There’s a playlist on Spotify, curated by the platform’s in-house editors, called “Lorem”—a title that doubles as a cruel joke, though it’s hard to tell on who. Lorem ipsum is a placeholder phrase, a bit of mangled-Latin gibberish that is supposed to get filled in with actual content later. The playlist’s description leans into this empty promissory quality—“Newsletter coming soon”—and the ever-changing tracklist calls to mind the Urban Outfitters mix CDs of the 2000s: a marketing executive’s idea of what’s cool, designed to diffuse in the air like a fragrance while you try on different versions of yourself. As of this writing, more than 1.1 million users have saved Lorem to their library.

Spotify itself is a sort of lorem ipsum. Its name is a snatch of start-up dream-speak with no particular meaning. And like so many of its tech-platform peers, it spent years puffed up on venture-capital money, promising eventual future profitability—something it first achieved for a full year in 2024, six years after its IPO and an incredible 18 years after its founding in 2006. Along the way, as journalist Liz Pelly shows in Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, the company has recast its product in several guises: quasi-legal alternative to piracy, music-discovery app, mood-music hub, AI-assisted personalized-playlist dispenser. 

Whatever face it presents, the company has incontestably come to dominate the music (and now podcasting) industry: With nearly 700 million users and more than 250 million paid subscribers, its user base is far greater than any other competitor (Apple Music, Tidal, Pandora). It would take several lifetimes of constant listening to get through every song in its library. The scale of its dominance is greater than any single number can reflect; its influence is felt in an almost mythological register. More so than its peers, Spotify has come to embody the promises of streaming itself: for record labels, a way to keep making money after the decline of CD sales; for users, a “celestial jukebox,” to use Paul Goldstein’s term, where any song is available at a touch; for artists, a supposedly level playing field where anyone could have a breakout hit, even the unknown and unsigned. 

As Pelly’s book recounts, little of this promised bounty has been delivered for anyone except the company itself and the major labels (Warner, Sony, etc.). It is no coincidence that the major labels are significant Spotify shareholders as well. The level playing field for artists has turned out to be more like a payola scheme, with Spotify offering artists the exciting opportunity to pay to compete with the platform’s favored content. And the celestial jukebox has turned out to be something more like a white-noise machine: CEO Daniel Ek’s bragging about the “Millions of people every day (or night!) [who] now go to sleep listening to Spotify” encapsulates the platform’s indifference to music’s status as an art form with distinct aesthetic qualities, something that one might actually want to pay attention to.

If you spend enough time on Spotify, it’s easy to sense, inchoately, that the platform is taking advantage of everyone involved. Maybe it manifests as a feeling of anxiety once you land on the app’s strangely cluttered home screen, where users are bombarded with playlist recommendations, each one apparently more bespoke than the last. (My favorite on my current homepage is “Midori Takada Radio”: I like to imagine a whole commercial radio station spinning her playful, deceptively propulsive ambient compositions around the clock—all Takada, all the time.) Maybe it shows up in the music itself, whether in the familiar, highly patterned melodies and airless production that dominate the  relaxation-focused playlists, or in the empty atmosphere that permeates more general-purpose playlists like Lorem. Or maybe there is a feeling that you’ve been sold a bill of goods: How did it come to be so hard to listen to an album on Spotify without the platform inserting unwelcome, unrelated tracks at regular intervals?

For those who make music or are otherwise involved in the industry, the experience is in some ways more direct. Even then, though, there is still a degree of opacity. There are certain brute realities: the steep drop in royalty payments in contrast to the CD era, a tighter and more gamified market where playlist placements can make or break a song. But Spotify makes it hard, by design, to understand how all these developments unfold and who is responsible for them. Royalty calculations are spectacularly abstracted, paid on a “pro rata” basis calculated by a song’s share of the overall number of streams on the platform rather than simply per stream. Playlist curation is similarly obscure, part black box and part Rube Goldberg device. 

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Spotify has set the template for how the circulation of music works in the streaming era, but in some ways it is its own closed universe whose rules defy logic. Artists who have successfully placed songs on popular playlists report a sense of anticlimax as they gain listeners but not necessarily engaged fans. One of Pelly’s sources, a producer with hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners, estimated that if they booked a gig in L.A. “and promoted it really hard, maybe twenty people would come.” 

