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If you stream a song on Spotify, how much money does the artist make? Many of us, it seems, have not given this question much thought, even though Spotify has for over a decade been a major part of the way people listen to music. According to the American music critic Liz Pelly, in her passionate and rigorous book Mood Machine, the platform has been profoundly damaging for all but the most commercially successful musicians and even shaped the kind of music that they make.
Like many digital start-ups, Spotify, which was founded in Sweden in 2006 by tech entrepreneurs Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, purported to be revolutionising an industry when really it was just reinforcing the status quo. It sold itself to the major record labels — Sony, Universal and Warner Music Group — as the solution to the download piracy that ended the lucrative CD era in the early 2000s. At the same time, Spotify promised to liberate music for listeners by putting every song in the world at their fingertips.
Spotify’s agreements with major labels were shrouded in secrecy, but it did not take long for musicians to notice their earnings falling. “Spotify does not pay artists per stream, but rather through a complex pro rata revenue share system,” writes Pelly. “And in fact, Spotify does not directly pay artists: it pays ‘rights-holders,’ entities like record labels, distribution companies, and aggregators, which maintain deals with Spotify on behalf of artists . . . ”
In 2012, Spotify commissioned research into its users listening habits and, according to a source, who Pelly says was “close to the company at the time”, the firm “realized active listening was a smaller part of the experience. There were way more listening hours using music as a background experience — people who wanted to lean back and let Spotify choose things . . . They started to think about how to optimize for that experience, for a less engaged user.”
This realisation prompted Spotify to start promoting playlists to soundtrack work, study, fitness routines, and shopping. The insidiousness of the playlists is arguably what sets Spotify apart from other streamers because they detach the music from its maker. These playlists are not the same as compilations that introduce listeners to artists whose catalogues they may wish to explore, but instead champion bland background music. “Listeners,” Pelly explains, “often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing.”
This laid the groundwork for Spotify to move towards promoting AI-generated music, which is already on the platform and which Pelly fears could come to play an increasingly significant role in its offering. She believes Spotify is attracted to AI “for the same reason that other industry power players were clamouring to harness its potential: it opened up a possible new pool of cheap content.”
It is clear where Pelly’s sympathies lie. The first two-thirds of her book can read as a familiarly depressing litany of ways in which Spotify — and tech giants generally — profit from the work of the talented. Then there is the potential for surveillance that is inbuilt in streaming and which Pelly discusses in a riveting chapter, warning: “It might seem like just music, but streaming services are susceptible to what’s called ‘surveillance creep’, or ‘function creep’. A surveillance system might start out with one purpose, but over time, its purpose might shift and expand beyond its original use case.”
Pelly has reported on Spotify’s impact on musicians for the best part of a decade, and has been thorough in her research. If her book occasionally feels repetitive that is because she must hammer home her message to wake us from our streaming-induced stupor.
What is the solution? At the start of the book’s uplifting and instructive final third, Pelly discusses the United Musicians and Allied Workers’ campaign which demanded Spotify “pay artists one penny per stream, end payola [the term that emerged in the 1950s to describe record labels’ under-the-table payments to radio stations in exchange for airplay], make closed-door contracts with major labels transparent, credit all labor in recordings, adopt a user-centric payment model, and stop fighting songwriters in court.”
Some of these demands were included in the Living Wage for Musicians Act introduced to the US Congress last year. The cause is enjoying increasing prominence; at last month’s Grammys, the singer Chappell Roan made a speech urging labels to give musicians “a liveable wage and health insurance”.
Pelly shows that the plight of musicians is bound up with wider struggles for “economic justice”, and encourages us to buy music directly from artists or from independent record shops, and go to gigs. Many of us are already doing these things with renewed commitment, she says, striking an optimistic note at the end: “The corporate culture industry entrenches its power not just through controlling the marketplace but also by controlling the popular imagination, by convincing us that there are no alternatives. The alternatives are growing all around us, though.”
Long term the answers to the problem are the same as they ever were: collectivism, localism, active listening. Something to think about the next time we click play.
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly Hodder and Stoughton £22/Simon & Schuster $28.99, 288 pages
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