Of the many galling facts in Mood Machine, Liz Pelly’s forensic account of how Spotify upended the music industry, most exasperating is that the Swedish company didn’t initially set out to be a music platform at all. The mythology around the company says that Spotify aimed to “save the music industry” from the piracy that was threatening it in the early 2000s. But Spotify was first conceived as an advertising technology company. Founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon just needed a traffic source. So they chose music.
That this is the origin story of the single most powerful music streaming platform is depressing enough. But, as Pelly tells it, that was only the start. Pelly, an American journalist and the foremost chronicler of how streaming has transformed both the music business and fans’ listening behaviours, has written an enraging treatise that should make anyone who claims to be a music fan cancel their Spotify subscription immediately.
Pelly speaks to numerous former Spotify employees and industry insiders, as well as gaining access to internal company Slack channels, to track the rise of the streaming platform and its disastrous effects on artists and fans. The stakes are high: streaming accounts for 84 per cent of recorded music revenues and Spotify is the largest service, with 30 per cent of the market, made up of 675m users and 263m paying subscribers. The story of Spotify, Pelly argues, is “a story of listeners being sold music more as a utility than an art form, and musicians starting to see themselves more as content creators than artists. It is a story of precarity, hyper-commercialisation, individualism, and all of the above being obfuscated under the notion of ‘vibes’.”
The allure of Spotify—almost all the recorded music in the world made available to you at the click of a button—is undeniable. But the business is nefarious. It is well known that Spotify doesn’t pay artists well. $0.0035 for every stream is the figure that circulates, but Pelly explains this doesn’t get anywhere close to detailing the trickiness of how royalties are really calculated, because Spotify doesn’t pay artists for every stream, but rightsholders according to what percentage of all listened-to music is theirs. Artists have long campaigned for better rates, although much of their ire lies with their record labels, who not only sign artists to outrageously unfair contracts, but also work behind the scenes with Spotify to negotiate favourable deals for themselves.
Pelly describes how the music industry is controlled by an “oligopoly”: the three major labels of Universal, Sony and Warner. Together they command 70 per cent of the recorded music market, which puts them in a position of power when they negotiate with Spotify. For instance, she reports that, in 2024, Spotify introduced a model that demonetises any track garnering fewer than 1,000 annual streams. The platform claimed it would help them to fight fraud. Actually, it was taking earnings from DIY and independent musicians and filtering it up to the very top of the system—the rightsholders of the songs already being streamed millions of times. It turns out that the change was part of a campaign waged by Universal to “revamp streaming in its favour”. It’s just one example of many that Pelly gives of schemes introduced to make streaming’s rich richer. And, because streaming royalties are paid according to percentage shares, that also makes the poor poorer.
The very notion of algorithmic playlisting is tied up in surveillance
Pelly argues that this makes music fans poorer too. The very notion of algorithmic playlisting, of being “fed” music as “content”, is tied up in surveillance; and, as Spotify’s tech has improved over time, the platform has become “blatantly less about connecting users to the world of music, and more about treating your own taste as a world of its own to be studied and sorted, packaged and sold”.
What’s more, the flattening of musical genres into mood playlists with names such as “Farmers Market” and “sad girl starter pack” has taken once-meaningful traditions and diminished them to the point where many listeners now think of them purely as aesthetics. This has hit certain genres harder than others. The composer and bassist Luke Stewart tells Pelly that he sees the streaming giants as “serving to perpetuate the idea” that jazz—his genre—“is something to be in the background. Something for chilling, or wining and dining, or listening to while you’re drinking coffee at Starbucks. Severed to sell a product, to sell a mood and a lifestyle that goes along with mindless consumption of non-substantive things, like fast food.”
All of this is crucial background to The Endless Refrain, another new book that attempts to analyse the current music landscape. In it, David Rowell, a veteran Washington Post journalist, explores why we are listening to more and more old music at the expense of new releases. He refers to data showing that, in 2022, 72 per cent of the overall consumption of music came from catalogue shares (music older than 18 months). And in 2023, the biggest new releases—by artists including Olivia Rodrigo and Ed Sheeran—were all outsold by “best of” collections by legacy acts such as Elton John, Fleetwood Mac and Abba.
Rowell has a warm, zappy style, asking readers to think of his book as “the equivalent of a triple album featuring one studio record and two live recordings… The compositions are all mine and I’m playing most of the instruments, but these guests come in and lay their parts down beautifully, which makes it all so much better.” The book’s first third is him grappling with the shift; in the second part he reports on tribute bands; in the third he explores holographic recreations of musical artists, as utilised in the hit Abba Voyage concert residency, which he says show “how old music could be new again”.
The author is asking a vital question. Gladly, Rowell, born in 1967, is not snobbish about new music. “The musicians creating music now could be making the most extraordinary music ever created and we wouldn’t even know it because of how uninterested we are,” he writes. However, some of his interviewees are not as open-minded. Jonathan Cain of the American rock band Journey tells Rowell he is “amazed at how little craftsmanship really goes into” music today. Meanwhile, 30-year-old Journey fan Samantha says of new music: “We don’t need it.” By the sounds of things, she’d be quite happy listening to “Don’t Stop Believin’” on repeat for the rest of her life: “I mean, this is real music.”
Rowell rightly discusses the importance of nostalgia. It’s been scientifically proven elsewhere that the songs we love as teenagers stay with us because in our youth our brains undergo rapid development, and so the music we listen to then becomes intrinsically linked to those defining moments. As Rowell points out, it’s natural, too, that as we grow up we have less time to actively seek out new artists. But that Cain, someone who has devoted his life to music, and Samantha, who cares enough to attend gigs—and is still really quite young, at 30—are so closed off to the possibility of discovering new favourites is heartbreaking.
Spotify is designed to give you more of the same
Rowell nods to the music business’s part in this, explaining that, when the pandemic hit, many artists sold their catalogues to rightsholders who will now be “cashing in on the artists’ licensing rights, future royalties, brand deals, and other revenue streams still to be imagined”. He also interviews pop critic Chris Richards about the impact of streaming on our willingness to listen to new music. Richards explains that an algorithm’s aim is to “figure out what you like” and “keep you there”. So much for being a “discovery tool”—as Pelly also observes, Spotify is designed to give you more of the same.
But Rowell doesn’t quite fully connect all the dots. He doesn’t address the fact that streaming platforms push listeners to older songs because major labels typically take even higher royalty cuts on catalogue music, and it is in Spotify’s interest to keep the majors on side because they own the vast majority of the world’s music, are stakeholders in the platform and, as Pelly’s book shows, in some cases have agreed deals that specify such measures. What’s more, Rowell doesn’t mention that the consolidation of the music industry—the oligopoly that Pelly describes—might have anything to do with this. It’s a significant oversight, weakening the seriousness of his investigation—and making all the time he spends hanging around with tribute acts feel even sillier.
Rowell would benefit from following Pelly’s maxim: “I’ve long been confounded by the expectation that we simply accept the dealings of the powerful as unexplainable.” The music industry is in crisis—and with the threat of artificial intelligence becoming ever more pressing, that crisis is unlikely to pass. If we care about music, we can’t afford to sit back.
