In early May this year, Spotify India and Indigo announced a yearlong partnership centred around the ‘6E Shuffle’—a dedicated microsite offering a personalised playlist for one’s trip or a destination suggestion to go with it. While the move may seem to offer listeners just more option from the Swedish audio streamer, there may be more to it than just another option.
Music journalist Liz Pelly calls this phenomenon ‘selling lean-back listening’. “There were way more listening hours using music as a background experience—people who wanted to lean back and let Spotify choose things… They started to think about how to optimise for that experience, for a less engaged user… (to) make music consumption even more seamless,” Pelly’s explosive book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist identifies. This strategic shift around mid-2012 was an attempt to market Spotify rather than marketing their primary product— music. This allowed anyone to become a ‘playlist influencer’, curating recommendations according to specific moods and occasions. The drawback—anyone could invest resources into building a virtual real estate. Brands like Sony, Warner and Universal created their own playlists. What Pelly underlines is the fact that the streaming economy has helped champion this dynamic of ‘passivity’—a mode of engagement that becomes hostile to art as musicians and labels are forced to churn out music that will work out in a specific playlist.
For the book, Pelly interviews over a hundred sources, including industry insiders, musicians, label employees and former employees of the giant. In an interview, a former employee says the core of the company was realising they are not selling music but filling people’s time… Spotify has capitalised on the fact that people are afraid of silence.
The book further goes on to identify the ‘fake artistes’ the platform has created to cater to passivity. The songs are often made by anonymous session musicians and production companies for a cheaper royalty rate, cranking out dozens of tracks at a time to fulfill the ‘need for content’. However, Pelly rightfully questions if the listeners were creating the need, or was Spotify behind it. “When platforms repeatedly prioritise one type of thing over another the scope of what’s possible in a given media environment starts to narrow,” believes Pelly. The need for personalisation of playlists has also been felt in the fact that pop artistes began rearranging their catalogues into mood playlists. For instance, Taylor Swift’s 2024 album was released as five playlists reflecting ‘five stages of heartbreak’.
The capitalistic turn for the music streaming platform was inevitable. Its founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon were advertising fellows who realised music was cheap and viewed it as a business opportunity. Pelly writes, “Ek and Lorentzon had some things in common: they both knew a lot about search engine optimisation, metadata, and selling ads. But they were by no means music guys”, and so, Spotify, in its early days, was a traffic source for its advertising product. Its initial days were spent establishing itself as a product better than piracy, as pirated music ruled the markets back then.
Today, the app also deals with accusations of data breach. In 2018, Spotify applied for a patent for emotion detection technology—a tool that would harvest a user’s voice—making it susceptible to ‘surveillance creep’. From merely recommending music to monitoring and mapping our voices, tracking down search engine activity off-app, tracking listening behaviour and selling it to data brokers as ‘mood data’ to assemble profiles on its users, the move tears into one’s privacy. But with these accusations, has Spotify still benefited musicians? The author attempts to answer this with, “The idea of Spotify as a creator platform is murky: the company’s own ‘creator’ tools don’t involve fans paying artists, but rather, artists paying the company.”
The commercial focus of the app was exposed in 2020 yet again when Daniel Ek pressed for artistes to maintain a continuous engagement with fans, essentially telling them to work harder, produce music faster and on terms amenable to the streaming industry. His view on the modern artiste as a ‘content creator’ pumping out new content rather than an artiste, thus, taking away their creative freedom and creativity and pushing for an algorithm-driven art, speaks of a dark future for the music industry.
In the most significant, eruptive and thought provoking book, Liz Pelly suggests that rethinking the future of music also requires rethinking profit motives and power structures, and investigating alternative models that are more cooperative, transparent, and artiste-run, putting people over profit. Talking about the moral downsides of the app, Pelly searches for an ethical alternative to Spotify. “This very model fails to meet the needs of most independent artists and listeners.” She suggests buying music directly from artistes and independent record labels to make an actual difference, even if it means tracking down where artistes have their work on sale directly. Deeper conversations around why universal access to music matters and what systemic political and economic realities prevent people from engaging deeply with music is the need of the hour.
Mood Machine is an excellent yet depressing revelation of the mechanisms and politics behind the churning of commercial music, which is a threat to art in itself. It becomes an important study of music streaming, how the industry is in an urgent need of a facelift and how the streaming giant has monopolised the music industry, drawing upon its many loopholes.
Reya Mehrotra is a freelancer.
Book details:
Title: Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
Author: Liz Pelly
Publisher: Hachette
Number of pages: 288
Price: Rs 699