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If you think Spotify was designed to be a music platform, this writer says you've been tricked

Liz Pelly is the author of "Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist."
Felix Walworth, One Signal Publishing
Liz Pelly is the author of "Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist."

If you think Spotify was designed to be a music platform, you’ve been tricked.

Liz Pelly has the receipts.

"There's a quote that I have from one of the founders of Spotify who is talking about how in the early days Spotify was an advertising product in search of a traffic source," Pelly said.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, at the height of the music piracy craze, two ad-tech veterans had a revelation: People weren’t going to give up on unlimited access to all the music in the world — and record companies weren’t going to give up on making money off that music.

So these two guys realized they could make money off both of those groups. In other words, they realized that music was the ideal traffic source to build a lucrative ad business.

Pelly tells these stories and more in her new book “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.” Pelly joined The Show to discuss how her reporting reveals that Spotify’s goal is not so much music discovery, but rather redefining our relationship to music.

Full conversation

LIZ PELLY: Over the years in Spotify's own marketing materials to advertisers, for example, they have put forth their image of kind of the model Spotify user's day. And it is someone who wakes up and listens to their morning rise playlist, puts on a news podcast during breakfast, has a playlist that they listen to on their commute to work, has a focus playlist that they listen to at their desk while they're working. Then maybe they have like a chat podcast that they listen to during lunch, more focused music during their afternoon, maybe a yoga mix that they listen to after work, and then they have a dinner playlist that they listen to, and then they have a wind down playlist that they listen to before they go to sleep.

DINGMAN: Yeah, and as they're listening to all of this music nonstop all day long on  Spotify, right, Spotify is just ingesting all of this information about this person into their system, which serves their ad model.

PELLY: Correct, yeah so the data that they collect on users is useful to them for multiple different reasons. On one hand, it gives them something to sell to advertisers. It also allows them to make personalized recommendations to users. And then the data itself also becomes this commodity that they can sell, you know, I talk in the book about how for years Spotify has been selling mood data to this marketing firm called WPP.

They've had a long-standing partnership for years. It's just one example of, you know, how they're able to take user data and sort of sell it in the data marketplace as part of their advertising efforts. The goal isn't really ever to recommend you something that they know you like, but it's to recommend you something that they know that you'll stream.

DINGMAN: Something that will keep you on Spotify for as long as possible.

PELLY: Exactly, and I always try to make this really specific distinction because the street, you know, in the narrative that streaming companies or algorithmic recommenders might put forth, you know, it's this line about we are able to tell what you might want to listen to before you know you want to listen to it. And I think it's really important to make a distinction between them being able to know what you like or know like your musical desires versus knowing what you won't hit skip on.

DINGMAN: Right, and this is also a critical distinction because if you think of say, for example, I mean, I'm a huge Decemberists fan and my favorite record of theirs is “The Hazards of Love.” And that is this hourlong operatic story where the lyrics are really intricate, the music is really intricate, the way the two relate to each other is super interesting. And it's a real emotional roller coaster. But in Spotify's framing, what serves their aims best is not that you have an emotional relationship with the music. It's that Spotify is there to kind of create a general emotional framework for your day.

PELLY: Yeah, I feel like, you know, the streaming recommendation model would be more about, okay, what is the song on this Decemberists album that is really important to you, that you have streamed the most times, and how can we take that track out of the context of the album and find the appropriate daily mix for it in order to make it part of some sort of emotionally themed algorithmic mix that we'll put on the front page for you.

DINGMAN: Right, which is how you get these Spotify playlists called Suburban Coffee Shop or like Autumn Stroll or whatever. But this brings us to an extended sequence in the book that is in my opinion, genuinely upsetting, which is the phenomenon of ghost artists. Tell us what the ghost artists are and how Spotify uses them.

PELLY: So over the years, you know, you maybe every few years would see like a viral post on social media from someone saying, “oh, I was checking out like, you know, this study playlist on Spotify and I realized that none of the artists on the playlist exist.” They're all, you know, attributed to this same stock music company, Epidemic Sound, based in Sweden.

And as I started reporting the book and talking to musicians and former Spotify employees and people who worked in the music business at the time, you know, I was able to uncover that this actually is a specific team within Spotify is a program called Perfect Fit Content. There's a list of specific licensors, these production companies who provide these tracks at a lower royalty rate. And then there's a team of editors internally at Spotify that is sort of dedicated to watching over the types of playlists that this music does really well in, and they clearly are giving preferential treatment to these tracks.

DINGMAN: Right, and one of the things that's troubling about that is that it allows Spotify to just insert this kind of musical slop into your playlists because they've already convinced you that music is just something you have on in the background and that it's not really about the music anyway, and that allows them to spend less money paying royalties to artists who are really trying to make music as art.

PELLY: Yeah, for sure. And then, you know, something else that I think really complicates it too is that at least some of the composers who are making this work for these production companies also are musicians who, you know, have artistic practices, who, you know, can't make enough income with their own art through their own, you know, releases that they put out so they're turning to this work as kind of like a side gig.

In interviewing them, they would tell me, “I just make my tracks for this production company. I submit them and I don't really know what happens after that.” So I just think that's like an interesting point to emphasize, too, is that there are so many different dimensions to the way in which this affects musicians.

DINGMAN: Absolutely. Well, so Liz, I'm guessing that there's a lot of people who might read your book or perhaps listen to this conversation and think that “I don't want to use Spotify anymore.” So as somebody who has reported on this in such depth, where would you suggest people go if they don't want to give their money or data to Spotify?

PELLY: Yeah, I think a lot of the criticisms made in the book are criticisms of the streaming model more broadly. Um, for me as a listener, like, I'm not someone who uses streaming services. You know, individual solutions to collective problems can feel really unsatisfying.

But as a music listener, I also think that it's important to, you know, support the cultural ecosystems that you want to see thrive in the world. So buying music directly from musicians, building a library, sharing the music that you're excited about listening to independent local radio.

DINGMAN: Hey, we like that!

PELLY: Supporting independent music retail, you know, supporting the independent music ecosystems that exist entirely outside of the corporate music industry.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Sam Dingman is a reporter and host for KJZZ’s The Show. Prior to KJZZ, Dingman was the creator and host of the acclaimed podcast Family Ghosts.
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