Mood Machine
The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
By Liz Pelly
I haven’t read this book yet. Have you? I have read some summaries and reviews (links welcome too). And it has been mentioned on Working together to put on workshops / talks / etc.
I was looking for a Wikipedia page about the author but found this instead, which is on-topic: Controversy over fake artists on Spotify - Wikipedia.
Came across this from @simon’s recommendation, accessed it, and now it’s on my list!
Wondering whether an “async reading group” is a thing, where people start reading it at their own pace, and share what comes to mind in a thread like this one?
Fake artists, fake art, fake news, real fiat
I was looking for a Wikipedia page about the author but found this instead […] Controversy over fake artists on Spotify - Wikipedia.
Remember the story from a few years back? Stereotypical East Euro evil genius bots own playlists of fake music using stolen accs, scams Spotify out of a neat bundle, and … I think story used to end with that person getting caught and sued?
That’s what I remember, anyway. Seems search results might’ve been scrubbed… maybe to promote the start of this story, given it got out – but obscure how it turned out in the end… maybe they settled, or acqui-hired him? Or maybe breaking news just get more traffic than outcomes. Curious what everyone else’s search results might say.
Whole thing strikes me as the mafia model. Spotify turns out to have been doing something similar, if not the exact same thing – but at scale, and against the general public, so with the associated externalities. It’s pretty much the middleman scamming both sides – providing fake music to listeners and fake impressions to the advertisers.
But you don’t steal from the house, the house always wins! And as long as you stick to that ground rule, you’re free to use the house as a breeding ground for scamming each other. It’s illicit evolution!
I’m under the impression most centralized platforms close their eyes to this sort of botting in order to inflate numbers. A little hyperstition work is nothing special if you got the requisite capital, namewash it as “bootstrapping” if you like. So it makes sense for them to go after a comparative small-timer whose operation would risk exposing theirs (which ran on “don’t be evil” technooptimism till it could get ingrained in people’s habits, familiar story.)
The only surprising thing about this (or the only thing that used to surprise me, anyway) is how little people cared for yet another round of world-shaking revelations. A firehose of experiences is best to scrub all traces of malfeasance, and mass media is happy to provide! And people are exhausted because they have no alternative, having never conceived of a chill without Netflix.
Some more thoughts provoked
I browsed quickly through the book just now and it’s rich with facts and references. Starts out strong:
I’ve long been confounded by the expectation that we simply accept the dealings of the powerful as unexplainable.
I do love when an unsaid generalized assumption is pointed out in a novel way. Power must be studied in order to be dismantled!
It ain’t pretty, though: those who are driven to study the powers which work against them, are most at risk of being corrupted and coopted by the same powers. It’s that Nietzschean cybernetics - maybe worth having a sort of mental firewall about, but how does one know it’s tuned right?
[…] When it comes to [DIY] recordings and labels, transparency is held as a foundational ideal worth aspiring to. With music streaming, it was jarring watching independent artists become convinced to accept a new system that no one could understand. […] This is all to say, the very concept of music streaming was designed for the benefit of extremely popular, major label music. But independent musicians have also been expected to conform to its one-size-fits-all model [!]
It’s what makes me doubt sometimes: by building our own social media and streaming platforms, et cetera, can we outcompete tech behemoths simply on quality and ethics?
Or are we missing our own layer of astroturf? I don’t see the social pressure component of shaming people IRL for using Spotify or Instagram, same way people are liable to consider you crazy for not using or liking these oh-so-convenient things? Every time I point out to a fellow anarchist that they are uncritically using the tools of the oppressor for personal enjoyment, they just kinda get mad at me for it.
I sure don’t like how graffiti – from kids’ scrawlings to proper art pieces – has started to include Instagram handles, so I’ve taken to crossing out the circle-in-square (or @ sign) from them every time I see it – same as when I see that “hooked cross” thingy.
Anyone else writing on walls is welcome to pick up this healthy habit!
It is a story of precarity, hyper-commercialization, individualism, and all of the above being obfuscated under the notion of “vibes.”
Sure, this little pet peeve of mine right here. Taking bets on how long will I last until starvation if I respond with “ew” every time the “vibes” are the whole point of someone’s argument, rather than at most some flair to drive home a point 
Language modulates perception – don’t let corporations dictate the vernacular!
There are another two book possibly worth reading about Spotify:
After the first one there’s a limited series on Netflix, which I watched, and according to that one, Spotify was created in order to make then-already-pirated music much easier to access - instead of downloading .torrent files and then waiting for download. This was Ek’s drive: to offer instant click play - but at the beginning he wasn’t considering neither the labels, neither the artists. It was simply piracy made one click away.
People forget you used to be able to add your own library to Spotify, and that a large chunk of the music on there wasn’t on there legally!
This is a core thing we’ve talked about at Mirlo before. Does it make sense to compete with capitalists on the same playing field? What does it look like to take our ball and play elsewhere? Is it building a giant co-op to compete with them? And what do our experiments to compete tell us? What do we learn from them?