Mood Machine Quotes

“And platforms mostly only offered the illusion of togetherness. They are not public squares; they’re corporate digital enclosures where your every move is tracked.”
― Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

“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.”
― Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

“Streaming, and Spotify in particular, created a music-themed version, where participation was captured, reduced to data points, and used to strengthen a commercial machine, to achieve the financial goals of Spotify and the majors.”
― Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

“Taken altogether, these companies attempt to map detailed user profiles that could be used for job selection, background checks, political micro-targeting, and more. Spotify has taken part in such collaborations through its direct partnerships. In his book Streaming Music, Streaming Capital, the professor and researcher Eric Drott notes that Spotify has partnered with Facebook, Uber, Tesla, Tinder, and Virgin Airlines, as well as Ancestry.com and 23andMe, offering the last two companies “not only a new customer base but a new source of behavioral data, one that might profitably complement the genetic data they already possess.” And to more broadly illustrate why else marketers and ad-tech firms as well as “credit agencies, banks, health-care providers, insurers, governmental agencies, and finance companies” might want music-related data—beyond just Spotify and streaming data—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”
― Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

“The moderators have also observed that people tend to recommend the same songs pretty frequently. As a lighthearted in-joke, they made their own playlist called “We Don’t Know What Your Playlist Is About but These Songs Are For Sure in It” (description: “you need therapy but you asked for a playlist”) with songs like “I Know the End” by Phoebe Bridgers and “Nobody” by Mitski.”
― Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

“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.”
― Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

“And once more, we’re not having a serious conversation about the future of
music unless we’re talking about public funding, cooperatives, unions, and
international solidarity—and unless we realize that the fight for a more liberated
and de-commodified cultural sphere is part of the broader struggle for a better
world”
― Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

“In 2003, the U.S. Center for Economic and Policy Research proposed something called the “Artistic Freedom Voucher,” which urged the federal government to dedicate $20 billion dollars to a fund that would give each taxpayer a $100 voucher in the form of a refundable tax credit, which they could voluntarily choose to allocate to a musician or group.”
― Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

“How wrong I turned out to be. I mean, 100 percent wrong. From this idea of ‘let’s challenge these power structures’ came a paradigm shift that just became a new power structure that did not benefit musicians at all. It did not challenge capitalism at all, but became an ultra-capitalist sort of thing.”
― Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

“To promote riding for free, which they saw as a form of strike, and to simultaneously wage a campaign for accessible public transport, they organized a fund akin to DIY insurance: pay 100 krona per month, or about $10, and if you’re caught fare dodging, we’ll cover your ticket.”
― Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

“Music industry defenders of streaming muzak like to point out that artists themselves have been making functional music for decades. The argument usually begins by pointing to Brian Eno’s 1978 Ambient 1: Music for Airports, widely considered the first ambient record, which came with a manifesto outlining how ambient “must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” For example, the cofounder of Endel, a German app that builds on the logic of the functional playlist boom by generating “personalized functional soundscapes,” cites Eno as his biggest influence.10 Today’s functional music front-runners seem to miss something essential about the history of ambient, though, and the traditions it draws from and helped shape. For his part, Eno claims to have conceptualized ambient as a direct response to the cultural pervasiveness of Muzak, rather than a recreation of it. He called ambient music “an atmosphere or a surrounding influence: a tint,” which he created to suit “a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.” In Eno’s explanation of it, consummate artists were not supposed to make background music, and he asked, why not? “I use it to make the space that I want to live in.”11”
― Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

“In the streaming era, the industry had identified a new type of target consumer: the lean-back listener, who was less concerned with seeking out artists and albums, and was happy to simply double click on a playlist for focusing, working out, or winding down.”
― Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist