Mood Machine
The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
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4.5 • 13 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A New Yorker, GQ, The Daily Telegraph (London), and Library Journal Best Book of 2025
A 2025 Washington Post Notable Nonfiction
An NPR Books We Love Most pick
Winner of a Certificate of Merit from the 2025 ARSC Awards for Excellence
An unsparing investigation into Spotify’s origins and influence on music, weaving unprecedented reporting with incisive cultural criticism, illuminating how streaming is reshaping music for listeners and artists alike.
Drawing on over one hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today’s highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed.
Building on her years of wide-ranging reporting on streaming, music journalist Liz Pelly details the consequences of the Spotify model by examining both sides of what the company calls its two-sided marketplace: the listeners who pay with their dollars and data, and the musicians who provide the material powering it all. The music business is notoriously opaque, but here Pelly lifts the veil on major stories like streaming services filling popular playlists with low-cost stock music and the rise of new payola-like practices.
For all of the inequities exacerbated by streaming, Pelly also finds hope in chronicling the artist-led fight for better models, pointing toward what must be done collectively to revalue music and create sustainable systems. A timely exploration of a company that has become synonymous with music, Mood Machine will change the way you think about and listen to music.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spotify is a cesspool of corruption that deincentivizes the creation of original songs and rips off artists, according to this spirited debut. Music journalist Pelly critiques the streaming service's pretense of making lesser-known musicians' tracks available to a world of listeners, arguing that the platform favors musicians signed to major labels, who receive millions of dollars in advances and free advertising, while obscure indie artists struggle to get by on royalties of 35 per stream. Meanwhile, the platform creates playlists of anodyne background music with bland stylistic strictures and a "muted, mid-tempo, and melancholy" sound popularized by mainstream performers like Billie Eilish and now replicated by AI programs. Evocative prose and sharp analysis ("The suggestion that the businesses of pop music, mood-enhancing background sounds, and independent art-making ought to all live on the same platform... is a recipe for everything being flattened out into one ceaseless chill-out stream") combine for a trenchant critique of the music streaming industry that calls for concrete reforms (federal legislation that guarantees artists adequate streaming royalties, nonprofit streaming services) while asking bigger questions about "why universal access to music matters" and the cultural consequences of restricting its production and dissemination. The result is a perceptive assessment of the current musical landscape and an eye-opening glimpse into its possible future.
