MOOD MACHINE

Demystifying Spotify.

In this age of platform capitalism, with streaming service content whizzing through our brains, the story of Spotify’s success is uniquely instructive. Emerging in 2006, after the first forays of Napster and Pirate Bay into the ethical murkiness of peer-to-peer file sharing, Spotify has grown to mammoth proportions. Backed by stringent research, Pelly writes convincingly about how independent musicians, initially convinced of the purported democracy of the platform, have become subservient to big-business interests, like the majority of their 20th-century forebears. The algorithms behind Spotify’s curated playlists, the passivity of its paying listeners engendered by those playlists’ “we’ll do it for you” ethos, and the decline in intelligent listening before data-driven systems tell a story of essentially translating customers’ postmodern laissez-faire into hard coin. Pelly argues that the company has affected the quality of music itself, turning songs into little more than “streambait”: Producers position the catchy chorus of a song, for example, at the very beginning of a track to hook listeners in the attempt to charm them from clicking Next, or they hire music production companies to write songs that will optimize income across multiple playlist categories. It will then be no surprise when one discovers Spotify has long embraced “ID syncing,” the act of selling a user’s personal data to other companies—and serving up music generated by AI, leaving even less room at the table for individual, all-too-human artists.

A strong indictment to rouse consumers into considering just where our commitment to music is headed.