Mood Machine
The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
by Liz Pelly · first published 2025
33% recommend50% neutral17% critical
NATIONAL BESTSELLER An unsparing investigation into Spotify’s origins and influence on music, weaving unprecedented reporting with incisive cultural criticism, illuminating how streaming is reshaping music for listeners and artists alike. Drawing on over one hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today’s highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed. Building on her years of wide-ranging reporting on strea
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I would highly recommend that folks read Liz Pelly's Mood Machine, which is referenced here via the Harper's excerpt, not just because it shows artists' perspectives on the long tail model that tech pitched to them, but because it can be read as an indictment of the…
on “How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop” ↗That is definitely the case, they cover this and many other interesting things about Spotify in the book Mood Machine https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/214151728-mood-machine
on “Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI” ↗Streaming is very different from radio: https://thebaffler.com/downstream/big-mood-machine-pelly When I pay for music I don't want harvesting of my listening habits to be part of the price.
on “"About half of Bandcamp was laid off today"” ↗…Payments to Real Ones [...] > According to a shocking new book, Spotify has been promoting so-called "ghost artists" so it can avoid paying its piddling royalties to real artists. > In an excerpt from "Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist" published in Harper's, author Liz Pelly reveals that the streaming platform has a secretive internal program that prioritizes cheap and generic…
on “Spotify is full of AI music” ↗"Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist" by Liz Pelly goes into more detail about their origins and the culture around piracy in Sweden at the time. https://lizpelly.info/book
on “Meta torrented & seeded 81.7 TB dataset containing copyrighted data” ↗> IMO using a streaming service’s recommendations is a way to filter out bands that labels aren’t promoting. The services have to be getting paid for pushing - right? I keep hearing this, I also read Mood Machine that says the same thing over and over again. Yet, every week for years, thanks to Spotify I'm discovering artists that don't have the means to pay to be promoted in any way. I'm not saying that I'm…
on “Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative” ↗