It is clear that Spotify, despite its slippery nullity, is doing something to music—as an art form, as a commercial product, as a dynamic and socially mediated thing that arises in part from people hanging out and playing together. But what, exactly, is it doing? And how could a streaming platform—which, after all, is a space where music is circulated to consumers, not a factory where it is produced—come to exert an influence on the way music is made today? These are the questions Mood Machine sets out to answer. 

Despite Ek’s early fumblings on the guitar, Spotify’s founders never really cared about music. As a former Pirate Bay spokesman recounted to Pelly, “Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon were advertising dudes who wanted to sell more advertising and realized that music was cheap.” Or at least it seemed cheap in the 2000s: The smaller file sizes of MP3s made storage and circulation easier on the Internet than with film or other longer-form media. The company was initially agnostic about the media it would host and deliver. Pelly dredges up a conference presentation where Lorentzon explains: “The revenue source was ads…. But the traffic source we were debating. Should it be product search? Should it be movies, or audiobooks? And then we ended up with music. So we actually checked the biggest format and we went down to the smallest format.” For Spotify, music was an indifferent “traffic source” from the start—which is to say, it was nothing more than content, an occasion to generate engagement and harvest user data. That music, like any art form, is the product of special kinds of labor, undertaken by workers who need time to think and practice and tinker, was never a consideration. 

This is not exactly a scandal—indeed, it is the standard business model for platforms in the streaming era. But Pelly helps us see this business model as haphazard and contingent, not immutable or inevitable. In the 2000s, in the wake of Napster’s defeat and the rise of the Pirate Bay, the major labels were scrambling to combat piracy. There was a sense within the industry that subscription-based streaming might allow the majors to hang on to their revenues while still giving consumers the sense of immediacy and unbounded possibility of a Napster. 

With the aid of seasoned consultants and armed with an early demo version of the product, ironically stocked with songs sourced from the Pirate Bay, Spotify eventually got the majors to the table to work out terms for licensing their catalogs on the platform. The terms they reached were lucrative for the labels: cash upfront and guaranteed payments for each stream to follow, plus stock in the company—and along with it, a say in its business operations. Artists were guaranteed nothing; their payments were to come indirectly, through an arcane series of calculations, from Spotify to the label or other distributor, and then finally to the people who actually made the music. Setting the pattern for what was to come, everyone got their big payday except the artists. And just as tellingly, the monetary value of a stream became abstract, fluid, and opaque—something more akin to a turbulent financial asset than a straightforward product like a record.

As Spotify collected data in its early years, the company realized that users were not listening in the way they expected. In the words of one of Pelly’s sources with inside knowledge, “There were way more listening hours using music as a background experience—people who wanted to lean back and let Spotify choose things.” This, in Pelly’s account, was the discovery that changed the platform’s overall strategy, prompting it to optimize for what has come to be known as “lean-back” listening. The change was first unveiled in a 2013 campaign accompanying a redesign of the site. The tagline for this rebrand, which has served as the foundation for everything the company has done ever since, was “Music for every moment.” In this conception, so much of life is dead air, waiting to be filled up with music. It hardly matters what kind of music fills the space.

The ambitions of tech platforms are often expressed in grandiose imagery: intergalactic domination, an Eye of Sauron watching over the blasted wasteland. Spotify’s core fantasy, smaller-scale but equally goofy, is life as a movie. “Life,” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote near the end of the Second World War, “is to be made indistinguishable from the sound film.” This was meant as a dig at what they saw as the dull empiricism of film, its insistence on reproducing real life with maximum fidelity. Spotify inverts this formula: Your life is a movie, you are the main character, and music is the always-on soundtrack, heightening life’s pleasures and insulating you from its accidents and disappointments. “We really want to soundtrack every moment of your life,” Ek has said. In an advertisement for Lorem, a young person on a screen ponders an unheard question from the brand: “How does ‘Lorem’ make me feel?” The response: “Like I’m the main character!” Music is not to be listened to closely, but instead to be absorbed unconsciously. Above all, it is made for inducing states, making us feel things on demand—including feeling like special, inviolable individuals endowed with unique tastes.

