{"id":11218,"date":"2026-06-04T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=11218"},"modified":"2026-06-03T20:36:01","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T00:36:01","slug":"mood-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/04\/mood-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"Mood Machine."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Music journalist Liz Pelly has spent most of her professional life working and living in indie music circles, which gives her a distinct and important perspective on the consolidation of the music industry around just a few streaming services, with Spotify foremost among them. In her book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist<\/a><\/em>, she explores the birth of Spotify, how it took over the streaming space, and how pernicious its effects have been on indie musicians and labels \u2013 as well as listeners who want to hear anything but the most anodyne music available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spotify began as an idea to sell ads, not as a way to save the music industry, or even just as a way for its founders, including the military-minded Daniel Ek, to get rich while working in music. Songs were just a vehicle for selling ads and collecting user data to do so more effectively. Ek and other Spotify execs have retconned their history to make Spotify out to be some kind of savior for music and musicians, even as their practices have proven predatory, including bringing back payola, and they\u2019ve cracked down harder on musicians with tiny followings than they have on scammers posting fake music tracks and clips to try to deke Spotify\u2019s algorithms and rack up streams from listeners who aren\u2019t paying much attention to what\u2019s playing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pelly spoke to over a hundred current and former Spotify employees, got access to internal Slack logs, and interviewed musicians, label executives, and others to research Mood Machine<\/em>, and two consistent themes emerged (among many smaller topics). One is that Spotify\u2019s entire structure, built largely around algorithmic playlists, which are made by machine-learning systems and are distinct from curated ones, assembled by humans, like the ones I post every month, is both corrupt and tends to funnel listeners to a small number of artists from major labels, while paying artists from outside of the big 3 labels a pittance (and paying no artists anything close to fair value). The second is that a huge portion of Spotify\u2019s audience isn\u2019t actually listening to the music: One of their main goals is to get listeners to stick on a playlist as some sort of background noise \u2013 similar to Netlix\u2019s \u201csecond-screen\u201d nonsense \u2013 and let it play for hours and hours, and if it runs out let Spotify\u2019s algorithm just keep playing more songs, so they can serve more ads. Playing a song costs Spotify less than half a penny in royalties. Their dream scenario is The Lost Weekend<\/em> except with some algorithmic chillwave playlist going in the background for 72 hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harper\u2019s<\/em> excerpted a portion of Mood Machine<\/em> in 2024 as a story called \u201cThe Ghosts in the Machine<\/a>.\u201d It exposed Spotify\u2019s program to commission fake tracks from outside vendors under its \u201cPerfect Fit Content\u201d program, where those companies would supply songs by \u2018ghost artists\u2019 to pad Spotify\u2019s playlists for deeply discounted royalty rates, allowing Spotify to deliver the same quantity of music to listeners for a lower cost. Spotify execs defended the practice, saying that listeners of those playlists were \u201chalf-listening anyway,\u201d so why deliver them real music? Pelly spoke to a number of employees dismayed by the practice, saying it was unethical to deceive listeners and harmful to the music industry they were supposedly supporting. The few editors remaining who curated playlists themselves reported increased pressure to use these ghost artists on their playlists, even though that was antithetical to their mission (and, I would presume, their music fandom). Some of the companies Pelly cites as ghost-artist producers are now getting into AI-generated tracks, such as Epidemic Sound, which also sells royalty-free background music to video producers. It\u2019s the most interesting chapter in a book that\u2019s full of them, and the most overt explanation of why Spotify is harmful to the music industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n