What Spotify Really Costs Us

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I rarely use Spotify because it’s ugly and doesn’t look as nice on my Apple iPhone. I consider it a necessary evil for work purposes, but the powerful algorithmic continuous playing features always just turned me off. Liz Pelly is an accomplished music journalist with years of experience managing DIY music venues, who I have been reading for years. In her new book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, she explains how Spotify’s shadowy money-making methods and data-first approach not only hurt artists of all sizes but also affect the listener.

I spoke to Liz from my hotel room in Singapore about the health of the music industry, the social value of music, not being exploited, perfect fit content, royalty confusion, and how she consumes music.

GQ: Your book is making some waves in my world. How fucked is the music business?

Liz Pelly: It's an interesting question. I state in the book early on that thinking about the health of the music industry isn't necessarily the same thing as thinking about the health of music.

For many people in the music business, this is a really good time—people who work at major record labels or top executives at streaming companies. It tells a different story if you talk to independent musicians and people who work at independent record labels. For my book, it was really important to for me not only to speak to musicians who are financially struggling right now, which is the vast majority, but to talk to those who have done really well in the streaming era, whose critiques of the current music environment are different because they might feel beholden to the platforms in a different way because they're a primary source of income.

The principal narrative is that being an independent musician is impossible now. You can't make money touring, and you can't make money streaming, and records don't sell. Yet, all this stuff breaks through. If you make something great, you can find success. We see it repeatedly, but maybe it's diminishing as a possibility.

I often hear people say how the ability to break through as an independent artist or have any semblance of sustainability feels like playing the lottery. Pursuing a music career shouldn't have to feel like playing the lottery, even if that dynamic isn't fully caused by streaming. The story of streaming is as much about what's changed in music as it is about what’s stayed the same. Streaming was sold as this thing that was going to be democratic and level the playing field for musicians, but it has reproduced a lot of the same music industry problems.

The excerpt from your book that I've seen passed around the most is about the ghost business, where producers make music for playlists that Spotify prioritizes. It spoke to me because it's staggering how most people don't care. They put music on as background; that has never been what music is to me. I don't put things on to help me concentrate. I don't put things on to sleep. I put things on to listen to them. But it’s shocking to realize that music has become something else.

At my launch event with Max Alper, we talked about how different people define what is valuable about music, and for me, so much of the value is social. But he said something that's been sticking with me. “These technology companies and the music business endeavor to take something that is really social and turn it into something that is anti-social.” So much of what makes music valuable, or what makes it feel meaningful, is the ability to connect with other people or go to shows and be part of a community.

That was my whole life. So how do we move forward?

There are so many different ways to answer that question. One of the things that's been really cool about doing events is hearing so many other people's answers to it, because it's never going to be the kind of question where one person has the answer. However, there is value in the work that musician organizers and artists advocates are doing right now to try to hold the streaming platforms accountable by advocating for various forms of policy intervention and reforms to the royalty model. But at the same time, it's equally important for people in music scenes to organize alternatives and think, "Okay, how do we revalue music outside of these systems? How do we set up new systems and structures completely outside of this?"

That's the part that feels unachievable to me. Even Bandcamp is ugly, and I don't like it. It’s a different process. I'm brainwashed—I like Apple Music because it's on my phone, looks nice, and is easy to use. How do you chip away at that?

There are so many people for whom the convenience and the frictionlessness of streaming are such attractive value propositions that it's really important not to just think about it in one way.

Tidal is a good example of something sold to us as better, not just because of audio quality, but because they were better to artists. But Tidal is just not part of the conversation. That's what is disheartening. Obviously, as a fan of music, I want musicians to be able to make money and do it for a living. But it's similar to journalism and a lot of creative jobs. People are realizing that it's not a given. No matter your talent, you can’t always make a living doing something you like. It’s not a right that is bestowed upon us. I feel like many musicians feel entitled to make a living from music, but the reality is that it’s just not true.

If your work is generating value for a $100 billion platform, you deserve not to be exploited by it. The exploitation and extraction that is part of the streaming model has been a defining characteristic of the record industry since the dawn of recorded music. It might not be a new dynamic, but there’s no reason not to push back on it.

There's too much music out there, and I think that's negatively affecting the good stuff as much as some of these policies are.

I've never been against universal access to music, but the frictionlessness has created issues, too. In my book, I specifically talk about what role the public library could play in revaluing music. I feel like there are so many people whose lives revolve around music, who say, "Growing up, going to the public library and getting a stack of CDs and bringing them home and flipping them to my computer was a huge part of how I built up my understanding and interest in music.” It's clear that having access to music for free is really important, but there's this other question. Is paying $10 a month to access so-called “all of the music in the world” the best way to make universal access to music a reality?

Probably not. You're younger than me, but I imagine you experienced Kazaa. I remember being in my parents' basement, almost addictively downloading everything. Things I'd heard of, things I'd never heard of. That helped introduce me to things and formed my taste. But I had to think of what to search for. It wasn't fed to me like on a streaming platform.

I am here doing what I'm doing now because of Napster.

It's a full-circle moment. I think the concept of the fake artist is so salacious because it feels like we’re actually being duped. An artist not getting paid can feel far away, but getting duped is universally hated.

That's why the book is structured the way it is. When I first started, I was thinking about it in two halves: the first half of the book is about the impact of streaming on the listener, and the second half is about the impact of streaming on the musician. But the structure shifted in some ways. It became clear to me that these aren't two separate stories, they're incredibly intertwined. But I do think that it's hard to convince a lot of people to care about how streaming has impacted the material realities of others. It's much easier to explain how it has impacted them and to use that as an entryway in, and hopefully they stick around for the whole ride and end up reading about both the impact of this incredibly complex royalty system on musicians and some potential policy solutions.

When it comes to the royalty stuff, I mean, I used to manage bands. I've done record deals and publishing deals. I still don't understand royalties. I still barely know how it works, and I think that’s by design.

Absolutely. How streaming royalties are paid through this incredibly complex pro rata revenue share model in some ways serves the same purpose as people in the music industry telling artists, "Oh, it's way too complicated to understand, just leave it to us." It's part of how artists and the general public are disempowered. There's a proposal suggested by musicians unions and advocacy groups for years now: a user-centric royalty model. “I pay $10 a month, and if all I listen to is Waxahatchee, then Waxahatchee should get my $10, minus Spotify's cut.” It's much more straightforward than the current model, which is not even worth explaining.

That's the only way to make it equal to attending a show and buying the record. That's not the solution, but you're right; that makes a lot of sense and feels easy to understand.

Also, the music industry is obsessed with fighting fraud right now, which I have all sorts of complicated opinions on, but it would address some of those concerns. Like, if my $10 only goes so far, then I wouldn't be able to sit here and set up a bunch of bot farm accounts and stream the same AI music on loop, generating millions and millions of plays and sucking money out of the royalty pool.

What do you use to listen to music? Do you use Spotify?

It's funny what you said earlier about Bandcamp, because I now have all sorts of criticisms of Bandcamp, because of things I hear from the independent music community, with the union busting, and the corporate ownership changing hands many times. But I have an MP3 library, I listen on Bandcamp a lot, and I am a big radio listener. I live in New York, where we have incredible radio stations like WFMU and WKCR. Even beyond local FM radio, there's a resurgence of internet radio that has been cool to see. NTS in New York, The Lot Radio, and Montez Press are not just radio stations but these hubs of independent music culture.