Liz Pelly at UMass: Spotify, the Mood Machine

The UMass Responsible Tech Coalition hosted journalist, editor and musician Liz Pelly to talk about her new book, “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist”. She’s introduced by my friend and colleague Mike Sugarman, who has interviewed her for our podcast Reimagining the Internet, and followed Liz’s career in DIY music for years. Mike contextualizes Liz’s work at Silent Barn in Bushwick, Brooklyn, an independent music venue organized as a community-led space. Silent Barn was organized along many of the principles of Occupy, supported almost entirely by ticket sales and sadly closed in 2018… but Mike sees Silent Barn as a model for how the music industry could be designed differently, a question that Liz asks and answers within her new book.

Mike namechecks Nathan Schneider, a media scholar at UC Boulder whose work on online platforms warns of the risks of digital “feudalism” – we have little to no power over the spaces like Twitter or Facebook we interact within. This, in turn, might damage our democratic and participatory muscles. The solution is to get involved with community organizations where our input is real and impactful. With that in mind, Mike suggests that involvement in projects like Silent Barn can be a counterpoint to faceless systems like Spotify that entertain but disempower us

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Liz began researching Spotify in 2016, but it took much longer for a book to emerge. In 2016, Liz was working as a freelance writer and tending bar and booking gigs for Silent Barn. Liz’s work writing about music for publications like the Boston Phoenix has been complemented by building the DIY music scene, hosting gigs and putting up touring musicians, giving her a skeptical perspective on the music industry.

In 2017, inspired in part by Astra Taylor’s work The People’s Platform, Liz began writing about consolidation and corporate power in internet culture spaces. She wasn’t a big Spotify user at the time, but became fascinated with the app as a pathway into understanding how corporate consolidation was changing music. She began writing about “backdoors” into Spotify playlists – her first piece on Spotify in 2017 asks about how music recommendations put certain artists and songs in front of users of the platform, and how the service’s “editorial voice” came into being.

Pelly’s book Mood Machine is “a 90,000 word answer to those questions”. Her sources behind the book were the people she met in her work with Silent Barn and led to dialog with music executives, artists, music writers and others with insights on Spotify’s weird journey from “a search bar for all music” to a world of algorithmically promoted AI music slush, recommendations based on payola and artist exploitation. The goal of the book is to debunk some of the myths of a platform like Spotify and to reveal the actual mechanisms at work behind the profitable service.

In particular, Pelly is interested in the myth of Spotify as a neutral meritocracy, a space in which the best work rises algorithmically to the top. The reality is more about arrogant billionaires overconfidently celebrating their machines and ignoring the social problems they leave behind. To tell this sometimes hidden history of Spotify, Pelly interviewed over 100 people, many of them artists affected by the rise of the platform. She offers this as a “pro-artist” work, noting that it’s strange to have to put yourself in the “pro-artist” camp. Swedish journalists, who covered the platform during its emergence, were also an important source.

So were internal documents from Spotify, including Slack conversations, sometimes shared from former employees. It’s a journalistic book, not an academic history, Pelly explains, and includes everyone from activists protesting against Spotify to shows the platform threw in Brooklyn, to founder Daniel Ek’s Twitter account and YouTube videos of Spotify execs talking about the platform at inception. The book brought her twice to Sweden, including a trip to Ek’s hometown, the Stockholm suburb of Rågsved, which houses a community music space much like the one Pelly lived at and helped run.

Pelly’s initial interest in Spotify focused on playlists and the notion of playlist creators as the new “gatekeepers” to music distribution. But over time, the focus shifted to labor movements: the ways in which the commodification of music by services like Spotify have changed the experience of being a musician. She notes the emergence of “ghost artists”, music commissioned at discount royalty rate from AIs or session musicians to create tracks for playlists for sleeping or studying. This connects to the power of algorithms in shaping what we pay attention to and hear… and what we pay for. Spotify thinks of itself as a “two sided marketplace” selling music to consumers and algorithmic promotion and advertising to musicians. In effect, services like Spotify end up emerging as the new bosses in the music industry, displacing music execs.

Reading from chapter 8 of the book, Pelly points out that listeners rarely get to see how much data the platform is collecting on them, except at year’s end with Spotify Unwrapped. The nature of the data visualization changes every year – one year, it focused on the “aura” of the music listeners encountered, working with a mystic to create colorful squares to represent the mood of the music. This vision of mass personalization turns music from a community and collective expression into a moment of personal expression: “make the music revolve around me”. What results, Pelly believes, is a deeply alienated way of appreciating music. You know what the machine thinks you like, but you don’t know why, and you can’t challenge it when it’s wrong. You’re sorted into a silo rather than encouraged to connect with the people building scenes and communities around musics.

Taja Cheek (who records as L’Rain) tells Pelly that we can no longer agree on a common view of history and facts, and that hyperpersonalization drives us into individual cultural silos as well, at the expense of the musicians creating this “content” in the first place. Pelly looks to musicians, not just businesspeople, as the people with possible solutions to Spotifycation of the music industry. American musicians cannot legally unionize – as independent artists, they would be considered a “cartel” – but musicians are starting to form solidarity organizations, protesting the financial injustices of streaming services. She looks at how public libraries are beginning to fund local streaming services, which provide access to local musicians who might not otherwise get carriage (and certainly not much revene) from huge networks like Spotify. What’s instructive about local, small-scale streaming services is not technological innovation, but the ways that communities can put forward alternative business models that are fairer to musicians and to listeners.

Pelly interviewed a librarian in Edmonton, Alberta, who launched a local digital music poject. That included conversations with local artists about the design of the network, including a conversation with fifty local musicians to help codesign the service. Another example of a social, not technical, hack is Catalytic Sounds, a co-op of 30 avant-jazz artists based around Chicago, where the $5 monthly subscription fee for streams of original music goes 50% to support the platform and 50% split between the 30 creators.

She closes with the last paragraph of the book (“not the last paragraph of the book, but the last paragraph I wrote, if that makes sense). The ineffability of music is at risk if we don’t protect both the musicians who create these works and our own emotions and choice.

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