I remember being in college in 2010. My friend had just returned from vacation in Stockholm during the summer break, and he brought back this peculiar new software called Spotify that his local Swedish friends had installed for him. It had tens of thousands of songs on it, looked pretty similar to the standard iTunes user interface at the time, and it was totally free. While I’m paraphrasing, our conversation went something like:

“So it’s like LimeWire or torrent sites?”

“Yeah, but it’s legal!”

“How?”

“I dunno!”

“Do these ads pay the artists in the same way you would if you bought their record?”

“I dunno!”

“Huh.”

“Pretty cool right?”

“Pretty cool I guess!”

Something felt off. As an avid pirate of experimental music from various blogs and torrents in my youth, I had gotten used to the transparency of illegality involved in these subcultures. What we were doing was definitely against the law, but we were too broke as teenagers to buy every rare record or CD we found on eBay, and even when we did have money for music, we spent it on more affordable finds, digging in the crates at the local record store. Sometimes piracy was the only way of accessing that truly bizarre, eclectic, and nearly lost media—even if it was illegal.

But this was different. This wasn’t just weird, long lost rips of ambient tapes from the 1980s, this seemed like any and all music that I could think of. How could making all music free be a profitable business, let alone a sustainable source of income for the artists on these platforms? These suspicions stuck with me throughout my twenties, and while I slowly started to put things together as my frontal lobe began to fully form, there was nothing to confirm this deep hunch growing in the back of my brain as I watched online music culture rely more and more on dirt cheap—if not entirely free—cloud-based streaming platforms and move away from hard copy files stored on local hard drives.

And that’s what makes Liz Pelly’s new book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, so important. For the first time, we have a single text that lays out, in exacting detail, the bullshit we’ve been fed and provides a thorough explanation as to how this Stockholm-based startup conquered the music industry and more importantly why.

Liz and I spoke at length about the social ramifications of Spotify’s reign to a packed audience of over two hundred music lovers at St. Joseph’s University in Fort Greene on a frigid evening earlier this month. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

—Max Alper aka Peretsky

Max Alper: In the book, you talk about how we just need to be honest with ourselves and what we value when it comes to music or whether we really value it all. You told me that you took years off your life living for this shit working in DIY music scenes throughout your twenties. When did you realize the worth of music in your life?

Liz Pelly: You know, like a lot of other people in this room, I think a lot of the value of music is social and comes from thinking about music as a social practice and the interactions that you have with people. The connections that get made at shows, friendships, collaborations.

MA: Yes! This term social practice is the perfect descriptor, there’s so much to it beyond the sound itself. It’s economics, it’s the people you know, the clothes that you wear, the food that you eat, where you live, the real estate you inhabit. I mean, look at Brooklyn rent prices alone and how much the nightlife industry has affected them! When did you have this “a-ha!” moment regarding just how social music is?

LP: It’s a great question because I feel like no one is a twelve-year-old starting to go to shows for the first time and saying, “This is a wonderful social practice.” It’s not really something that you choose. I feel like for a lot of us who end up as “lifers” in music, it’s just something that happens to you because it’s fun to be part of a community. It’s fun to throw shows for people, have bands stay at your house, and make dinner together. And then one day, you wake up and you’re like, “Oh, this has kind of been my life for a decade now and I’m thirty-five and reading a book about how music is a great social practice.”

MA: It seems like this is just something that you can’t escape from if you’re really about that life. Which is what makes everything that you write about all the more maddening in that Spotify is trying to make something inherently social into something antisocial. Whether we realize it or not, the means of media consumption continue to become more insular.

Shifting topics, this is some seriously impressive investigative and critical reporting here. I wanted to know a little bit about your process. It was your 2019 Baffler article on streaming that brought me out of my apathetic funk on this subject, so I have you to thank for radicalizing me! Was this article the first time you started to take a deep dive into the internal practices of music streaming?

LP: It really started in 2016 when I began to research and write an essay about Spotify and the streaming economy for a [since defunct] nonprofit organization called CASH Music. This piece was about major label influence on Spotify playlists in particular. I began interviewing anonymous employees of major record labels and talking to musicians about what they were observing. That’s what led me to start writing about streaming for The Baffler. The research process for the book itself really started in earnest in 2022. But it was the series of Baffler essays that formed the basis of this project. Those essays and the book are similar, in that it is all reported criticism. It involved talking to a lot of sources, reviewing internal records, and getting firsthand observation by going to some interesting places, such as Sweden.

MA: You went to Daniel Ek’s hometown!

LP: I will say, this hasn’t come up in any of my interviews yet, but I’ve been waiting for a moment to explain this. I actually was really inspired to go to Sweden after seeing the documentary Turn Every Page about Robert Caro, which documents the process of him writing about LBJ and how he wanted to find out more about how he grew up, so he moved to Texas. I said to myself, “I gotta go to Sweden, straight up.” I actually went twice, Sweden is great.

