This book is excellent at helping to explain how music became content and how we became discontent with that transition. Liz Pelly has roots in DIY music booking / promotion (a thankless task if there ever was one) and brings that lens to the immense corporate flattening that streaming music represents. It’s Spotify that specifically catches her attention in this analysis, which makes her critique unique to that platform; however, you will likely recognize in its specifics some aspects that apply in general to Apple Music or Amazon Music. I was a bit weary of reading another book about streaming music, given that I’d read Nick Seaver’s Computing Taste not too long ago and the texts seemed similar at first blush. They’re less similar than they are complementary, so I’d recommend reading both.
It’s deeply clarifying to understand that Spotify began not as a music concern, but as a way to get ads in front of eyeballs. Ads are annoying, and they are the reason the platform exists. It’s not because Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon were diehard music lovers. As Pelly writes, “that’s what music was to Spotify in its early days: a traffic source for its advertising product” (p. 13). Ek and Lorentzon were part of Sweden’s software and media piracy scene, so they had familiarity with file-sharing of different kinds of media. It’s almost incidental to their story that Spotify features music. I had a different idea when I first used the service in 2012 or so. I knew of iTunes and Amazon Music, which were existing companies that pivoted to include music. Pandora and Rhapsody, among other “radio” based options weren’t interesting to me because I wanted more control over what I was listening to. With Spotify, I thought I’d found it, and in so doing, found a way to enjoy music digitally that didn’t involve MediaFire / YouSendIt / MegaUpload links or cryptic blog posts. (The days of Napster, Audiogalaxy, and Kazaa being long gone.) Little did I know that the original source for much of the earliest songs on the platform was via piracy itself, as proven by the presence of music by a band of Rasmus Fleischer’s. His band’s music had only ever been distributed via PirateBay, though it ended up on Spotify (p. 15). With a beginning like that, it’s no surprise that Spotify would later be so uncompromising in its mistreatment of the artists that use its platform.
Pelly argues early in the book that the Spotify employees in charge of creating and maintaining playlists are a large part of what made the foregrounding of ad revenue over music listening so successful. Essentially, the listening preferences of individuals, when taken en masse, reveal something about what is popular on the platform. If you’re like me, you think that these data would be useful in learning what kind of music is popular to whom and where. Pelly notes that the number of streams a song has are not the same thing as a firm assent for the song above any other. She clarifies that “streams are, in fact, not votes. Especially not when the streams are most earned by music just inoffensive enough to not get shut off” (p. 33). So it’s not the gripping hook of a song you can’t stop playing on repeat that is the measure of success for Spotify. It’s the idea that you will have the app running in the background to give some texture to your day as you go about living your life. (This “lean-back” listening [ch.3] is contrasted elsewhere in the text with “lean-in” listening, which is something I didn’t know I had been doing forever.) For a user who just taps on a colorful tile for a playlist and then lets the algorithm do its work, the gravest sin is to skip a song on a playlist. This action gives the playlist editors information about what doesn’t engage users on a certain list. They want there to be no reason to engage with the app again once you’ve opened it for the day. Pelly explains how this process turns music listening on its head by relating how “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” (p. 40). Music that is just worthy enough to keep on in the background, but isn’t worth investigating or “leaning into” for additional engagement. It’s a painting on your wall that’s there just because you had a blank space and not because you liked how it looked. I do see the benefit of listening to certain artists or albums as I read or write, but the idea of doing some kind of set-it-and-forget-it maneuver with music just seems icky to me. I deserve better; the artists deserve better.
The more I read the book, the more the inability of Spotify’s executives to actually enjoy music became clearer and clearer. When art is flattened to the metadata that describe it, that’s what happens. A song file has descriptors such as length, volume, pitch, tempo, timbre, rhythm, and melody, among other factors. These are elements that computers can (more or less) identify accurately for the purpose of adding to a playlist by throwing together similar sounding songs. There are times, though, when the songs that go together make no sense or are jarring. Pelly shares the example of ANOHNI’s track “Why Am I Alive Now?” being on a “Chill Vibes” playlist (p. 54). Turns out the unchill, depressing mood of the song escaped the algorithm’s and playlisters’ detection. Rather than stopping there, Pelly uses this instance to interview ANOHNI about the importance of putting music in context without an algorithm. For her, it’s true that “Sometimes a record only needed to be listened to five times in order for a profound transaction to have taken place” (p. 54). So, the “lean-back” listening of many Spotify listeners, which involves just keeping music on as part of the ambience, results in a clear disconnection between the artist and their craft. There’s no real transaction happening except for the the financial one.