Presumably the soundtrack to one’s life could feature many different kinds of music. But no musical style—really less a style than an affect—came to embody Spotify’s lean-back ambitions quite like “chill.” Much has been said about the boom in chill playlists in the 2010s, first on YouTube and then across other platforms, where niche genres like chillwave and lo-fi hip-hop broke containment and reached a broader audience. Amanda Petrusich memorably called the music streaming on channels like Lofi Girl “apathetic music to make spreadsheets to.” Pelly helps us see how Spotify made apathy the very engine of its business. 

One of Mood Machine’s centerpiece chapters covers the platform’s “conquest of chill”: its bet on soothing background music as the optimal lean-back content. In the 2010s, Spotify poured its resources into curating and showcasing frictionless, Muzak-adjacent fare, queued up for autoplay on mood- or moment-based playlists like “Mood Booster,” “Chill Music,” or “Indie Chillout,” where it mingles, free of context, with other choice cuts snatched from established artists’ discographies. (Think Takada’s ambient compositions side-by-side with the paint-by-numbers Fruity Loops fare of Porter Robinson.) Spotify presents this content as “functional music,” a genre of sonic self-help that can operate directly on the listener, changing their mood.  

And yet, Pelly reports, the question eventually arose within the company: If users turn to Spotify mainly as a lean-back mood enhancer, a repository of generic vibe playlists rather than a trove of their favorite songs by their favorite artists, then why should Spotify pay “full-price royalties if users were only half-listening?” The platform’s push for the playlist—rather than the artist or the song or the album—as the default unit of listening had prepared the way for this kind of thinking. Soon Spotify developed a new “perfect fit content” (PFC) program to fill out its playlists cheaply, bypassing the majors and their steep royalty rates. Pelly gives us the most comprehensive account of PFC so far. Through this shadowy program, the platform would commission independent third-party agencies for “music to fit a certain playlist/mood with improved margins.” These songs, which came to lard official playlists and show up in suspiciously high places on search results, are often credited to mysterious one-off artists with no bio and no web presence.

The jarring sensation of stumbling on such a profile has led journalists to describe these as “fake artists,” though Pelly prefers the term “ghost artists.” The distinction makes sense: There are, in fact, real musicians behind these songs. These musicians often get a raw deal, taking a flat fee from PFC companies and giving up a significant share of any future royalties. The process of “making new PFC,” Pelly writes, “starts with studying old PFC: a feedback loop of playlist fodder imitated over and over again.” A musician she spoke with put it in starker terms: “It feels like someone is giving you a prompt or a question, and you’re just answering it, whether it’s actually your conviction or not.” The imperative is to produce music not like a human but like an algorithm: regurgitating content and recombining it arbitrarily to fit a prompt.

If PFC represents a de-skilling of the labor of producing music, changes in Spotify’s playlists signal a de-skilling of curatorial and editorial work. Later chapters in Mood Machine trace a shift away from centrally edited playlists toward personalization. During the supposed “peak playlist era” of 2016 to 2019 (there are lots of these micro-periods in the book; they are hard to keep straight) Spotify editors had the autonomy to build playlists. Many of these playlists were enormously influential, and they could break new artists. But when Spotify doubled down on delivering bespoke personal experiences—especially year-end roundups and other junk data visualizations—rather than shaping users’ tastes, editors found their jobs changed. As Pelly explains, teams working on playlists in the early years of this decade have found that just as much as actual editing, “their work involved labeling tracks in order to insert them into the appropriate ‘strongly seeded candidate pools,’ as employees discussed on Slack, and thus making them more legible to algorithmic systems.” Just as the artistic labor of music-making comes to resemble an exercise in rote assimilation and imitation, the work of editing playlists is well on its way toward degenerating into data-cleanup gruntwork.

