Katie and Patrick laugh at me when I buy music CDs. They listen to 100% of their music on streaming services like Spotify, iTunes, and Pandora. Diane and I do listen to Sirius/XM Radio when were driving around but at home, we’re CD listeners.
Liz Pelly’s informative Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (2025) tells the story of how a tiny, obscure Swedish music streaming service became one of the dominate music platforms in the world. Music streaming has become the norm for millions of listeners with playlists, personalized, and autoplayed services.
“In 2021, a couple of executives form the in-house Warner Music Group data science team explained, in a video, that the comp was then processing information about its roughly 4.5 billion streams per day, all of which power insights to ‘help inform where we’re going to invest in new Artis and content types…’ In other words, the major label was collecting an obscene amount of date every day, and then using it to presumably power algorithms that would tell it what artists to sign in the future.” (p. 90-91).
Of course Spotify, iTunes, and Sirius/XM Radio were doing the same thing. Even back in 2013 when Spotify made its big investment into producing in-house playlists, the effect was the ability of Spotify (and other streaming services) to change the way people listen. “It was not long just about providing all the music in the world, but about purporting to know what you anted to listen to, when you wanted to listen to it, to provide the perfect playlist at the perfect moment.” (p. 92)
The most shocking chapter in Mood Machine is “The First .0035 Is the Hardest.” .0035 of one cent is the royalty Spotify pays singers and groups to play their song. Needless to say, Spotify is paying a pittance for this music while making billions in profit. Studies show the median musician earned between $20,000 and $25,000. You could make more money working at McDonalds.
Liz Pelly, who has covered the music industry for over a decade, shows how a small group of music streaming services controls what millions of subscribers listen to and which singers and artists are shut out. This is a chilling book. Do you listen to music streaming services? GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction — vii
The Bureau of Piracy — 1
“Saving” the music industry — 11
Selling lean-back listening — 24
The conquest of chill — 39
Ghost artists for hire — 57
The background music makers — 68
Streambait pop — 79
Listen to yourself — 92
Self-driving music — 106
Fandom as data — 117
Sounds for self-optimization — 125
Streaming as surveillance — 137
The first .0035 is the hardest — 149
An App for a boss — 151
Indie vibes — 172
This is… Payola? — 185
The lobbyists — 197
The new music labor movement — 204
Conclusion –217
A Note on Sources — 237
Acknowledgements — 239
Notes — 243
Index — 267
