Is Spotify Ruining Music?
Why your playlists feel off and why it matters.
Hello friends and happy Wednesday! This week I had users on my Instagram vote for which article they wanted and Spotify won out (just barely). So please enjoy this deep dive into Spooky Spotify. Also, because this article is so long I'm not doing a tasting menu or Sweet Treat this week, you just get one big meal! Enjoy!
A huge thank you to Liz Pelly for writing the incredible book that I got this whole article from. If you want more info, take a look here and I strongly suggest buying and reading the whole book. It's incredible.
A few years ago, during a production of Hair, my friend Livvy and I would stay up til the wee hours of the morning while she played around on her guitar. Listening to her play soothed my soul, and those memories are some of my favorites from that summer. She and I caught up recently, and as our conversation turned to music, she brought up this book that she was reading: Mood Machine, the Rise of Spotify, and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly. I started listening to it on the train ride home, couldn't stop, and finished it four days later. It broke my brain.
See, I love music. Music brings us together in a way that transcends explanation. I love the vulnerable moments when you choose to share a song with someone. It's poetry set to music. It's a part of your emotional self that you're asking someone to hold. Singing in groups has even been proven to increase levels of oxytocin, biologically fostering social connection.
But what Spotify and the other big music streamers (Apple, Amazon, etc) are doing to music now is the exact opposite. In our hyper personalized world, music is becoming more and more personalized and more and more isolating. Spotify is filling our playlists with soulless stock music, prioritizing music with better royalty deals, and collecting a mountain of your data in order to create a perfect algorithmic playlist to keep you listening 24/7. After all, Spotify's own CEO, Daniel Ek, has said that the company's "only competitor is silence."
It's crazy. Let's dive in.
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The History of Mood Music
The concept that music can change our moods has been around forever, and to an extent, it's true. I know that listening to music can completely turn my day around. Music can motivate me at the gym; music can help calm me down, and music can even help me get in the right writing flow. Audio is a very intimate and emotional experience that helps us form connective bonds. Axios even found that 87% of people are more likely to believe something if they hear it vs. reading it. And companies have been exploiting this audio/user relationship to sell products for over a century.
In 1921, Thomas Edison released a pamphlet called 'Mood Music.' It illustrated 31 tracks that would change your mood if you listened to them on the phonograph, which he just happened to invent. Since listening to music at home was still an early concept, Edison needed something to help people learn how to listen to music. It was a "marketing pamphlet disguised as science" and included moods like 'peace of mind,' 'moods of wistfulness,' and 'for more energy.' A decade later, this was further popularized by muzak, calming elevator music, which was invented to put riders at ease when the elevator was first invented.
And in the intervening century, companies have continued to use music to promote wellness, productivity, self-improvement, and even patriotism in factories during the world wars. Now that music is in our ears at all times, the streamers have perfected Edison's pseudoscience to keep us hooked always.
Perfect Fit Content
Spotify quickly learned that a majority of its users were what it called 'lean-back' listeners, individuals who put on music in the background but aren't actually listening to it. These listeners may put on background music for dinner; chill beats to study by, or even jazz for sleep. Since these users are not really even paying attention to the music that is being played, Spotify realized they could play something else instead of traditional music: Perfect Fit Content.
Perfect Fit Content is essentially stock music. Spotify partners with 'music farms' to get royalty-free background music that they can then use to fill their playlists. If you know what to look for, you can see these tracks everywhere. The album covers look like a Canva project, and the artists have no biographical information whatsoever. A perfect example of this is the playlist Bossa Nova Dinner, populated almost entirely by PFCs. In these playlists, Spotify creates a frictionless experience where you don't even realize that the music is changing behind you. They want PFCs to remain perfectly pleasant background music so that you don't think to ever turn it off.
Now, you might be thinking, "Well, if it's just background music, is it really that bad?" And to that, I say yes! Because these stock music playlists have taken real streams away from real musicians at an alarming rate. Playlists that used to be filled with real humans making a living with their lo-fi or acoustic guitar music have now been sidelined by generic, royalty-free mush. PFCs have destroyed the livelihoods of many people who wrote instrumental, atmospheric music, and Spotify is coming for mainstream artists, too.
