Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. Atria, 2025. $28.99, 288 pp.
In his poem On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), the first-century BC Epicurean philosopher Lucretius sought to explain the nature of the universe and all its parts. Lucretius suggested that the world—and everything in it—is made up of atoms. Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist is similarly ambitious in scope. Pelly explains not only the nature of Spotify, but also the nature of music and the nature of our current cultural and economic environment. The result is a book that is valuable even for those who rarely encounter playlists.
Since its founding in 2006 and launch in 2008, Spotify has become one of the most common ways people encounter music. Over 600 million people use Spotify to listen to music and podcasts. Spotify claims to increase access to music and empower listeners. It has a remarkable catalog of recorded music. Spotify also claims to care about musicians, offering opportunities for new artists to find an audience and to make a profit from their music.
The true nature of Spotify is significantly different. In chapter after well-researched chapter, Pelly uses evidence and interviews to lay bare the nature of the Spotify behemoth. For starters, Spotify began as a way of selling advertising, not spreading love for music. Artists make very little, if anything, from the streaming of their music. Deals are secretive and inequitable, with major labels and their artists benefiting the most. Most recently, Spotify has even found ways to entice labels and musicians to pay for plays, rather than being paid for plays—a reincarnation of “payola,” when labels illegally paid radio stations for plays.
Built on a “something for nothing” foundation, Spotify began with illegally pirated music. Then it moved to licensed music, but it lured listeners in by not charging anything. Everything was directed towards making them paid subscribers, but they could have “something for nothing” if they could put up with ads. At the same time, musicians are giving up “something for nothing”—many make little, if any, money from their entire catalog being available to 600 million people around the world. Spotify, as a company, offered “nothing” in terms of profit until 2024, yet there has long been a lot of “something” when it comes to what Spotify corporate gets paid.
Many listeners may not care much about what happens to musicians and how contracts get made, but they are under the impression that Spotify is empowering them as listeners. Yet with its curated playlists, algorithms, and efforts to push certain types of music and artists, Spotify is not as listener directed as it seems. Listeners may think they are cruising down a musical speedway with limitless options, but most are on a track that resembles the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disney World. And it is a small, musical world they are visiting.
A book exposing a company as profit-driven and corporate-goal oriented is not especially novel, but Mood Machine does much more than that. With her own background in the DIY and independent music scene, Liz Pelly asks bigger questions about the nature of music itself. Many of us think of music and musicians as they are portrayed in documentaries like It All Begins With a Song or 20 Feet From Stardom—motivated by ideas and passion and fueled by talent. We think music and musicians are filled with meaning. But Spotify works best for its board when the opposite is the reality.
Spotify seems to be all about music, but depending on your perspective, it may be more accurate to say that it is nearly anti-music. Spotify has gone far beyond pushing certain artists or playlists. It now promotes “ghost artists”—artists who don’t exactly exist. There may be a social media page or an account identifying a band or musician, but they’re essentially fictional. This is cheaper for the companies that sell to Spotify. It also works toward another goal, PFC, “perfect fit content,” which is what ghost artists and AI typically make. The ghost artist percentage on Spotify playlists might shock you if you noticed it.
But even if the artists aren’t ghosts and are acknowledged, PFC in some ways challenges the nature of music. Content is a “perfect fit” for playlists built around vibes and moods and moments. Spotify’s advertisements claim to offer “music for every moment.” Some playlists, like “Deep Focus” and “Bossa Nova Dinner” are 90% PFC. Essentially, what Spotify is pushing is “functional music,” which is how we’d classify the Muzak you hear in elevators. “Music for every moment” is background noise, not meant to be especially intriguing or challenging or even noticed. Daniel Ek, Spotify’s founder, has said Spotify’s only real competition is silence.
The “perfect playlists” filled with PFC aren’t really for listening. They are background noise that perhaps even discourages listening. Why is it that we need or want constant white noise? What habits of being are we developing as we constantly practice filtering out sounds? Why are we so uncomfortable with silence? Do Spotify’s perfect playlists help or hinder our development as human beings?
