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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Liz Pelly
Read between
May 25 - June 4, 2025
In her 2014 book The People’s Platform, the writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor challenged the idea that the so-called digital revolution had democratized culture. In particular, she warned that the same problems of “consolidation, centralization, and commercialism” that defined our old media systems would continue to shape the digital world without a serious reckoning. “Networked technologies do not resolve the contradictions between art and commerce,” she wrote, “but rather make commercialism less visible and more pervasive.”1
Over its first two decades of existence, as Spotify moved from in-house playlisting into its next act as a personalization engine, it became increasingly concerned with shaping user behavior on the platform—which is to say, influencing listening habits, because Spotify benefits when we stream content that’s cheaper for them to provide. Internally, the company looks at a metric called “programmed streamshare”—the percentage of total listening influenced by its recommendations—and aims to make that metric increase. This should concern listeners for reasons that go beyond matters of personal
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price point, both through its ghost artists program and its algorithmic payola-like practices.
Spotify began as a “de facto pirate service”—because its beta product was made using pirated files—delegitimizing its stated mission of offering an alternative. But what’s possibly more telling is Spotify’s ambivalence about being grouped in with pirates. It simply aligned itself alternately with piracy or with industry interests when it was convenient to do so.11
If you start looking at Spotify as an advertising company rather than a culture company, a lot of things make more sense.”
Search algorithms are often embedded with all sorts of bias. The UCLA professor Safiya Umoja Noble, an expert on how racism and sexism are embedded into commercial search engines, has noted that “one of the most important factors that enables a link to rise to the top of the rankings is the amount of capital you have.”1
“At first, Spotify really thought they were competing with iTunes,” the source went on. “Rather than having the music on your hard drive, it was streaming. But having done the study they realized active listening was a smaller part of the experience. There were way more listening hours using music as a background experience—people who wanted to lean back and let Spotify choose things.
When users would select the most immediately visible “dinner playlist” or “workout mix,” they might have unknowingly clicked through to a list owned and operated by a major label.5
The handmade, analog mixtape culture of the late 1970s and 1980s is now synonymous with a type of pre-internet person-to-person intimacy via songs that is anathema to much of what we think of when we think of algorithmic corporate music culture.
the history of the mixtape—as one-to-one musical transmission, an expression of a fixed idea through song and sound collage, as an enemy of the industrialized record industry—actually serves as a useful foil to the data-tuned, ultra-surveilled ways music circulates on streaming playlists today. Under the gaze of streaming surveillance, the exchange is never truly one-to-one.11
Playlists don’t just respond to users’ musical interests, but manufacture them, too.12
This was part of a bigger project of the platform era, one that suggested data-driven success was a meritocracy, that virality reflected the will of the people, and that social media had somehow empowered fans to nominate pop stars to power. It’s present, too, in how Spotify’s official “Charts” website claims that “hundreds of millions of listeners shape today’s streaming charts, every day.” Truthfully, though, success was also influenced by contracts, connections, and streaming-friendly music.19
streams are, in fact, not votes. Especially not when the streams are most earned by music just inoffensive enough to not get shut off.
It seemed like the order of business had become: editorial consideration for artists with well-connected labels and management, algorithmic mysteriousness for everyone else.
Streams, for better or worse, add up equally. Users passively streaming music all day in the background meant just as much to Spotify as any other kind of listening, and it was easier to encourage. “We really want to soundtrack every moment of your life,” Daniel Ek said in 2016. “So what excites us [is] when we are able to do that in moments which may seem counterintuitive at first. Take sleep as an example. Millions of people every day (or night!) now go to sleep listening to Spotify. This is a behavior that is brand new for a huge chunk of that same audience. So as we think about Spotify in
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If the streaming economy has contributed to any major cultural shift in recent history, it might be that it has helped champion this dynamic of passivity. And while listeners can—and many do—use the service without engaging the recommendations at all, what the interface nudges is more of a reactive mode: its model listener would just simply hit play or skip. Often, conversations about the streaming era center the way music has been financially devalued, but there is also a broader, harder-to-pin-down cultural devaluation that comes with streaming: the relegation of music to something passable,
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Pauline Oliveros
Deep Listening,
hearing is involuntary in nature, while listening requires consciousness. This is to say, she made a strong case that the act of listening was virtually incompatible with multitasking. In the Oliveros tradition, listening is something that requires focused attention on the act of listening, to music or sound or the natural world or the person next to you.24
Music in Everyday Life,
‘Apple Music, Amazon, these aren’t our competitors. Our only competitor is silence.’ ”26 The ex-employee stared off and nodded. “I definitely think people are afraid of silence,” he told me. “And Spotify has capitalized on that pretty well.”