Discover Mode & Spotify For Artists
Not only is Spotify edging out artists, but it's also influencing how the artists still on their platform make music and the kind of music they make. In 2017, Spotify launched Spotify for Artists (S4A), a website to help artists understand trends and track metrics. The premise was good: 'Learn about your music so that you can perform better.' Suddenly, every musician had the same amount of control over their Spotify data and could use it however they wanted. However, Spotify started to see S4A as a different business opportunity altogether.
The executives at Spotify realized they could use S4A to convert artists into paying customers, too. Spotify began selling advertising opportunities and a little feature called Discover Mode to the artists it was claiming to champion. Discover Mode lets artists opt for favorable promotions on Spotify for a smaller share of royalties. This way, artists don't have to pay anything for preferential placement, but Spotify doesn't, either. This means that the songs that Spotify ends up feeding us are the ones that are cheaper to play because it doesn't want us listening to music that it has to pay full rights to.
And that's not all! S4A also includes guides and tips for musicians, telling them what kind of music they should make in order to perform better on the platform. Again, in the name of data and agency, this could be great, but eventually, it turns into artists creating Spotify music in order to stay relevant and loved by the algorithm. It also discourages artists from growing and changing their sounds as artists try to recreate past viral successes. Mood music does not celebrate change; it celebrates more of what is familiar and what will hook a user.
"We no longer know if we're listening to a song because of a recommendation or a business relationship." -Liz Pelly
Surveillance Mode
However, none of this artist's information would be worth anything without the insane amount of data that Spotify collects about you. Every single thing you do within the Spotify app is tracked and recorded to further enhance their algorithms. I recently downloaded my Spotify data, which you can do here, and it was so overwhelming I didn't even know where to start.
All of this surveillance is designed so that Spotify can anticipate your every mood, perfecting what Edison started over a century ago. Their end goal is that they know you so well that everything you need is just on one screen, and you just hit play or skip-- a completely frictionless experience. They already use your data to predict your moods with the ever-popular daylist that changes throughout the day. This way, you never turn off the music because it's always exactly what you want or what Spotify thinks you want. Spotify has made all of music revolve around you and your desires.
Spotify's hyper-personalization has "Ushered in a deeply alienated way of learning about music. You know what the machine thinks you like, but you don't always know why the machine came to that conclusion...It is music recommendation as a means of creating silos, not connections." - Liz Pelly
And Spotify doesn't keep all this data to themselves. Spotify shares your data with Facebook, Uber, Tesla, Virgin, Ancestry.com, and 23 & Me, to name a few. The company claims to have behavioral data about all its users, which can accompany Ancestry.com and 23 & Me's genetic data. Can you imagine if your Spotify behavioral mood data was paired with your literal genetic code and then sold off to the highest bidder? Well, it could already be happening. We simply don't know what all these companies are doing with the data they collect.
Spotify even has a proprietary patent that would allow them to track a user's voice intonation to figure out their emotional state. Spotify could listen to you, make judgments about your emotional state, and then play music to influence it. In an optimistic world, they could take you from sad to happy, but look at TikTok's algorithm. If TikTok sees you're resonating with sad content, it will just send you more and more sad content to keep you engaged, further increasing your spiral.
What About You?
At the end of the day, Spotify is a company focused on making money off you, not your well-being. When Spotify launched in Nigeria, this was its ad, a woman listening to her personalized playlist and being surrounded by countless versions of herself. This is the user Spotify wants, completely isolated and happy being fed whatever the algorithm thinks is best, a passive island in an ocean of other passive listeners. But Spotify can't know you exactly. Spotify can only know your data, and while the data bank may be massive, it isn't always accurate.
In streaming, "We are listening to our slightly off data double. But at a certain point, a streaming listener may very well come to believe that what the machine suggests is indeed what they like, not because it's true, but because they can see or feel no other option." -Liz Pelly
As someone who has grown up being very intentional about music and whose career is wrapped up around how music can change a mood and progress a story, I find this so dangerous because it strips users of agency in the name of convenience. Yes, you can still search for music, and you can still skip songs, but there are so many factors at play that none of us are aware of. It's affecting our listening habits, and it can be devastating for artists.