MA: Yeah, we’re not dissing Sweden here. Truly, just how unique a place it is, even down to its strong public music education funding that breeds so many artists. Spotify really could only have happened in a place like Sweden because of both how many artists there are, but also the proliferation and normalization of piracy in Swedish culture in general.

LP: It’s super interesting. This is also a great example of something that I may have not learned about if I hadn’t gone to Stockholm because once I got there I interviewed this person named Rasmus Fleischer. He’s the coauthor of the book Spotify Teardown but is also cofounder of the [since disbanded] organization Piratbyrån, which translates to the Piracy Bureau. It was formed in Stockholm in the post-Napster, Pirate Bay era in response to this Hollywood-aligned group that was formed called Antipiratbyrån, the Anti-Piracy Bureau.

Spotify was happy to align themselves with piracy when it made them seem cool.

All of these people in the punk and rave scenes were questioning the role of copyright in Swedish society and decided to start a straight up pro-piracy lobbyist group. I think this sets the stage for how different the piracy conversation was in Sweden, which ultimately partially allowed for a company like Spotify to be created there because it wasn’t the same as in the United States. Here in the states we are very intense about copyright law, but in Sweden, it was more of a question. “Well, is copyright good? Maybe piracy is bad, or maybe there is a public good here. Maybe the free circulation of music and culture at the expense of Hollywood studios and major labels is actually a positive force for society.”

The music business started referring to Sweden as a lost market. The industry belief in Sweden was that no one’s ever going to pay for music here anyway. So if some advertising guys want to come and make an app that provides free music with ads, sure, let’s try it in Stockholm.

MA: They were vulnerable as a market over there, right? In that regard, it seems as though there was an opportunity for someone like Daniel Ek, an ad tech professional, to swoop in and say, “What if we could have both, free and legal?” It sounds like they were riding the coattails of what was hip about piracy and the Pirate Bay, when they clearly weren’t those people.  Which brings up the topic of how much Daniel Ek genuinely cares about music, right?  It seems Spotify as a whole had redefined itself several times in its earliest stages, not necessarily even as a music company but ultimately becoming one because they couldn’t compete with YouTube, and that music had smaller file sizes and even less regulation than video.

LP: It was a little bit surprising how easy it was to piece together the reality that the early history of the company wasn’t music specific. There are conference talks where employees are discussing how in the early days they were as interested in video as they were in music. Some have suggested that perhaps they went with music because the video files were too cumbersome to make a beta product with. Their first patents that they registered didn’t necessarily indicate that they were trying to create anything music specific. It was really, “How do we make something that takes advantage of [peer-to-peer] technology and legalize it in some way through an advertising model?”

MA: Right? It’s really just a bastardized and mainstreamed version of piracy that we’re seeing. Fast forward over a decade later and now shareholders and The Big Three record labels are benefiting tremendously from it.

LP: Some of the musicians I talked to in Stockholm who were adjacent to the Pirate Bay scene talked about it as a gentrification of piracy. It just seems like Spotify was happy to align themselves with piracy when it made them seem cool, and then they were happy to align themselves with the anti-piracy sentiment when it was good for business.

MA: It’s like they got some cultural clout at the very beginning and changed their tune when enough people with money started paying attention.

I want to harp on this one word that you bring up quite a bit in the book, which is flattening. It’s funny because just last year Apple had that ad where they just put all your favorite creative tools into a hydraulic press and flatten it into an iPad. And then they had to pull it because everyone said, “What the fuck, this is horrible. I like cameras, guitars, and books!” That was the perfect illustration of what’s going on with the internet and media consumption in general, being that you can do everything on a single device, it’s winner-take-all now. Everybody’s stuck using the same apps. I want to know a bit more of your definition of this term in regard to music specifically, both in terms of how we consume but also the market itself flattening out. This seems quite different from the record store model of there being shops for x style of music versus y.

LP: In the early days of writing about the impact of streaming on music, when I thought of the concept of flattening I was thinking about it in relation to aesthetics and how the music that seemed to become popular in the streaming era was this really flattened, washed out, chill vibes, boring music. I would talk to artists who would say the song in their catalog that does best algorithmically is the most boring song on the album, or the one that sounds the most like other artists, or the one that can work really well in a background music playlist. That’s how I thought of this flattening at first: it essentially meant music that could do well on playlists that serve the bottom lines of these companies through being tied to some sort of emotional clickbait sentiment.

But over time, I started feeling like there’s another connection there. When you look at that Apple ad and see the flattening, it becomes really clear that this actually has a lot to do with an obsession with seamlessness and optimization, the idea of just making the experience of engaging in culture as easy as possible. Somewhere there’s this gathering of tech people who decided that your average culture consumer does not want to think about it, that the idea of choosing what to listen to is this horrible task that you have to figure out a solution for. Personally, I don’t actually know many people who think that way.

MA: This is clearly a tech person idea, not a music person idea because we fucking love digging through the crates, right? Not necessarily even vinyl, but just the Bandcamp website itself. Just looking for artists, reading about them, the challenge of learning things before hearing it, that’s all part of the process. That seems to just be friction in the eyes of a tech executive who wants to streamline it.

LP: Yeah, you have this aesthetic flattening due to obsession with optimization. But I also think of the different senses of musical purpose. Music is just so vast. There are so many different reasons why people make music and engage with music. There are so many different types of industries that exist under this huge umbrella, and streaming introduced the idea of a one-size-fits-all model for artists and listeners across different practices and traditions. As a result, there’s also this other type of flattening, like a form of context collapse, where you have all these different musicians who have different purposes for what they do, but they’re all expected to operate on the same playing field as each other, as if that’s a gift or something.

MA: I can think of a few different examples of problematic sampling of non-Western music by some white guy in Europe or America, whether it be throat singing Tibetan monks for meditation music or the use of Indian tabla in otherwise very Westernized electronic music. These are specific examples in niche corners of the market, but now it seems like we’re just running into this type of context collapse every day across any and all genres or styles.

This idea of something frictionless and easy to listen to being the cash cow for these companies relates to what you had written about in Harper’s on what Spotify calls Perfect Fit Content, or PFC. You really gotta hand it to Spotify for keeping that term under wraps, because the types of ideas it evokes are horrifying. “We know you better than you know yourself, Max. Good morning! We can see you’re using a gym-tracking app right now. How about workout mix, my dude?”

LP:  I’ll say this spoiler, in the last paragraph of the surveillance chapter, there’s a Spotify employee talking about how badly they wanted to be able to track people’s locations. There was an internal backlash, and it never happened, but we know it’s something they can technically do.

MA: Of course! At least they can look at your time zone, right? They could say “It’s 7 a.m., time for a wake up mix! It’s 6 p.m., time for a chill cooking dinner mix!”

Right before the PFC chapter you get a bit more in depth into something that’s near and dear to my heart, specifically the topics of ambient music and “deep listening.” Pauline Oliveros had spoken at length on how we’re doing a lot of hearing but not a lot of listening. She’d be turning in her grave right now if she knew about this because the Spotify playlist algorithm tends to view her type of music as frictionless.

Now, as musicians we can admit that there are some calming, formulaic elements to ambient music, sure. But that doesn’t make it a passive listening genre! It feels a little disheartening to want to make this type of music right now because you might just get put in the Muzak category by default. What if I want to make J Dilla-inspired beats with jazz loops, am I suddenly a chill lo-fi guy? It feels so insular and isolating experiencing this music online now, as if it’s only there to pacify me. How do we actually make this a social practice for active listening again in these types of genres?

LP: You know, at first when I was researching the book, I wasn’t deeply motivated to research the “fake artist” story because it had been discussed for over a decade in trade news. But when I started the reporting process and pulled the veil back a little bit, I realized this is actually a program being created from inside the company. There was an internal team dedicated to looking after some of these chill playlists and populating them with low-budget stock music.

Streaming introduced the idea of a one-size-fits-all model for artists and listeners across different practices and traditions.

The thing about it that I think is so disturbing is that the music that is often being replaced on these playlists, whether it be ambient, lo-fi, or even jazz, is music that has rich traditions that aren’t meant to be consumed solely for these purposes of self-regulation and mood stabilization. It was so interesting talking to people about some of the history of ambient music, which has a whole philosophy behind it, a philosophy of communication in a sense. This type of music doesn’t only exist for the purpose of calming you down and chilling you out.

MA: In Spanish, ambiente means environment. And I think that’s a really beautiful thing, to actually put the definition of the word into the music and to be aware of your environment. Brian Eno first conceptualized the term from a hospital bed where he heard the radio in one corner of the room and the IV drip in another; he was actively aware of these sounds and where they were. This part of the philosophy of the music is completely washed away through context collapse.

But like, dude, music is so subjective! What if I like to sleep to grindcore? What if my blood pressure goes down when I listen to Pig Destroyer? What do we do when these platforms try to push back against this subjectivity of musical mood?

LP: It speaks to the importance of insisting that music be contextualized in ways that are respectful to the music and not just the ways in which the streaming services have presented it, which is basically, “What can we do to get people to click things and not turn off the app?”

MA: Yeah, just keep that app open. Keep it playing. Keep it scrolling. Please stay here. Please!

Continuing on this idea that Spotify apparently knows you better than you know yourself, we know that’s pseudoscientific because, in a way, music is irrational. Why does a version of a three chord song that was first composed one hundred years ago make you cry today? Why does this other version of it make you want to move your feet? There’s no single scientific solution to these questions, but Spotify sells it as a science in the ad tech realm. They tell their ad partners, “We have whittled it down, we know exactly the mood, and we know what that means for you based on the data.” That sounds like bullshit.

