It’s not just musicians who starve with Spotify. Turns out we all do

The mixtape was always a gift. Hours of time and patience. Borrowing a friend’s Doors album and lending your Janis. The sound of your real (or maybe imagined) self, given as an act of love.

We knew the musicians, we knew everything about them. And we loved them.

We are no longer fans. Now we’ve outsourced our demos of devotion; outsourced them to music streaming steamroller Spotify, the subject of Liz Pelly’s virtuosic new book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. Pelly is a music journalist, a researcher, someone who spent a lot of time in the DIY music scene. She’s spoken to hundreds of sources, scanned hundreds of internal documents and hundreds of Slack messages to put together her portrait of the streamer.

Music journalist and researcher Liz Pelly spoke to hundreds of sources for her deep dive into Spotify.

There’s only one way to sum up what Pelly tells us about Spotify – sinister. It promotes fake or ghost artists, music generated by machines, stock music. Why? Spotify doesn’t have to pay royalties to artists who don’t exist. Yes, the company pays Beyoncé and Taylor Swift well because they have the market power to make a fuss and their music is indispensable to fans. Who hasn’t listened to 16 Carriages on repeat, singing “overworked and overwhelmed” at the top of your voice? Nothing wrong with that, but so many other artists languish.

Spotify forces vulnerable musicians into a pay-to-play arrangement. Want to be most streamed, noticed in Discovery Mode? Be prepared to take a 30 per cent royalty reduction in exchange for being listed there. Only streamed a few hundred times a year? You get zip.

Pelly is reserved. But her unreservedly thoughtful book takes us through all the questions we have about the streaming giant, all the worries.

“You know, there’s going to be different things that trouble different people about this model … depending on your values, your priorities or what your relationship with music looks like,” she says. “Yes, it’s a book about music, but it’s also a book about surveillance, politics and the relationship between creative labour and capitalism.”

Some of us (me! me!) immediately worry about the impact it has on our listening. Spotify’s Perfect Fit Content encourages us to be less adventurous, passive, starving ourselves of authentic work. We accept artificial music devised by artificial intelligence, manufacturing and mirroring our own version of emotional intelligence, which limits our own. Those songs of love are born of algorithmic invention, not of desire. The result? The death of the mixtape. But that’s far from the worst of it.

‘There’s a backlash to generative AI image culture... But we don’t have the same sense of media literacy around audio culture.’

Liz Pelly, author

Pelly explains how our data is collected and used to strengthen a product that endeavours to diminish culture, then “just straight-up sold in the mood data marketplace to data brokers who might be sharing it with other types of data brokers”.

I immediately panic and imagine the worst. Mood music at work, designed to keep us on track, undistracted. Pelly’s not at all sceptical about that possibility.

“But I hope most streaming users would care about the material impacts on musicians’ lives, or the way in which streaming has made it significantly more difficult for musicians to scrape together an ability to make a living from music.”

Spotify was meant to be the key to unlocking the world’s music, to unleashing creativity. It would be affordable for fans and would provide decent financial support for artists. Nirvana (or Pearl, if that was your Jam maybe). It’s anything but.

And the woman who’s unlocked the various chains? Pelly, 35, who grew up on the south shore of Long Island, is in the middle of a huge and frantic book tour and her messages, emails and texts are out of control, but she’s talking to me from Texas. An Australian tour is on the cards, say her local publishers. The demand to hear someone explain the ways in which Spotify is destroying music would be big here – after all, the streamer has had an extraordinary impact on Australian music. Music piracy built the coffin but streaming nailed it in.

Liz Pelly’s new book uncovers the sinister side of music streaming.Credit: Hachette

Back in the day – say, early 2000s – Australians accounted for 30 per cent of the music which sold well enough to make the bestselling charts. Now it’s just four per cent.

Those are the numbers of Tim Kelly, former music executive, program director at the Australian Institute of Music and midway through his PhD research. He says it’s not just Australian music that’s suffered. It’s anyone outside the US/UK axis. “Dominant artists are getting more and more of the pie and no one is breaking new artists,” he says.

But Kelly says it’s worse than that. It’s the way Spotify doubles down on our taste, rather than trying to expand it. As he points out, that’s not unique to Spotify – all algorithmic design does this.

“It will suggest something very similar to what you’ve already heard,” he says. But when we get suggestions from our friends, there’s a different process. “Friends try to expand your vision rather than double down on your vision.”

He also says going to gigs is no longer a base on which to build our music tastes. Where once we took risks, now we tend to go to gigs of people we already know and love. Taylor Swift sells out multiple stadiums in multiple cities. But we might not take a chance on someone we’ve never heard of. “The superstar economy undermined the base,” he says.

Pelly has some answers. She thinks we should do what readers do – in place of book clubs, listening parties. And they’ve done that at independent music store Red Eye Records in Sydney’s CBD. Co-owner Matt Huddy sees it as a commercial opportunity. Get access to the album early and get a heap of people to come listen and respond. It worked well for Lana Del Rey’s Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. Huddy says that’s been the most successful of all Red Eye’s listening events.

Beyond listening parties, Pelly says we also need to think about music in the same way we now think about images. “There’s more of a public conversation unfolding about generative AI images, and publications using generative AI images, and illustrators being out of work. There’s a backlash to generative AI image culture.

“People are streaming playlists filled with songs by artists that don’t exist, or hearing music made either by generative AI, partially by generative AI, stock music, fake music, ghost artist music. But we don’t have the same sense of media literacy around audio culture.”

We’ve been persuaded to take a lean-back attitude to consuming music when what we used to do is stand up the front, clamouring for more.

Huddy gives me a glimmer of hope. He says there’s been a resurgence in the sale of blank cassette tapes. Now to buy the thing that plays them and send all my friends that one track by Thelma Plum. Because friends don’t let friends play the same boring rubbish over and over again.

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly is out on paperback on March 11, $32.99, Hodder & Stoughton.

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