Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

by Liz Pelly

“If we’re willingly letting corporations create culture, or determine culture, for their own financial gain, that’s unequivocally bad,” Cheek told me. “And what makes it so much worse is that it’s couched in all of this language of individualism that people buy into and believe. It’s an era where we can’t agree on basic facts of history in general, and then we’re giving corporations the power to create their own versions of culture, and therefore their own versions of history. And then they make a lot of money off of it, while the people who are actually creating the work and the art that make it possible for them to even do this whole scam are not getting paid anything.”

“Data is described as this pure source that is untainted by culture or opinion or location or anything like that,” she continued. “It’s just not true. Algorithms are made by people and people have biases. There is nothing pure about data at all. It’s just a way of describing something from a particular viewpoint.”

The pop music philosopher and scholar Robin James, in theorizing why music culture has become entwined with the language of “vibes,” has argued that in embracing vibes, we’ve adopted the language that algorithms use to perceive and to organize us. She has explained vibes as a way to typecast users not based on identity but on their actions and data breadcrumbs, in terms of the “trajectory” that someone might be on as a user. “We’ve learned how to interact with algorithms so that they perceive us in ways that we want to be perceived,” she said in a 2023 podcast interview. “You’re pre-packaging yourself as a data subject.”2

The new paradigms of being a fan online—the niche vibes, the meme playlists, the infinite descriptors—started feeling more attuned to this broader project of data processing and corporate exploitation than, say, musical understanding and appreciation. It was the datafication of not just music, but fandom. If microvibes are a form of metadata, and metadata works to make artificial intelligence systems operate more efficiently, it’s worth following that logic a bit further and remembering the broader ramifications of AI systems. In his introduction to Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music, the philosopher Fredric Jameson describes the concept of “autosurveillance,” under which “capital and the state no longer have to do anything to you, because you have learned to do it to yourself.” This was fan culture reshaped by algorithmic ubiquitousness, which is to say, by tools of surveillance.3

Fake mood music streamed by fake listeners: Is that where the arc of recorded music industry “innovation” eventually leads?

“The issue isn’t that these tools are fundamentally bad, or nefarious, or immoral,” he explained. “It’s that we don’t have consent over how the things that we make are used, and that is a fundamental right that we all have, but that we need to remind ourselves that we have, because we live in a world where that right is often trampled on and taken away. We forget that we have that right.”

“The fact that functional music as a market is rapidly growing is just a testament to the power of sound and the power of music,” said Endel’s CEO in a 2023 interview with a fitness blog. “A lot of people have recognized that, and they are turning to sound to help them feel better or feel different. They’re self-medicating with sound.” Whether the research is legitimate or not, wellness and self-medicating should not be in the hands of Endel, Universal Music Group, Spotify, or any other corporate entity, but that’s a hard sell in a country where health and well-being are by design left to private sector profiteers.

“Maybe it turns out Spotify shares the information with a data broker, which is, in turn, absolutely happy to share this information with another actor to make a very detailed profile about me,” Rossetti continued. “It’s Spotify, it’s dating apps, it’s what I read online.” This practice is called “ID syncing,” in which companies compile data from various sources, from cookies and mobile identifiers, fingerprinting on browsers. Taken altogether, these companies attempt to map detailed user profiles that could be used for job selection, background checks, political micro-targeting, and more.

Drott points to examples that already exist: a start-up called Creditvidya, which has used music streaming data as part of its algorithm for approving loans, and the microcredit start-up Lenddo, which media scholar Robert Prey has noted uses concert ticket data as part of approving students for loans to buy textbooks.6

Spotify calls its mass data collection practices “streaming intelligence,” a term that, like the popular use of the phrase “artificial intelligence” by corporations today, is merely a way of reframing surveillance.

Despite issues of privacy, profiling, and bias, some commercial applications of emotion AI have reached the market in recent years, in advertising, customer service, health, and other industries. According to one estimate, the global “emotion detection and recognition market” was valued at $20.26 billion in 2021—and is projected to be triple that number by 2030.10