De-skilling is one crucial element of the larger story that Mood Machine pursues, above and beyond Spotify. This is the story of the devaluation of music in the several decades after the piracy crisis. This process is multilayered and unfinished. As Pelly writes, “Often, conversations about the streaming era center the way music has been financially devalued, but there is also a broader, harder-to-pin-down cultural devaluation that comes with streaming: the relegation of music to something passable, just filling the air to drown out the office worker’s inner thoughts as spreadsheets get finalized and emails get circled [back] on.” When the dominant streaming platform presents music as mere content and cultivates listeners who are undisposed to pay attention to who or what they are listening to, it is hard not to feel the cultural values around music and its worth shifting. Certainly, at the very least, Spotify has created a kind of listener with a very different sense of music’s value than, say, a record collector, or even someone who occasionally bought CDs 20 years ago.

At its best, Mood Machine traces the relation between these two strands of economic and aesthetic impoverishment. Once, it seemed as though recorded music had a relatively straightforward relationship with the commodity form: It was bought and sold in the form of records, tapes, and CDs, and it was promoted through live shows. This commodity character brings with it a certain sense of autonomy and solidity. An old record I recently bought came with a promotional sheet explaining “how records give you more of what you want.” Point number one asserted that “they’re your best entertainment buy,” because “every album is a show in itself. And once you’ve paid the price of admission, you can hear it over and over.” Without getting nostalgic, it seems fair to say that this is as far as you can get from Spotify’s conception of “music for every moment.”

Music’s commodity character was also expressed in the genre and star systems: You declared allegiance to one brand, one product, over another. Under the streaming regime, it can seem like this relationship has begun to denature—especially when it comes to the music world’s 99 percent, the artists who, unlike Taylor Swift, can’t count on a fanatically devoted fanbase who will mobilize to support even their most trivial release. To adapt a point that Mark McGurl has made about Amazon’s relationship to literature (in 2021’s Everything and Less), in Spotify’s hands, music is less commodified than commoditized: transfigured into an array of interchangeably generic products that offers no particular reason to choose one kind over another, and so you might as well just pick what’s right in front of you. 

Artists, especially ones with modest followings or those hailing from independent labels, are made to recede into the anonymous middle distance. The old hierarchy of stars, up-and-comers, and unknowns becomes a grim tableau of a few megastars rising out of a greige soup of content. The old genre system is replaced by a frothy dialectic of nongenre and microgenre: on the one hand, Lorem and its analogous “post-genre” playlists; on the other, ridiculous categories like “stomp and holler” and “weirdcore” and “pov:indie.” In a real sense, the sound of chill-vibes playlists, of Lorem, of PFC, of what Pelly calls Spotify-optimized “streambait pop”— is all the sound of music’s devaluation, its commoditization. 

Pelly’s focus on cracking the black box of the platform itself, not least through exhaustive interviews with insiders and musicians, gives us the first clear picture of Spotify’s transfiguration of the musical field. It is a field more unequally stacked against artists than ever before, where the biggest payouts go to acts with massive promotional budgets; where solo artists are privileged over groups; where working musicians are browbeaten into accepting flat fees and foregoing royalties; where songs with under 1,000 plays are arbitrarily demonetized; where artists must surrender a higher portion of their royalties to Spotify if they want a competitive shot at playlist placements (this is a feature called “Discover Mode,” and it is widely criticized as a corrupt payola system); and where the very act of selling records has become so pointless that the only way for most musicians to earn an honest dollar is to go into debt by going on tour.

Even so, Pelly ends on a hopeful note, with a survey of various efforts to build structures for circulating music outside of Spotify’s gravitational pull. Some of these are alternative streaming platforms; others are locally focused artist collectives. Others are public institutions like libraries. Since reading Mood Machine, I have not been able to stop thinking about what would happen if we all got our streaming music from our local library rather than a platform like Spotify. Maybe, as with some of the librarians Pelly talks to, there would be a focus on local music, supplemented by in-person talks and musician meetups, paying out royalties fairly and transparently within the community. Maybe the reach would be broader and the selection more eclectic. Whatever this arrangement would look like, it is healthy for the political imagination to remember that the processes of music-sharing and discovery that platforms like Spotify have enclosed can be returned to the commons.