Pitiable playlists

Twenty-five years ago, when compact disc sales were peaking—and let’s be honest, those things weren’t cheap—listening to all the world’s music 24/7 for $10 a month sounded too good to be true. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever before, but according to Liz Pelly accessibility comes with a steep cost. In Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria, 288 pp.), Pelly explores the darker side of Spotify’s technological sway over our listening habits.

The story starts with the Swedish company’s founding in 2006. Spotify claims to have saved the music industry from rampant piracy with its goal of helping artists “unlock the potential of human creativity,” but Pelly strips away the corporate mythmaking. The original goal was to find a way to stream ads—only later did music become the justification.

Spotify struck equity deals with the three major music labels, who in light of declining CD sales were looking for new forms of revenue. But Spotify didn’t merely become an alternate delivery channel for music. It began to dictate how music was both created and consumed.

Getting on a playlist could make or break a musician, and many started writing songs to succeed in the streaming era. Song lengths got shorter, choruses got pushed to the front, and many musicians homogenized their sound.

The primary imperative for developers is to keep users engaged with an app as long as possible, so Spotify began tweaking the user interface to increase engagement. The company’s real success came from prompting passive laid-back listening. The app encouraged users to find a playlist to suit their mood, and just let it run.

While Spotify wants continuous user engagement, it wants to pay as little as possible for the music. And there’s a calculated lack of transparency in its attempts to turn a profit. The company commissions cheap music with which it can populate its playlists, and it asks labels and artists to pay for preferred placement in the algorithm. Users, however, think they’re receiving recommendations based on their own tastes.

Pelly convincingly critiques Spotify’s exploitative practices, but at times she veers into less persuasive criticisms of capitalism. The book’s biggest weakness is her attempt to offer alternatives that value artistic creativity. The fact is that while most people like music, they don’t want to pay much for it, and many don’t care too much about quality.