Bad Mood Rising

Arielle Gordon interviews Liz Pelly about her new book “Mood Machine” and Spotify’s impact on the music industry ecosystem.

By Arielle GordonFebruary 3, 2025

• Music

ACCORDING TO SPOTIFY, my “daylist”—the auto-generated mix that is refreshed daily and sent to the top of my feed each morning—has a “college rock twee Monday morning” vibe. It wants me to know that I usually listen to “stretching” and “positive” at the top of my week, which I guess sounds like Yo La Tengo’s “Sugarcube.” It’s one of four songs by the New Jersey indie rockers on my bespoke playlist—variety must not perform very well during A/B testing. In the scope of our listening lives, Spotify has become not just a platform but also a prescription: Listen to these songs and you’ll feel “cozy” or “upbeat,” or perhaps even “stretching.”

In feeding our streaming data back to us with bizarre, focus-grouped descriptors, Spotify hopes to keep us listening—not to music in general, but to Spotify in particular. When it was announced that the company donated $150,000 to President Trump’s 2025 inauguration, its unspoken aims were at once made manifest: In the age of the raging narcissist, Spotify makes a streaming platform for the isolated ego, using its music data to mollify and flatter rather than disrupt or provoke.

In her new book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Liz Pelly interrogates the Swedish streaming giant, tracing its origins as a response to rampant music pirating in the early 2000s, uncovering the internal strategies that prioritized nonstop listening over quality content, and outlining the deleterious effects its data-driven missive has had on musicians and fans alike. Drawing on dozens of interviews with “ghost musicians,” indie rockers, chillwave DJs, and former Spotify employees, Pelly grimly describes Spotify’s rise to power as a series of scams that disregard artists’ and employees’ livelihoods in favor of their bottom line.

But Pelly, who came up through Brooklyn’s vibrant DIY community at spaces like Silent Barn, also offers distinctly communal alternatives to streaming. Only by reclaiming the “popular imagination,” as she says during our conversation, can we begin to abandon these platforms. Following the release of Mood Machine, I spoke with Pelly about unpacking the algorithm, dissecting Spotify’s corporate strategy, and determining what is lost in pursuit of the perfect playlist.

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ARIELLE GORDON: When we talk about Spotify, it’s so often wrapped up in this black box of “the algorithm” as this unknowable Big Brother. I loved how much Mood Machine put human names and faces to the decisions behind these code logics. Were you surprised at how much human intervention was going into these playlists?

LIZ PELLY: Part of it is grasping a better understanding that the concept of “the algorithm” doesn’t really exist. It’s this fiction. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it is pretty complicated to break down, or maybe it has to do with the public confusion about how automated decisions are made. Part of the challenge is contending with the preexisting notions of “the algorithm” that people already have. With Spotify, it’s not one algorithm that is deciding what you listen to or making suggestions, but rather a series of algorithmic systems working in tandem. Each algorithmic system or personalized discovery tool draws from different pools of data. In the book, I try to break down a basic overview of what some of those pools of data are and how some of those systems work.

How were you able to track down so many Spotify employees who would speak so candidly about the company?

Well, a lot of people were not willing to speak, so I just cast as wide a net as possible. I tried to speak with people from different departments within the company. Trying to understand the map of how a company like this works is an interesting challenge. I was lucky to have both the combination of interviews with former employees and the ability to review internal documents, including a company map that I reference a few times throughout the book. That map gave me an interesting overview of the teams and departments within Spotify and aspects of the company’s operation that I hadn’t known about.

One thing that ended up on the cutting-room floor of the book is a chapter specifically about working at Spotify and how the company organizes itself internally, and how they were part of spearheading the “agile” approach to business organization. They have all these funny words—“squads” and “missions” and things like that. It ended up being a little bit outside of the scope of what I was trying to do. One of the challenges was writing something compelling for people who have been following streaming discourse for a decade, but also short enough that it can be accessible to someone who’s only a little bit interested in this subject.

Some of the book’s chapters share titles with essays that you’ve written about streaming for The Baffler. How did you approach blending your existing body of work with new research?

Some pieces of reporting from the first batch of essays had contributed to an ongoing conversation at the time, enough to warrant being included in a book. And then there were just certain things that I learned about over the years after the essays had come out. For example, I wrote the essay “Streambait Pop” in 2018 about how streaming was changing the sound of pop music. But it wasn’t until 2021 that I learned about how Spotify had been hosting its own songwriting camps. It wasn’t until I’d spent more time looking at the company from different directions that I realized that it was a story about songwriting, which is a very specific aspect of the music-making process.

There also are some arguments that I made in some of my early Baffler essays where my perspective just changed over the years. Actually, there’s an essay that the title of the book gets its name from, “Big Mood Machine.” In the years since that essay came out, the questions that I had about what streaming services are capable of doing with mood data evolved.

In the chapter “The Conquest of Chill,” you bring up Thomas Edison’s attempts to sell early versions of “mood playlists.” Is Spotify different from these previous efforts to market our moods, or is it just more of the same?

In the introduction, I write that the story of streaming is as much about what’s changed as what stayed the same. It’s instructive to recognize that a lot of conversations and concerns about the impact of streaming on music are just the contemporary versions of problems in the music business that have existed since the dawn of recorded music, and in some cases, since even before recorded music.

At the same time, there is a level of everyday, pervasive, inescapable data collection that seems new to the current era of music marketing and music technology. It’s interesting that “mood” has always been used to try to sell people on new music technologies. In some ways, this is part of a bigger trajectory, but there are also certain aspects of it that are new.

You’re not explicitly prescriptive in the book, but you do suggest that there’s an inherent value in being exposed to challenging music. What do you think is lost for listeners when Spotify precludes that exposure?

What immediately comes to mind for me is the way in which the orientation of listening seems to be shaped by streaming. It seems so obvious, but music is something that has the potential to connect listeners to other people, to the world, to different traditions and cultures, to be educational. It’s a medium through which we look outward.

There’s something about the current paradigm of streaming that is a lot more focused on pointing at the individual. Music is a way of connecting people to others, not just connecting with yourself. One of the great powers of music is that it can also help you connect with yourself. But it’s surely not the only reason to listen to music. I write a lot in the book about how, in the streaming era, there seems to be this obsession with thinking about music as a vehicle for mood stabilization. This whole cottage industry of major labels and start-ups has popped up in the wake of streaming services that really focus on this idea of what the music industry calls “functional music.” It’s selling listeners not necessarily on music, but on a “wind down soundscape,” or a feed of study beats, or a specific vibe. There are endless consequences of that for the relationship between listeners and artists, and how we even conceptualize what music is, what its purpose is.

Pretty early on in your reporting, you homed in on the playlist as the focal point of Spotify’s business model. I’m curious about what initially drew you to the playlist, and why you think it’s key to understanding Spotify’s strategy.

I think part of it was this period from 2016 to 2019, what a former Spotify employee described to me as the “peak playlist era.” This was a brief period of time in which the concept of the editor-curated playlist, or in-house editorial playlist, was starting to hold this unique new weight in the music industry. Even independent labels were putting a lot of emphasis on the importance of getting onto Spotify playlists. Artists would talk about how they felt like they couldn’t publicly criticize streaming services because their managers and labels would get mad at them for potentially compromising promotional opportunities or placement on playlists. As I mentioned in the first couple paragraphs of the book’s introduction, I also had a friend who worked in the music industry basically just directly say to me, “You should research the influence of major labels on Spotify playlists, because there’s some weird stuff going on.” So in some ways, it also was a result of that.

The other books written about Spotify, like The Spotify Play (2021) or Spotify Teardown (2019), are written from the perspective of the tech industry, for better or worse. But you come from a DIY background. You’re a music journalist. You are friends with so many musicians. How do you feel like that background and perspective helped inform your research and your writing of this book?

From the beginning of writing about this subject, incorporating the voices of musicians has been really important to me. There are a lot of people who write about the music business, and they do an incredible job covering the day-to-day as beat reporters; writing this book gave me a lot of appreciation for the people who do that work. But it’s not super common to interview musicians about their lived experiences for articles about the music business; it was really important to me to include perspectives from musicians, and independent musicians specifically. There are other books that have been written about Spotify and about music technology, but I felt like the story of the impact of these shifts on the independent music world hadn’t been documented as well. I wanted to make sure that there were points in the book where specifically the impact on the independent music world was being discussed. What artists had to say about the way streaming has shaped music was as nuanced and insightful as the academic media theory that I was reading at the same time. Musicians are great sources on how technology shapes music, and they’re great resources on how exploitative business practices influence their lives. Musicians are experts on their own lived experiences, and people should seek out their opinions more often when they’re writing about the intersection of music, business, and technology.

In the book’s final chapter, you discuss the United Musicians and Allied Workers coalition, which collectively advocates on behalf of musicians. I wonder, though, if there’s a struggle to see musicians as laborers. Have you encountered that in your research?

Yeah, absolutely. Some musicians think of themselves as workers and think of what they do as labor. Some not only don’t think of themselves that way, but also don’t want to think of themselves that way, because maybe making music is more of a hobby, or a life-affirming spiritual practice, or something they do because it’s how they’re connected to their community. There are some people for whom music is purposefully and meaningfully deprofessionalized.

At the same time, when you consider the importance of protecting music, or insulating it from these really harmful and extractive qualities of Big Tech and the corporate music industry, there are a lot of points of solidarity that can exist between people in independent music. I think that is one of the unique challenges of organizing musicians: getting people who care about music and art to understand that—even if their big picture goals are different, or they have differences of opinion—there are points of connection also.

A lot of well-meaning music fans still think of Spotify as a “necessary evil.” What is your practical advice for leaving the platform behind?

People in power maintain their position by controlling the marketplace as much as by controlling the popular imagination and convincing us that there are no alternatives. I do think that there are many alternatives. I’ve been on a book tour the past few days, and it’s really refreshing talking to people after the events about alternatives to streaming. Something that comes up is how simple it can really be to buy music directly from artists and maintain an MP3 library. Listen to the radio. We have great radio stations in New York City, and there are lots of ways to stream independent radio around the world digitally. Support independent record stores, independent record labels, and independent musicians, artists, and organizations operating outside of the mainstream corporate music industry.

So much of how we receive information about music right now relies on this concept of “the feed.” We expect recommendations to come to us, or the music to come to us. A small but tangible thing that you can do is just have a sense of your own “queue.” I’ve been having conversations with people about the queue as an antidote to the feed. If you have your own system for what’s on deck, it can help in those moments where you don’t know what to listen to, and out of convenience, turn to what is being recommended to you in a news feed or a playlist.

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Liz Pelly is a journalist living in New York. Her essays and reporting have appeared in The Baffler, where she is a contributing editor, as well as in The Guardian, NPR, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and many other outlets. She frequently speaks about music streaming on radio shows and podcasts, including appearances with The New York Times Popcast, NPR’s Morning Edition, and others. Pelly teaches in the recorded music program at New York University and has spent over a decade involved in all-ages show booking.