What About The Artists?
Spotify's actions have made it very clear that they're a tech company concerned with profitability rather than a music company concerned with artists. In late 2023, Spotify demonetized any track garnering less than 1,000 streams annually, which was about 86% of all songs on the platform. This move was encouraged by Universal Music Group, one of the Three Majors with Sony and Warner. These three's control over the music industry and closed-door deals have also led to many of the themes explored here. They've sent a clear message to musicians: if you're not successful, you are not valued on this platform.
"The goal was corporate profits. Not establishing a fair system for artists." -Liz Pelly
Not only are they erasing money for small-scale artists, but when niche genres become suddenly famous, which can happen overnight thanks to social media, the effects can be devastating. Take hyperpop, a genre made hugely popular on TikTok, which consists mainly of slowing down or speeding up songs. The genre got started in the corners of the internet, but once it hit mainstream, the effects were devastating for the artists who started it. According to musical artist quinn, once Spotify started capitalizing on hyperpop, the scene was filled with "cis males using a formulaic sound, displacing the offbeat trans artists who supported the scene in its early fetal moments. The creation of the Spotify hyperpop playlist...led directly to the erasure of trans influence." And with Spotify only paying about $.003-.005 per stream, influence can be more vital than streams. And it is the influence that is the solution to fixing some of the ills that Spotify has created.
Streamlutions
So, what can we do? Pelly says that, unfortunately, there is no real ethical way to stream music right now. It's up to us to sit with that and figure out ways in which we can ensure our own ethical consumption as best we can. I don't foresee a world in which I ever ditch Spotify, but reading the book has given me some interesting ideas about how to support artists going forward.
Do What We Can
Like it or not, Spotify and the other major streamers rule the world we live in, and there can still be good things that come from them. Your support for an artist on Spotify, while not much monetarily, is still helpful to them. You can use the discover engine to find new artists who you can then choose to support in other, more tangible ways. While you're on the app, you can try to gravitate to user-generated playlists and not ones suggested by Spotify; this helps make sure that real people get money for your streams.
P.S. A PFC profile usually looks something like this.
Alternative Platforms
There are also other platforms out there that support artists in different ways. There's Mixcloud and Soundcloud, primarily for DJ sets. There's also Bandcamp, billed as an online record store where fans can support artists directly. You could also go to an in-person record store and buy records if the artist makes them. This is also a great way to future proof your music collection.
Radio?!
There are also many indie radio platforms out there. These Sites like SomaFM and dublab are great if you're looking for human-curated experiences. You can still put music on in the background, but rest assured that you're relying on human expertise and not an algorithm's recommendation. This way, you'll also find music that you may not like but that will be wild, different, and new! You could surprise yourself.
Community
This one is my favorite. The best way to support an artist is to go see them in person. They make so much more money from live shows and merch sales than they ever could from streaming. You can also sign up for artist newsletters or go to their personal websites to find out the ways in which your support can have the biggest impact. This also helps build your community and gets us out of our personalization bubbles, which is always a good thing.
According to experimental musician Phillip Golub, "The issue isn't that these tools aren't intently bad or immoral, it's that we don't have consent about how these things are being used." What Liz Pelly does in her book is give readers the knowledge to get some of that consent back, and I hope this article did so, too. Just learning about the systems that govern such intimate spaces as our music choices is a huge step forward in becoming more engaged listeners and supportive of the incredible musicians who make the music we love.
Music is a beautiful thing. It illuminates our lives in a way that not much else can. My livelihood is so deeply intertwined with music, musicians, and all types of artists and I believe it's vital to support them as best we can. Now, I can't change the powers that be, and take down Spotify and the other streamers, but there are so many incremental changes that I can do to push back against the isolation brought on by their personalization. Every time I seek out a human-generated playlist or search directly for the artist I want to support, it brings me a little bit closer to those late nights when I would listen to Livvy play and be reminded of the incredible, tangible magic that music creates.
Well that's all for me this week, I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into Spooky Spotify and stay kind out there! I’ll talk to you soon.