LP: I’ve tried to be really careful in having conversations around the book and the interviews or anytime someone suggests that Spotify knows what you like. They actually don’t, there’s no way. Streaming services have a pool of data on you. They know what you have listened to in the past, and based on this they can statistically predict something that you won’t hit skip on. But that is not the same as saying, “We can get inside your head and know your hopes and dreams and your deepest, darkest fears.”

MA: Better yet, they really just want to know what you’re needing to buy this week. “Guys, we really need to sell Charmin toilet paper, what song best works for that?”

LP: Especially in the past couple years with the AI hype cycle, you’ve even seen headlines that say, “Spotify wants to use AI to get inside your head.” And it’s like, no, they can’t do that, that’s not real.

MA: Hopefully this book and the conversations that seem to be sparking in various corners of the musical internet as a result of it can at least create some critique on the personal level as consumers so as to not take them at their word when they say these things or that we assume they’re speaking in good faith or truthfully at all.

Speaking of critique on the personal level, what can we do to make music less of the ruggedly individualist and in-the-box experience it has become online through these platforms? How can we bring social practice of music back into our lives as listeners?

LP: That’s a great question. We’re talking about the revaluing of music. I love even just the way that you frame the question too because whenever people ask about revaluation, there is naturally always a focus on, “Where should I put my money?” And that obviously is a really important question. I think that for a lot of people in this room it’s become really clear that the answer is simply to put your money directly in the pocket of the person who you’re trying to support. Spotify, Apple, or Amazon aren’t going to make sure that the money gets into the hands of the musicians that you care about. But there’s also this whole other question of how to socially and culturally revalue music. We were talking about this the other day, how can we do this even among our friends? Whether it be just telling people about the music that you’re into and listening to it together or simply writing about the music that you’re into online, that’s actively being social!

MA: I think it’s about reiterating the communal social aspect of it, whether it be through listening clubs, going to shows, or even specific online communities. You and I are millennials that grew up on forum culture! These are the places where we can discover new and specific subcultures.

With what’s happened to the online marketplace, even with decent sites like Bandcamp being sold to Epic Games and then resold to Songtradr within two years, do we think it’s possible for musicians to exist comfortably within a mainstream online framework at all? Should they aim for independent, smaller distribution outlets if they have the choice? Sometimes it’s so hard to even have that choice, some artists might not want their stuff on Spotify, but their distribution service might not allow them to pick which platforms they can appear on. Should we just disengage entirely with these powers that be?

LP: This is where we can introduce our great ideological split! I’m pretty upfront about the fact that I’m someone who is not going to ever endorse or call for a user boycott of a specific streaming service unless it’s coming from a collective mass movement of musicians who are organized in making that direct demand.

MA: And I’m just a dumb musician on the internet, so I can be loud and annoying on Instagram and say, “Everybody send me a screenshot of you canceling your subscription and I will post your Bandcamp link in my stories!” That’s fine, I don’t need to be professional. I guess that’s our great split!

But you’re right, I’m just one guy. This has to be a collective action across the board. On the topic of collective action in relation to small-scale streaming services, you talk about local libraries starting their own apps and their own streaming services that license works from local musicians. It seems like at the grassroots level, this is something that could really make an impact. Does the New York Public Library have such a service yet?

LP: No, and I really think that that should be their next project. One of the problems of the streaming era is this idea that a one-size-fits-all solution will ever work for all musicians and all listeners. So debunking and rejecting this idea is central. To get away from this idea of a highly optimized, frictionless, one-stop solution for music involves getting used to the idea that there might be different platforms and different sites that you have to go to in order to interact with and support different types of musicians.

MA: That’s how the Internet used to work, we used to have websites, people! You go on different websites for different things, rather than your three apps that you use for everything. Is it just a matter of baby steps in this more decentralized direction, perhaps even with smaller co-op models? What was the label you mention in the book that has their own streaming app that does this at a small scale?

LP: Catalytic Sound, yeah, I talk about them pretty extensively. It’s this group of thirty-three musicians wherein you can pay $5 a month and you just get access to stream the music of these thirty-three musicians. They make new work specifically for their website and app that you can only get from this subscription service. And then rather than paying the artists on a per stream basis, the co-op provides a model of an alternative way of doing streaming economics. Rather than paying musicians on a per-stream basis, 50 percent of the subscription revenue is split equally among the artists, regardless of stream count.

It would be cool to see other scenes, collectives, and labels experiment with a model like that. I think that’s why I wanted to include this example at the end the book because it’s obviously noteworthy, but also seems potentially replicable. This is not about an out-of-reach technological solution, it’s about reimagining these systems on a social and economic level.