Organizing music by mood is a way to transform it into a new type of media product. It is about selling users not just on moods, but on the promise of the very concept that mood stabilization is something within their control.
Over time, though, the quest for a frictionless user experience resulted in a deluge of frictionless music: an ease of use that, in turn, facilitated easy listening.
Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities.” Muzak was intended for mood boosterism, but ambient was meant to induce reflection, and to help foster a relationship between the artist, the listener, and their surroundings. In the airport, Eno wanted listeners to confront their own mortality; his record had “something to do with where you are and what you’re there for—flying, floating, and secretly flirting with death.” In other words, it wasn’t pure
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“In designing music that can be modularly organized for anyplace, for anyone, you end up with music for no place, for no one,”
By muzak-ing ambient into utilitarian self-help content, tech companies have contributed to ambient going the way of punk and folk—traditions that started out rooted in philosophies of musical relationships, now flattened to the point that many listeners hear them solely as aesthetics.
Reflecting on how this played out with ambient is especially curious: a genre that was purportedly established to offer a more compelling response to capital-M Muzak, reimagined by corporate playlist machinations as lowercase-m muzak.
In this sense, the conquest of chill reflects an industry content to profit from a world of disconnection; capitalism both alienates us and sells us tools to distract us from the loneliness of nonstop alienated labor, sickens us and then sells us the cure.
Indeed, today’s chill-out ambience feels less attuned to Eno’s atmospheres, which were intended to create “musical experiences” that the listener could enter and leave as they wished, and more like personalized pseudoscientific therapeutics. If the Muzak of the 1940s was about disciplining workers in factories—or selling to employers the idea that this was possible—then today’s mood music boom, in the age of being your own boss, might be more about the streaming user disciplining themselves, or being sold on that possibility, under the guise of self-improvement and empowerment, like an
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favors a narcotic relationship to music over a complex, meditative relationship to music.”
The suggestion that the businesses of pop music, mood-enhancing background sounds, and independent art-making ought to all live on the same platform, under the same economic arrangements, and the same tools of engagement, is a recipe for everything being flattened out into one ceaseless chill-out stream.
These editors did not understand music culture, the source continued, “so they don’t feel bad about what they’re doing. There’s no moral dilemma for these people. They’re happy to do it, because to them it’s just music in the background, too.”
And, as I noticed all of the places where these ghost artists would pop up—in my home page recommendations, personalized search results, algotorial mood mixes—and I read their made-up names, made-up bio pages (often touting the “healing” and “wellness” properties of their generic drones), even sometimes fake social media pages, it also just started to feel like a straight-up problem of misinformation and media degradation, issues that were only going to grow more insidious as the functional music trend opened the door for generative AI music makers to walk right in.
usually someone from the PFC company will come along, too—acting as a producer, giving light feedback, at times inching the musicians in more playlist-friendly directions. The most common feedback: play simpler. “That’s definitely the thing: nothing that could be even remotely challenging or offensive, really,” the jazz musician told me that day in the park. “The goal for sure is to be as milquetoast as possible. And that’s made pretty explicit. They try to leave enough leeway for musicians to sort of not feel like they’re completely losing their minds, but the agenda is play simply and
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As streaming has organized everyone into its lean-back-vibes economy, in the quest for a frictionless experience, musicians coming from historically separate corners of the music business have begun to operate within the same landscapes. That’s true of the fact that major label pop stars and independent artists alike now rely on the same tools. But it’s also true in this new reality where these other two distinct industries—the business of being an artist and the business of generating background sounds—are folding in on each other.