It might seem like just music, but streaming services are susceptible to what’s called “surveillance creep,” or “function creep.” A surveillance system might start out with one purpose, but over time, its purpose might shift and expand beyond its original use case. We might know that a streaming app is watching our every move, but it’s just to recommend us music, we think—and so, we are conditioned to consider it low stakes. So much so that when, for example, a music app starts also monitoring and mapping our voices, or tracking down our search engine activity off-app, maybe we don’t even notice. Or, when it takes the most basic facts of our listening behavior and sells them to data brokers as “mood data,” which they then use to assemble more complex profiles on us, maybe we don’t even care. But these are fundamental violations of our privacy, and whether that right is encoded into law or not, it matters. The UK privacy advocacy group Privacy International puts it this way: “Privacy is how we seek to protect ourselves and society against arbitrary and unjustified use of power, by controlling what can be known about us and done to us, while protecting us from those who aim to exert control over our data, and ultimately all aspects of our lives.” As the tech and music industries alike aspire to ever more invasive ways to extract data and profits from us, it’s crucial to remember the bigger picture.11 What’s more, privacy is just a basic human right, one that we should seek t...

It matters that Daniel Ek has used his fortunes from Spotify, in part, to invest in AI militarism, through a 100 million euro investment in the German military-AI company Helsing, putting that company’s valuation at 400 million euro. Helsing alleges to use its software to “assist battlefield operations” by using live data to “identify and assess multiple collected forms of data via sensors in order to assemble a picturesque viewpoint which military agents could then use at their discretion.” Ek sits on the board of Helsing, and has publicly advocated for the expansion of investment in its technology. In 2022, he coauthored an op-ed for Politico arguing in favor of what he dubbed “New Defense,” urging for a new wave of AI military companies. The piece was riddled with tech-culture buzzwords, calling out the need for defense contractors to be “digital natives” with “agile and iterative development practices.” It should go without saying that many musicians would prefer the profits made from circulating their work did not fuel the war machine, as was evidenced most recently by the United Musicians and Allied Workers’ 2024 “War Profiteers Out of Music” campaign.13

Even on the higher end of Spotify’s floor for being “able to live off of their art,” in its various estimations, these are sums that would be meaningful, in most cases, for individual solo artists, self-releasing their music. Indeed, the tier system, in general, does not seem to account for musicians working with teams—whether that be songwriting collaborators, bandmates, producers, or record labels of any scope, all of which would dramatically impact the profits reaching the actual musicians behind a given artist moniker. This is a crucial distinction: when streaming services issue scraps of payments, this does more than ensure the precarity of artists’ livelihoods. These financial realities also shape the image of the streaming era’s model musician, systematically pushing artists toward staunch individualism.

“If your art practice is so ingrained in the brutal reality that Spotify has outlined for all of us, then what is the music that you’re not making? What does the music you’re not making sound like?”

course, it raises the question: What is Spotify doing spending hundreds of thousands on vanity billboards when it has barely ever turned a profit?

“Now the word ‘independence’ just slots in so perfectly with the neoliberal project,” Saunier reflected. “The word has been redefined to mean, you’re on your own, we’re not helping you…. You get no investment, you get no brainstorming meetings, you get no marketing help. It’s purely based on if your track happens to go viral, or conversely, if you happen to already be famous, in which case your track is going to go viral anyway. It’s the shifting of all responsibility and work to the individual, which is the main tenet of this stage of capitalism that we’re in. It is perfectly illustrated by the new definition of the word ‘independence.’ ”

When I perused the “Front Page Indie” playlist in the spring of 2024, about a quarter of the playlist was made of major label music, and roughly another quarter was credited to independent labels with major label distribution. As one might guess, Spotify’s primary concern is not the long and rich history of independent music, or with providing a platform exclusively for artists on independent record labels, but is rather more aligned with the long history of the music industry flattening “indie” into a specific sound, genre, or as Spotify calls it, a “vibe.” Indeed, its flagship “no genre, just vibes” playlists, “Lorem” and “POLLEN”—which were being touted around on a music press and spon-con tour where Spotify’s PR team branded them the “future” of its playlist curation strategy—occupy much of the visual real estate on the “Indie” page.

Like elsewhere in the aspirational vibes economy, it was data-flattened music wrapped up in niche descriptors that would make the listener feel unique by hitting “play” and then letting it drift off into the background. “Indie” was once short for “independent,” but at some point it became this. Similar to many a great marketing scheme before it, the goal was to capitalize on a user’s aspiration to feel like an individual.11

Meanwhile, actual independent labels were mystified by what was happening on the so-called “indie” playlists. As the founder of one indie rock imprint explained to me in 2022, word had started to spread among independent labels and distributors that things were changing at Spotify. “Their indie playlists have turned into pop playlists,” the label founder told me in 2022. “Most indie labels are aware of this and have been really upset about it,” he continued. “Our distributor is constantly trying to talk to Spotify about it. They’ve pushed a lot of what we would think of as indie to the rock category, which has a much smaller listenership. So even when we do get playlisted now, it doesn’t really translate into very many streams, or much revenue. Lorde and Taylor Swift and all of these pop stars are on the indie playlists constantly now.” The independent label owner said it was becoming impossible for their artists to get onto playlists like “All New Indie.” “We’ve been doing this long enough,” they told me. “All of our guitar bands used to be on those playlists. And now it’s just this watered down pop sound that has taken over. We no longer know what playlists we’re aiming for. They become more and more abstract as time goes on, and they all have a sound that is very similar.”

