I decided to read fifty-two books this year. Waiting around for agents to reject my latest novel is demoralizing. Plus, I lost a long-term content writing gig last fall — possibly to AI, possibly to a twenty-year-old remote worker who could use AI better than I.
Also, I’d become a bit of a sloth when it came to reading. Which just wasn’t right for a writer.
Liz Pelly’s new book “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist” was my Week 4 pick.
I’m not going to issue a spoiler alert. I’m not spoiling anything, just laying out the two main arguments of the book (so I don’t forget them when I get to, say, Week 48 and have to bullshit my way through conversations in which I pretend to be sharper than I am).
And anyway, Pelly’s findings won’t come as a surprise to anyone that’s been online roughly since 2007.
Now for the book...
Pelly divides Spotify’s malfeasance into two major streams of perniciousness: evil done towards consumers and evil done towards musicians.
Both are, by now, familiarly revolting. But the extent of Spotify’s crimes against culture are bizarre and pathetic even by Facebook standards.
First, the consumers.
Pelly argues that Spotify has devalued our connection with music. Having cheap music everywhere, whenever we want it, we’re no longer listening to music. We’re hearing noise. This is especially apt after Spotify learned to game our experience by injecting ghost recordings — and then AI slop — into its auto-generated, never-ending playlists. I won’t go into details, i.e. provide links, but this is no secret.
In my own experience, I listen to whole albums and real artists I choose, rarely drifting off into Spotify goo. So I’m really not a victim here.
The real problem with Spotify is that their business has been a sham from the start.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s interest was never music per se, as he claims in front of cameras. Internal documents show that music, as the function of the app, was an afterthought. Ek’s real plan was to use an app — any app — to sell ad space, his expertise. That in itself marks the end of Spotify’s bona fides in my book.
But it gets much worse.
Spotify, posing as a disruptor of the status quo and a savior of musicians from the existential threats of piracy, has actually been in bed with the corporate music machine from day one, setting up its system of extraction and enrichment for their profit.
In other words, Spotify has not only never been about music, it’s never been about the artist either.
And here’s where the true perversity comes into play.
In order to convince independent artists that they (Spotify) were actually their champions, Ek and his engineers invented a bunch of grifty tools (Marketplace) that they claimed musicians could use to compete on the same footing as the big-budget, major-label acts on the platform.
Which, as Squarespace, Facebook, IG, Google (the list goes on) have proven again and again, is a gigantic lie. Sustainable “solopreneurship” is largely a myth designed by the Big Web to turn individual “creators” into cash funnels of one. In Spotify’s case, the tools to do this are all paid services whose subscriptions go right back into Spotify’s own pockets, squeezing the already squeezed artists further.
Remember, Spotify doesn’t pay artists per stream, they use a black box pro rata system whereby smaller artists see less than pennies.
At the end of the book, Pelly argues for collectivization as the only route to defeating the monetized self-atomization proposed (and enforced) by Big Music.
There are voices out there right now crying in the post-Spotify wilderness. I’ve got my ears open. Because I agree with Pelly: we need to do something. And I hope we can do better than Tidal, which is now partially owned by Sprint.
For my part, I’m going to start buying my music straight from the labels and artists I listen to, as I should have been doing eons ago.
The only problem is podcasts. I haven’t figured out a solution to that beyond RSS, where possible. If you have any ideas, let me know.