The importance of context isn’t limited to artists thinking their songs have been misappropriated either. Pelly interviewed a Spotify engineer, who had similar thoughts to ANOHNI’s about the high power of an album having no correlation to an equally high number of listening sessions. He tells her how “records that I would consider really life-changing… in terms of listening time, wouldn’t even show up in my top 100… There is a lot of music that listeners find important but it’s not what you want to listen to all day” (p. 101). There are definitely records that can be exhausting to get through, not because of their low quality. They are an experience and it is necessary to give your full attention to them. You might feel drained or enlightened after hearing them; either way, you might not rush to play them again. These comments about the importance of the context of listening to a certain record or song reminded me of an email exchange I had with a friend I’d traded music zines with over the years. He wanted to write about a band from the city where I lived at the time, so I excitedly sent him multiple MP3s of their music, figuring that would be the easiest way for someone in the U.S. to share music with someone in Australia in 2009. I was a little surprised at his response, which read “I won't download that stuff as I don’t have the time to listen to them attentively at the moment. I only really want to listen to music when I can pay it attention, and not in between school and home or while I'm stuffing packages. I'm finding more and more that my brain is adjusting to music and not listening to it, just *accepting* it. This bothers me.”
If it’s not the physical environment of listening to music that matters, then maybe the social aspect of sharing music is what makes it click. Anyone lucky enough to have received a mixtape from a friend, acquaintance, or sibling knows the power of music as an influence. That power is integral to its format. Pelly notes the distinction between mixtape intimacy and corporate surveillance (pp. 29-30) in a way that recalls Marc Masters’ argument in High Bias. The playlist that Spotify generates for you based on your own listening preferences is not going to push your tastes or challenge you the way a mixtape might. Even Spotify’s “Discover” feature is less about finding new sounds as it is getting to the core of what you already like. As Pelly puts it, there are more important aspects of music than engagement: the product was becoming blatantly less about connecting users to the world of music, and more about treating your own taste as a world of its own to be studied and sorted, packaged and sold (p. 99). This reversal of what discovery should mean recalls Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which argues that “free” online services have not the user, but the user’s behavior as their product. In other words, it is worth a lot of money to corporations to predict what you are likely to do in the future. If they can get you to keep navel-gazing in your playlist of choice, they’ve won. You are trapped in their algorithm.
Coincidentally, a podcast I was listening to around the time I was reading the book featured drummer Nick Jett of TERROR (more importantly, he is the guy who recorded the first two KNIFE FIGHT records) The episode included a discussion of streaming and how it influenced his band’s song choices for their setlist. He mentioned how TERROR started playing a certain song because “it’s like number five on our Spotify or something like that.” The host agrees and says he thinks more bands should “play the songs people are clearly listening to” by consulting streaming info. Jett understands that, but also thinks it’s “crazy” that some bands write their setlists based on their Spotify plays. It would have never occurred to me for a band to cater to their audience that much. What a perverse incentive to consider.
The social element of music is also present in the fact that other humans are making the tunes. Well, there’s some AI-generated music out there, but Spotify’s structure has also ushered in “ghost artists,” who exist to mimic certain sounds. Imagine session musicians hired to write songs that are pastiches or replicas of music in a specific genre. Regarding these artists, one of Pelly’s sources explained how “there was a problematic racial dimension to the unfairness of the program, when stock music tracks started commonly being used in playlists historically dominated by artists of color” (pp. 66-67). So, there’s a racially gentrifying homogenization to the recommendations of the algorithms. There’s no need to pay licensing fees for actual music made by real people who are racial minorities when you can get a white dude in Sweden or the U.S. to sound like them and pay the royalties that way. It’s a rip off, such a rip off.
That’s the overall message here. Streaming services, especially Spotify, are a rip-off all around. Aside from all the issues I’ve discussed already, Spotify continues to pay its artists penny-fractions for their thousands of streams, even as it increased its monthly fee for its premium service in late 2023. That fact, and Ek’s support of AI for military purposes via investment in German company Helsing, was enough for me to drop Spotify at the end of that year. I’m not going to pretend Apple Music is better. I am glad to support artists that make their music available on Bandcamp and I still occasionally browse the bins at Reckless Records when I’m in the city. You should find a way to more directly support the artists and labels you enjoy, especially as genre meanings get blurred on streaming services to the point that the bright line between independent and major labels is fading. Pelly shares the words of “an independent label owner” who indicated that Spotify’s “All New Indie” playlist is missing the guitar-forward music that is typically associated with the phrase indie rock. They claim “now it’s just this watered down pop sound that has taken over” (p. 182). What better time to recommend you listen to The INMATES' “You’re Not a Part of Us”?
Watered down pop — WE DON’T NEED YOU!Corporate shit rock — WE DON’T NEED YOU!Trendy fashion plates — WE DON’T NEED YOU!Bandwagon fakes — WE DON’T NEED YOU!
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