Credit: Hachette
TECHNOLOGY
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist
Liz Pelly
Hachette, $32.99
So Spotify knows Amused to Death is my favourite Roger Waters album and Perfect Sense is my favourite track. I bet it hasn’t worked out which line of the song is stuck on high rotation in my head. Yet.
Perfect Sense is a tragicomic saga of human folly in which a curious monkey decides to leave the jungle for a more comfortable life. “Mama, mama,” he wails as he realises too late the cost of his evolution, “why do I have to keep reading these technical manuals?”
That’s the line stuck in my head because that’s me, every day of this century. It’s me again, wading through this important, mind-numbingly complicated book about how Spotify is poisoning how we choose, find, make, sell, hear, buy and generally think (or not) about music in the digital age.
Like any monkey, I just want to be amused with a minimum of inconvenience. Hence, Spotify. The fact that its billionaire CEO Daniel Ek is selling my data for shares in war technology while systematically strangling and debasing music as we know it and enslaving the people who make it? Mama, mama, talk about inconvenient.
American music journalist Liz Pelly’s story of the conquest of streaming — it now accounts for 84 per cent of recorded music income; Spotify’s share is 30 per cent— is a horrendous tale of techno-capitalism stamping on the face of humanity. It’s business as usual in a world where our attention is the new gold, just especially galling given the old currencies of heart and soul that traditionally bond musicians and listeners.
Music journalist Liz Pelly.
The very notion of “listening” is ripe for extermination under a system where users are encouraged to “lean back” and let playlist editors or algorithms choose sounds to massage your mood without you worrying your pretty little head which intelligence – artistic, commercial, human, artificial, indentured – is filling the silence.
“Often,” Pelly writes, “conversations about the streaming era centre [on] the way music has been financially devalued. But there is also a broader, harder-to-pin-down cultural devaluation … the relegation of music to something passable, just filling the air to drown out the office workers’ inner thoughts.”
Our passivity is key. Drawn from scores of interviews with former Spotify employees and other biz “insiders”, Pelly’s portrait of an industry gamed by tech bros to turn music into “a traffic source for advertising product” is a classic corporate greed conspiracy with clueless musicians and consumers as patsies. Again.
This heist began with the file-sharing crisis of the early 2000s, when wholesale music piracy (Napster, LimeWire, Pirate Bay et al) spooked major record labels into buying into a gaggle of cowboy streaming services, throwing their artists under the bus in a gallant rush to save “the industry” (i.e., their jobs).
When Spotify emerged as the horse to back, Sony, for instance, received $US25 million plus a slice of the company and millions in advertising to hand over its music for two years, “with no clarification of whether this had to be shared with artists”. Wonder which way that windfall blew?
“The new boss partnered pretty well with the old boss,” as one independent musician/activist says in the book. Spotify’s Byzantine royalties system was soon revealed to be paying indies about one-sixth of the pennies doled out to the majors – though they could buy prestige “playlist” treatment by cutting their share further.
Mama, mama. Good luck keeping up with the Filtr and the Digster, the Tunigo, Songza, Snowfish, Echo Nest and S4A and other systems bloating the new economy of curated playlists, taste profiles, user-consumption data-crunching and “creator tools”. Suffice it to say that with great power comes great responsibility – to ramp up your stock price before the stock float.
Musicians? Spotify discovered these were ideally replaced by “ghost artists” paid off to make muzak for users conditioned to “lean back” and daydream. If a chapter titled “The Conquest of Chill” doesn’t make you shudder in horror, it can only be because you literally can’t tell music from “mood vibes”.
The news for music lovers is worse. The dominance of Spotify means artists aspiring to a piece of the only pie in town have to play by its rules: making music for inoffensive, made-up genres (love that “aesthetic rap”) and wasting creative time on “content” for whatever new gimmick the boss reckons will boost his traffic.
“The industry,” Pelly writes, “spent years treating music as data and edging artists toward more machine-legible output.” Even Taylor Swift maxes her kickback by dividing her albums into mood playlists. Meanwhile, one indie artist frantically working to supply the new paradigm wonders what the music he didn’t get around to making might have sounded like.
Through grim chapters exposing “Streambait Pop”, “Fandom As Data” and “Streaming As Surveillance”, Pelly holds her indie-warrior sword aloft, culminating in a precious few flickers of hope for the future. These amount to artists opting out and down-scaling to small communities working together for art’s sake. But not before they’ve read the manuals.
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