Mood Machine, Liz Pelly's brilliant, deeply researched account of the streaming behemoth Spotify and its rise to power over the past two decades, was released last fall and quickly became a conversation-starter for those of us interested in building alternatives. The team at Mirlo expected it to offer a useful framework to think about our work—we were not disappointed! The book details how the ad-tech company came to become the world's largest music distributor, how they developed tools to juice their bottom line by filling their product with low quality ingredients, and what is at stake for independent music in particular.
As Pelly points out in the first chapter, "It should give readers pause that “a huge conspiracy” was one of the first phrases used to describe music streaming in the mainstream news media." (p.3) She pulls no punches from there, outlining with each of its first 17 chapters the strategies that the company has developed to become a central powerhouse of the music industry—at our expense.
This includes a deep dive into understanding playlists—there's a lot here that resonated with us. For example, she shows how Spotify used free user labor to promote themselves, tying user self identity closer to the brand, what they consume, and share with others. (This pattern is also adopted by other tech companies, like Apple and even Bandcamp.) Spotify then transitioned into editorially driven playlists, which were slowly supplanted by algorithmically generated ones. There's a slight rug pull happening here: because these playlists are for consumption purposes they're not actually there to create fans (p. 49). As documented by Pelly, and through our own conversations with labels like Constellation Recordsand individual artists, we know that these playlists can make your rent on any given week, but rarely turn over long term listeners. What the playlists do help with is turning listeners into data points. Spotify depends on our listening habits being constantly surveilled and machine readable, feeding them into their algorithms, reducible to vibes (p. 122). And this has impacted what kind of music we hear. Musicians are pushed towards creating music that will do well on playlists, and Spotify is able to insert AI slop into those playlists to push down the cent per minute they have to pay out to musicians.
Of course, playlists do incredibly well as formats of extended self, something most brand-forward organizations know very well. But they're also a convenient way for a large corporation to surveil us and invade our privacy, use our free labor, focus on the individual rather than the collective, and building an entire culture and shaping the fates of real and entire scenes (p. 100).
But as believers in building the alternatives, we were most excited by the 18th and final chapter which offers an overview of the emerging labor movement and alternatives. As she puts it,
Rethinking the future of music also requires rethinking profit motives and power structures, and challenging a system where a handful of entertainment and technology firms own so much of music. It requires investigating alternative models that are more cooperative, transparent, and artist-run, that support artists operating across diverse scales and practices, and that generally put people over profit. (p.218)
We couldn't agree more—and appreciated the mention on page 222 that "some former Resonate members were working on a new co-op vision." (Does that sound like anyone you've met on these here internets?) When the book came out last fall, we had been working together on Mirlo for a couple of years and had our own hunches about the unhealthy directions that the streaming giants were taking independent music.
We do feel the need to point out how the book's perspective is situated firmly within the North American independent music scene, from which Pelly makes an important argument about the need to remain actually independent as the meaning of the term and the histories it references face new kinds of threats from music streaming. It would have been useful to have more research on Spotify's impact on music around the world—it's bad, if you hadn't guessed—but it is also understandable that only so many angles could get coverage in one book. All told, Mood Machine gives a clear and unapologetic account of the dark times of today's music world—and an analysis that is clear and ultimately hopeful.
If we can understand that the root of the problem isn't just evil adtech billionaires but a whole system that has enabled them to thrive, this can guide us towards building a plurality of just alternatives as we fight for the music worlds we love together.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://mirlo.space/team/posts/767