up a lot in interviews with former Spotify employees is how easy it would be for generative AI to be creating a lot of this music. One of the things that would be really beneficial is oversight of the contracts between the musicians that make this music and the companies that are commissioning it from them, because there’s something that gets referred to as synthetic data, which are data sets that get used in generative AI technologies when there’s not enough real world data to fuel a generative AI system. In some ways, I feel like it’s not super hard to imagine a world in which these production music companies are commissioning this music from artists and then using it as a data source for generative AI music that they could then license at an even cheaper rate to streaming companies.
One thing that I really tried to get across is that the artists that are making this music are also being screwed over, because there are some musicians who see it as a side hustle, or just another gig in a long string of gigs that you use to piece together a living. And this practice lays a lot of groundwork for listeners to inevitably — not inevitably — eventually, potentially — accept generative AI content on their lean-back playlists. I definitely don’t mean to use the word inevitable. Because none of this is inevitable. It’s all created.
