Sasha Frere-Jones
Music for nothing and your chill playlists for free: a new book by Liz Pelly on the horror story of Spotify.
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, by Liz Pelly, Atria/One Signal, 288 pages, $28.99
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You may be shocked to hear this, but that Swedish kid who worked at Jajja (SEO firm) and Stardoll (browser-based cartoon game) before cofounding Advertigo (ad-targeting agency) did in fact impress Universal and Sony and Warner with his final boss project, Spotify (music, sort of). The streaming service might as well be called Startigo or Jajjdoll—the name “Spotify” was something Daniel Ek misheard cofounder Martin Lorentzon yelling from another room. You will be frustrated if you read Liz Pelly’s brilliant new Spotify book, Mood Machine, as a story about music. What it details, instead, with efficiency and moral oomph, is the creation of Spotify, a data-mining company whose public-facing founder, Ek, has invested at least $114 million in the military AI company Helsing, currently developing attack drones for Ukraine.
Ek is interested in music approximately as much as Jeff Bezos is interested in Bernadette Mayer. Just as Amazon initially sold books to establish its logistics infrastructure, Spotify used music to grow a massive user database. Now major labels are making more money than ever and giving musicians a tiny or nonexistent slice of that profit. Those musicians are competing for that .0035 cents against Swedish “ghost labels” churning out new-school muzak that is referred to within Spotify as “perfect fit content” and highly favored by certain playlist editors. You, the listener, get substandard streaming fidelity, impressive cache abilities for those times when you’re stalled between subway stations, and untrammeled access to a volcano of mucilage slick and transparent enough to facilitate your “lean-back” experience as a worker drone hoping against hope that the next Spotify playlist will drown out the horrors.
Spotify’s first choice for streamable content in 2006 was video, but music files were smaller, and Ek had already downloaded plenty of MP3s from torrent sites like the Pirate Bay. (If international law has taught us nothing else, a crime is not criminal if our guys do it.) From there, Ek’s employees could apply what he called a “maniacal focus” to “latency optimizations” and “speed of search.” Are you an artist with a track that has received under one thousand annual plays? In 2025, you will be paid nothing by Spotify for streaming your song, but Ek will make sure someone can find it in less than half a second. In 2012, Ek called himself one of the “punks,” but clarified, “not the punks that are up to no good.” Rather, he styled himself as one of “the punks that are against the establishment.” Among the establishments he is most against is the Store, where people buy things and producers receive a cut of that customer’s payment. He is not alone in this aversion to old-fashioned commodity relations.
To be fair, neither are you. A fact that I wish came up earlier in Pelly’s book appears first on page 206, which is that the material conditions of YouTube are the frame for Spotify, what New York’s Music Workers Alliance calls “the leak in the bottom of the bucket.” Because of “safe harbor laws” included in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Google is not liable for the content that circulates on YouTube, and “the responsibility of reporting copyright violations” is on the artists. The music on YouTube that has been officially licensed pays out at even lower rates than Spotify. For people raised with almost twenty years of YouTube, the idea of free music is not a radical disruption but simply the weather. Have you ever held up your phone and played a song on YouTube for your friend? You live under the same sky.
The terrain is much worse for musicians and listeners than you think, and has been for decades. For starters, terrestrial radio doesn’t pay musicians—something that seems, anecdotally, like a surprise every time I bring it up—and companies like Apple and Google embedded in daily life have contributed far more to the surveillance state than Spotify ever could. So what is Spotify’s particular version of hell? As Pelly puts it, summarizing reporting by Helienne Lindvall, Spotify created “a system where the biggest labels were shareholders, where the majors were getting advances that no one else could command, where NDAs prevented even major label artists from understanding the rates they were paid.” That was before they stopped paying rarely played artists entirely.
Another reason the Spotify story isn’t really about music is that people aren’t entirely listening to the music on Spotify. Pelly quotes an unnamed former employee who remembers an all-hands meeting from the mid-2010s, during which Ek reportedly said “Apple Music, Amazon, these aren’t our competitors. Our only competitor is silence.” Playlists collect the music least likely to be turned off. As reported recently by Will Tavlin in n+1, Netflix is equally unconcerned with the quality of what is being streamed, or if the viewer is even awake. (Sleep playlists are huge at Spotify.) What matters is that the app stays on and the content keeps playing. This kind of environmental blankie began creeping into the culture, at least as an articulated idea, as “chill” more than ten years ago. As Pelly writes, this idea “spoke to a generation that was anxious and overworked, engaged in cycles of trying to focus hard and chill hard.” It would be disingenuous to pretend that I have never wanted background music or that I always want to hear spiritually profound music.
But I can play the sound of rocks being tumbled on YouTube if I need background chill. Spotify still has lots of recordings of music, most of them by lesser-known artists. And if you are one of those lesser-known artists, you can participate in something called Discovery Mode, which gives your tracks an algorithmic boost in exchange for a 30 percent royalty reduction rate. Even here, the tyranny of Chill abides. One independent label owner told Pelly that only “folk-leaning artists” did well in Discovery Mode campaigns because they fit in with the “passive listening” so popular in coffee shops. To understand the particular form of labor involved here, you have to understand how platform capture works and how fully it has transformed value, or at least a view of it. In 2019, in response to a musician asking about the company’s financial model at a public event, Spotify executive Jim Anderson said, “The problem was to distribute music. Not to give you money, okay?” The job now is not to make music—every moron has done that, you can imagine a Spotify employee muttering. It’s not just that music is free, it’s that this condition has created an exchange that returns back to the music itself. If it’s free it is also worthless, even to people who allege to love it. The labor is now selling your music, once it’s been made (again, agnostic here as to content—you might be better off imitating rocks being tumbled). As Pelly puts it, someone like Goth Babe, a fella who sings and wears Carhartt, is “Spotify’s model artist” because of his nonstop self-marketing, the core activity of influencers. Mr. Babe is “a solo creative entrepreneur, digital nomad, who posted as much about van life and his outdoorsy lifestyle as he did about his steady stream of singles and EPs.”
You, the artist, need to do this, because Spotify executives like Lorentzon need a lot of your money, because they don’t want to die. He told a Swedish journalist in 2023 that “he does believe in death but that he aims to live until he is 120, under guidance from longevity experts.” When I am 120, in sixty-three years, all of the recordings I have ever made, in total, will not have earned me a single year’s salary from Spotify. Crazy punks!
Sasha Frere-Jones is a musician and writer from New York. His memoir, Earlier, was recently published by Semiotext(e).