Pelly identifies a number of issues with the background noise model of music. The goal for PFC sessions is music for “lean-back listening.” There is no room for “challenging” music. The artists aren’t especially identifiable. There is little room for creativity or expression. There is next to no artistry, which is why AI is surging in the PFC market. If music is meant to be a human art, PFC always ranks low on the art side and is increasingly low on the human side. What are humans getting from this listening experience? Are they really listening at all?
Lean-back listening and perfect playlists not only crowd out emerging artists, they can operate as a form of erasure. Playlists named after existing genres, like “lofi,” may begin with songs from original artists and the actual musical movement. But then Spotify fills the playlists with cheaper PFC songs. Soon enough, listeners start to think a genre is well-defined by a playlist that has eliminated whatever was original and real about the genre. If you turn to Spotify to learn about lofi or jazz, you may be misled. Spotify doesn’t just offer an alternative to more original and challenging music. It consumes genres and regurgitates golems.
Of course, the music industry has long posed threats to music. Labels have always repackaged and repurposed sounds and songwriters. Plenty of people had their vocals used for other people’s benefit back when everything was still on vinyl. CD quality never did justice to artists’ talent. The album rose and fell and everyone bemoaned the changes that came with the MP3 era. Now artists are affected by TikTok pressures not only to create shorter songs, but sometimes just hooks and choruses. Spotify isn’t always the best for artists, but maybe there is nothing new under the sun.
Mood Machine is a compelling read because it explains what is new about Spotify and why listeners should care about Spotify’s habits, even if they altogether hate music. Spotify is also a twenty-first century data company. It gathers all kinds of information on its listeners, even attempting to track moods as you listen to your “moments.” Much of that happens behind the scenes with next to no transparency. As Pelly points out, it is a good example of surveillance creep and raises questions about privacy. Spotify pays you nothing for your data but it makes money off your data. And like many other twenty-first century companies, it turns its founders and CEOs into millionaires, without turning a profit (until just recently).
Big data and “datafication” are not inconsequential. In their prescient 2013 Foreign Affairs article “The Rise of Big Data,” Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger identified that “big data exacerbates the asymmetry of power between the state and the people.” The same is true for the asymmetry of power between corporations and consumers. The authors warned against authoritarianism leaning on big data—which we are, in fact seeing in China today—and against “misplaced trust in data.” As they say, “organizations can be beguiled by data’s false charms and endow more meaning to numbers than they deserve.” Spotify shares our data with companies that target us and change the environment around us based on what Spotify has learned, but Spotify has also picked our experience and options through algorithms and sorting strategies. We are told that our preferences are taken into consideration in the changes around us, but we may in fact be serving algorithms rather than being served by them. Spotify is only one example of this much broader trend.
Big data also speaks to an underlying epistemological shift in our culture. In 2013, Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger suggested that “in many instances, we will need to give up our quest to discover the cause of things, in return for accepting correlations… Big data helps answer what, not why, and often that’s good enough.” In their opinion, the rise of big data indicates that “a worldview built on the importance of causation is being challenged by a preponderance of correlations.” Spotify’s methods reflect a philosophical sea change that affects us all.
Ultimately, Spotify and its perfect playlists are part of larger cultural shifts. As Pelly notes, “What musicians are dealing with today is also what working people everywhere are dealing with: precarious labor conditions, a lack of universal healthcare and affordable housing, a generally untenable rising cost of living.” She encourages us to think beyond the music industry in response: “we need to think about the world we want to live in, and where music fits into that vision.”
Not all readers will agree with the prescriptive parts of Pelly’s book. Some people simply do not understand and appreciate music the way she does. Some people may be fine with a “chill vibes” playlist in a way that we might be comfortable with a McDonald’s chicken nugget. Others may differ from Pelly politically. She admires the Swedish model, which has included support for artists and musicians, and she suggests that “music is too important to be left solely to the marketplace.” But it would be difficult to argue with Pelly’s descriptive analysis.
Whatever playlists we enjoy, Mood Machine reveals much about the nature of things in the twenty-first century. Spotify is one company, but its ways of doing things are not unique. Spotify also presents us with a categorization problem we constantly encounter: Should music (or anything) be considered culture or a commodity? Pelly’s ultimate prescriptive suggestion is: “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.”
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