The internet has long stopped feeling like a town square—it feels like a shopping mall.

What streaming services have done well is influence content in ways that are aligned with corporate interests—namely, selling placement in playlists and “programmed streamshare”—while maintaining a sense of feigned neutrality, especially aesthetically through the lack of contextualization in the interface. Businessmen might say this is genius, but for the public, it’s a disservice. It’s not neutrality; it’s deception. For users and artists alike, it creates confusion.

It would benefit listeners and artists alike if Spotify would clearly label when tracks were part of the PFC program, or surfacing due to Discovery Mode or some other marketing partnership—even if doing so would detract from its long-running sham narrative that streaming is a democracy and whatever rises to the top is the will of the people.

“Unaccountable power is the problem wherever it pops up. It’s not about any particular technology. It’s concentrated, unaccountable private power.”

In 2023, Spotify made it onto a year-end top 10 list of its own: as of December 31, it was listed as one of the ten biggest spenders on lobbying fees in the “internet companies” category on the nonprofit-run database OpenSecrets.org. According to the website, which tracks money in politics, Spotify ranked ninth on the list, spending over $1.58 million. It paled in comparison to ByteDance’s $8.74 million, Amazon’s $19.2 million, and Meta’s $19.3 million, but still, it was telling. Big technology companies have long aspired to buy political influence in order to normalize certain practices—around data collection, privacy, competition, tax evasion—and Spotify was among them.7 From 2015 to 2023, Spotify spent a total of $8,720,000 on lobbyists. Much of Spotify’s political activity has focused on its battle against Apple, who, when Apple Music launched in 2015, had already been spending big in DC: the company had spent $4 million on lobbying in 2014. The following year, Spotify began catching up, hiring its first four lobbying firms: Peck Madigan Jones, along with Forbes-Tate, Gibson Group, and BakerHostetler. These firms represented a huge cross section of corporate interests, across finance, pharmaceuticals, airlines, oil, and beyond, including the likes of Facebook, eBay, and Pandora. At the time, Politico called it “an aggressive move” for Spotify, noting that the company was likely motivated, in part, by the Justice Department’s then-looming considerations of changes to mu...

In one video, Ek complained that Apple was making it impossible to communicate directly with his consumers—meanwhile, his app prevents artists from messaging their listeners, or reaching them directly without participating in its paid promotions. “Apple wants to tax us with 30 percent,” Ek complains—the exact percentage of royalties that artists must give up in order to have their music surfaced by Discovery Mode. When Ek claims that Spotify is all about the open internet and leveling the playing field, at a certain point it starts to feel like what the musician Holly Herndon has called “platform gaslighting.”9

As MWA explains it, the only reason that free music on YouTube can legally exist is due to “safe harbor laws” included in a piece of late-nineties legislation called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which relieves giant companies like Google from being liable for the material that circulates on YouTube, and puts the responsibility of reporting copyright violations on the artists themselves. “Reforming DMCA Section 512 is the only way to fix the ‘leak’ and establish a fair functioning market for recorded music,” MWA writes in its explainer. “Once this happens, we can organize and build leverage against streaming services, create viable alternatives, and raise the floor for royalty payouts.”4

UMAW and MWA are not actually unions: because independent artists are technically independent contractors, U.S. labor laws currently prohibit them from unionizing, instead making it so that musicians coordinating boycotts can be deemed illegal cartels.

“Every time there’s a new, paradigm-shifting technology, there need to be new laws,”

“Part of what’s so sinister about the streaming landscape now is how it’s really devalued musicians’ labor. When we listen to music on Spotify, we are not just listening to a song. We are consuming someone’s labor at a really artificially reduced price. We’re trying to get people thinking about consuming music in a different way, and to think about the ways in which artists are being exploited in that process.”

