Interview: Liz Pelly

on reclaiming power through music

In her new book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, music journalist and indie concert booker Liz Pelly states, “Rethinking the future of music [...] requires rethinking profit motives and power structures, and challenging a system where a small handful of entertainment and technology firms own so much of music.” In our conversation, held via Zoom a few weeks after Mood Machine released, she expanded on these ideas of power and influence, central theses for the book: “When you talk about issues with technologies, oftentimes what you’re talking about isn’t necessarily the technology itself, but the way in which power, politics, and economics inform a technology.” Liz’s background in the indie scene, and her palpable love for music and musicians, informs her political and social attitude towards streaming, and its position in the larger story of capitalism and consumption.

Appropriately, the opening chapter of Mood Machine is dedicated to history, a contextualization of music streaming within piracy culture, specifically in Sweden where Spotify was founded. Later on, Liz also traces the evolution from lack of listener agency in radio to “lean-back listening,” a mode of passive music consumption Spotify champions. Where most writing about the negative impact of streaming places blame squarely on zombie listeners and careless consumers, much of the book explores complex streaming deals and business relationships, recentering the conversation on the disproportionate influence of the major labels. This framework reveals our current predicament to be an old problem with a new face, and reflects parallel obfuscations of fault in environmental and political realms.

When I asked Liz about ethical futures for streaming, I cynically wanted her to agree that while new structures could be erected, the battle would be fought mostly with listeners brought up on Spotify, with no inherent concept of the value of art or why they should pay for it. Instead, she shifted the conversation towards the partnerships between major labels and Spotify, which have been central to the company’s model since its inception–the majors owned eighteen percent stake in the company when it launched and control seventy percent of the recorded music market. She argues that the problems with Spotify can be traced by following the money: “Streaming didn’t invent the concept of the lean-back listener, but they championed it in a new way in order to grow their subscriber base, engage users, and sell them to advertisers.” In the introduction of the book, she describes her original conception of the problem as bifurcated: its effects on listeners and its effects on artists. In reality, the same passivity that benefits Spotify and harms artists also impairs listeners and their critical ability to develop taste.

Last week I wrote about the taste recession, which has resulted in a general flattening of culture via homogenization. I asked Liz about personalization, Spotify’s current mode of manipulating user listening, and in which direction she perceives the flow of impact between the streaming service and our increasingly self-similar culture. “One starting point could be thinking about where personalization comes from, what the goals of it are… I think that in a lot of ways the reason why platforms embrace personalization is to shape user behavior around their platforms so that users might see them as valuable to their everyday lives,” she explains, “Both the trend towards personalization and the broader flattening effect seem to be connected to the business logic of the platform economy.”

In the excerpt of her book that led me to reach out for this interview in the first place, Liz describes the phenomenon of ghost writers, Spotify-commissioned faceless artists that write and produce original content for the platform. This content is ultimately owned by the corporation, funneling more money back towards itself. Internally, the program is called Perfect Fit Content, or PFC. She writes, “According to a source close to the company, Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content program was created.” PFC hinges on the idea that listeners do not know, and more importantly, do not care what they’re listening to, so long as it fills a need. Liz mentions in the book and we touch on in our conversation Pauline Oliveros’ work Quantum Listening (a favorite among friends of Record Store), in which she identifies an essential difference between hearing and listening–that listening can be a mode of activism, but it must be intentional. Is it possible that Spotify, playing deftly into the hands of big business, encourages users towards the kind of passivity that not only affects their ability to choose their own music, but also to choose their own values?

“The goal of the Spotify curation system is to reduce the cognitive work that users have to do when they open the app,” Liz says, as we discuss the role of music criticism and curation in the age of streaming, “Spotify is trying to create a product where the user does not have to think critically about what they’re engaging with, and they can just receive music. Criticism is intellectualizing music, putting forth an idea about why something matters. Even if you disagree with what a critic says, hopefully it will encourage you to think and take stock of your own experience.” Art is beautiful, but it is also challenging; it requires active engagement to be fully experienced. Coming up against an idea, a sound, or an artist you dislike with reveals your own opinions, like feeling along the walls of a dark room to get a sense of the space.

But challenging music does not engender continuous, constant streaming, so Spotify plays it safe: “The product was becoming blatantly less about connecting music to the world of music, and more about treating your own taste as a world of its own to be studied and stored, packaged and sold. It wasn’t necessarily selling you music recommendations, it was oftentimes selling your own music taste back to you in lots of different types of boxes.” Where music used to be a communal, shared experience, more and more streaming has shifted the narrative towards the self. Liz describes a Spotify commercial in which a woman puts on her headphones and is immersed in a world in which she is the only inhabitant, reflected back on herself wherever she goes. The slogan at the end of the commercial states, “Your music, your world.” It begs the question: is this the world we want to live in?

A sense of hope pervades Mood Machine, and Liz and I finish our conversation with a lively chat about ways people can reclaim their taste and discover new music outside of algorithms. She suggests that recommendations from someone deeply embedded in music culture are valuable; she mentions independent record labels, musicians themselves via their tour lineups or playlists, and music journalists. She sees networks of connectivity but not necessarily relativity in all these methods: record labels curate musicians they like, musicians curate music they like, and so on. Importantly, there is no algorithmic drive for this music to be “similar” or fit into a box. She suggests subscribing to these channels, via newsletters or social media, to maintain a more direct line of communication.

In the conclusion of the book, Liz describes how artist collectives and public libraries are rethinking streaming and ethical music listening, rather than music consumption. She suggests that these collective solutions get at the heart of the problem with personalization, individualization, and capitalism: “True independence comes from working together with people in your community to build an alternative.” While big business amasses power in the mainstream music industry, Mood Machine suggests a return to an indie ethos, one which is inherently countercultural and subversive, to reclaim power over our listening and beyond.