It feels fitting that Spotify was originally imagined as an advertising platform, because in many cases, when you press “play” on a calm-down, wellness-vibes, or whatever mood playlist, what you’re hearing is something that was cranked out by someone making music for an advertising library. It makes sense that as the digital world has grown to feel more like a shopping mall, it is also sometimes the very companies making music for shopping malls that are flooding its soundtrack.
datafication, or the process of rendering our lives as data, is “first and foremost… a kind of surveillance designed to impose classifications and norms on the surveilled while devaluing whatever ways they understand themselves.” It’s a way to encourage artists to minimize their own conception of their work, and maximize its machine-legibility.3
Music journalists began taking note of how streaming was changing the sound of pop music around 2017. In terms of song structure, because streams were only monetized after thirty seconds, there was a particular emphasis placed on perfecting song intros. Sometimes, streaming-conscious songwriters would just dive directly into the chorus.
one pop songwriter and producer told me that Eilish had become a type of poster child for what was being called a “Spotify sound,” a deluge of platform-optimized pop that was muted, mid-tempo, and melancholy.
The chill-hits Spotify sound—or what the pop music critics at the New York Times started calling “spotifycore”—was a product of playlist logic requiring that one song flow seamlessly into the next, a formula that guarantees a greater number of passive streams. At times, these whispery, smaller sounds even recalled aspects of ASMR, with its performed intimacy and soothing voices. When everyone wants your attention, it makes sense to find reprieve in sounds that require very little of it, or that might massage your brain a bit. Both traits—seamlessness and chillness—are reflected in music that
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“Anything that could be put on a coffee shop playlist streams better, basically,”
With the new pressures of TikTok, artists didn’t only need to make songs that would avoid skips and “do numbers on” lean-back playlists. They also had to answer to the harsh demands of short-form video and TikTok’s fast-moving feeds. The line between the musician and the meme-maker blurred. Everyone had to commodify their personalities now by becoming a comedian, or making some other sort of clickbait emotional appeal. Artists needed to be dancers and models and lifestyle influencers; they needed to open up about their innermost struggles. An extreme sense of literalism in lyrics triumphed,
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The rise of short-form video as a vessel for music discovery brought the logic of streambait to a new extreme. It was no longer about grabbing the listener in the first thirty seconds, but the first three-to-five seconds. The chorus or some ultra-hooky bit needed to hit the app-swiper immediately. Shortly after first joining the app, a video barged its way onto my “For You Page,” wherein a self-appointed TikTok-for-musicians expert explained that in order to go viral on the platform, a song needed not only an immediate hook, but “re-engagement triggers” every few seconds.
Songwriting started to revolve around snippets. I will never forget the first time a young songwriter explained to me the songwriting process that was emerging in the TikTok era: artists were releasing short bits of works-in-progress, essentially A/B testing their own hooks in order to see what was reacting and figure out what songs to finish writing. In 2022, Billboard reported on how labels and artists were abandoning snippets that failed to generate mass enthusiasm, leaving professional songwriters with “dead copyrights” they could no longer place.11
But if it wasn’t Spotify and streaming numbers, I’d be looking at the radio charts. If it wasn’t the radio charts, I’d be looking at iTunes sales data. If it wasn’t the sales data, I’d be looking at other metrics. You want to get some kind of feedback of where it’s connecting with people.” He has a point: platform pressures, in the end, are just business-minded approaches to songwriting, amplified by data optimization.
Jeremy Wade Morris has built on Katz’s notion of “phonograph effects” by calling these “platform effects”—how the pressures of various digital music platforms shape the sound of music released on said platforms.14
Streaming services aren’t pulling strings tied to artists’ backs forcing them to write songs in certain ways. But they afford users space for certain ways of being. When platforms repeatedly prioritize one type of thing over another, the scope of what’s possible in a given media environment starts to narrow.
Commercial music is always in search of what’s going to scale. It’s why streaming services are always going to be wired for music that streams well. This is part of what independent artists are up against today: the supposedly neutral streaming platform that encourages artists to create value on its own terms, one that cares more about playlist streams than creating a sustainable situation for artists. The problem is not the chill-pop streambait musicians, or even the TikTok plants, but these self-replicating systems that continuously reward the same styles—whatever users will stream
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Hyperpop was a shorthand for a post-SOPHIE, post−PC Music internet aesthetic, a more queer and trans alternative to mainstream experimental electronic music culture, often with pitch-shifted vocals, drawing influence from vaporwave, nightcore, chiptune, J-pop, y2k pop, hip-hop, and all sorts of dance music.
The official Spotify playlist did to hyperpop what streaming giants do to culture at large: it worked as a flattening, making a scene that was previously sprawling and complicated into something commodified and palatable, cutting out many of its original voices along the way.