The problems created by venture capital are never going to be solved by more venture capital. There needs to be a political counterweight, but music needs alternatives, too. Rethinking the future of music also requires rethinking profit motives and power structures, and challenging a system where a small handful of entertainment and technology firms own so much of music. It requires investigating alternative models that are more cooperative, transparent, and artist-run, that support artists operating across diverse scales and practices, and that generally put people over profit.

Linares is an advocate for what’s called the solidarity economy—a deep-rooted international movement toward sustainable economic arrangements that value community ownership and democratic governance—and her ongoing work involves connecting the dots between those concepts and the arts. That could look like worker-owned cooperatives, participatory arts budgeting, or mutual aid networks, to name a few examples. “It’s not just about what we’re against,” she once told me. “We also need to consider what we want to build.”2

Imagining new futures for music requires collectivity, improvisation, and deep listening.

At a time when the music industry has insistently sold the idea of the hyper-individualistic solo creative entrepreneur as the model independent artist—where every artist is meant to act like the CEO of their own little media empire—there’s power in collectives of artists pushing back, and asserting that true independence comes from working together with the people in your community to build an alternative. “The music industry is not going to help musicians,” Vandermark concluded. “It’s going to come down to us, but they’ll do everything they can to break us.”

The problems with music streaming are problems more broadly of culture under capitalism—where decontextualization and historical amnesia make it so people do not look backward, forward, and around, but just flounder in their atomization. Collectives and cooperatives work to counter exactly that by creating the conditions for people to be in more direct collaboration with one another. It is hard work—the polar opposite of the frictionlessness that platform-optimized tech culture imposes. But friction is part of how real connections, and ultimately change, happen.

Music is too important to be left solely to the marketplace. This subject has come up time and time again in my reporting: how brutal it is that there remains barely any public funding at all for music in the U.S. All around the world, though, there are examples of how to publicly fund music: grants, basic income, education programs.

Everyone wants an answer: What’s the ethical alternative to Spotify? The one I often provide is, unfortunately, unsatisfying to many, because it is not simple. There is not one single answer. It’s certainly not merely to download Apple or Amazon Music, or some other app that allows you to pay $10 a month for all of the music in the world. Rather than seek out another fix-all app, we should be honest with ourselves about the reality that this very model fails to meet the needs of most independent artists and listeners, and grapple with the complexity of that. Supporting art is a different equation.

Collective issues require collective solutions. But buying music directly from artists and independent record labels makes an actual difference; it is an important part of supporting the culture you’d like to see keep existing. That means tracking down where artists have their work on sale directly, whether online or at the local independent record shop.

Being a better individual consumer, of course, only gets us so far, and is surely not the only way to strengthen diverse cultural ecosystems. This also requires participating in alternative networks of communicating and contextualizing music: writing about the things that are exciting, sharing music with your friends, going to shows. I am energized by what feels like a real resurgence of interest in independent radio stations as community hubs, too. Independent radio offers something that hyper-personalized streaming can’t: a sense of locality and shared listening experience. Against all odds, it feels like independent music journalism projects are rising from the ashes of corporate media collapse—newsletters, blogs, zines. That work is increasingly vital in the streaming era, and requires new funding models too.

On a collective level, we have to be active participants in the cultural economies we want to see flourish; we have to validate the culture we want to see in the world. The corporate culture industry entrenches its power not just through controlling the marketplace but also by controlling the popular imagination, by convincing us that there are no alternatives. The alternatives are growing all around us, though. To be sure, the broader equation for revaluing music also involves staying plugged into the organizing work, standing in solidarity with the new music labor movement groups, supporting the long political fights ahead. Streaming is not going away anytime soon, and some basic regulations are the bare minimum we can do to attempt clawing back the corporate stranglehold on culture, to try to get a bit more money into the pockets of working artists. Lawmakers should seriously consider new rules for digital payola. At the FTC, there should be more oversight of the major label licensing deals with all streaming services—not just Spotify. UMAW’s Living Wage for Musicians Act would create a new, additional royalty stream paid directly to artists. The American Music Fairness Act aims to get artists in the U.S. paid when their music is played on AM and FM radio. And perhaps most important of all, the Protect Working Musicians Act would give artists the right to unionize and collectively bargain, thus giving them more negotiating power with not just streaming services, but the...

The problems faced by musicians, like those faced elsewhere in society, aren’t technological problems: they’re problems of power and labor.

To address the root causes of our ailing music culture, we need to have deeper conversations about why music matters, why universal access to music matters, and what systemic political and economic realities currently prevent so many people from engaging deeply with music.