Author Liz Pelly on Spotify Book, Ghost Artists and Speaking Up for Indie Musicians
In music journalist Liz Pelly’s new book, she writes about how Spotify and the streaming business has reshaped how we listen to music, and she points out some of the questionable behavior from music’s top music streamer. And in the nearly 300-page effort, one of Pelly’s goals was to give a voice to the little guys of the music biz: “Something that was really important to me was to offer an independent music world perspective on the streaming story.”
“I think that, naturally, the music business press, when it tells the story of Spotify and unpacks the impacts of streaming on the music business, there tends to be more of an emphasis on telling the story through the lens of the pop world and the mainstream music business. But I come from the independent music world and I’ve seen the impact of these shifts in the music industry on independent record labels, and independent musicians, and it felt to me like a story that hadn’t been told as thoroughly,” Pelly says of Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria/One Signal Publishers), which was released Tuesday.
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“I wanted to make sure that there were a lot of interviews with people who work at independent record labels, and independent musicians, and to have a specific section in telling the history and background of the rise of Spotify that specifically focused on the moment when the independent record labels got on board with the streaming model,” she continued.
The book, a mix of Pelly’s investigative reporting and cultural criticism, tackles various topics including “ghost artists” Spotify used to fill in playlists instead of using real artists, whom they would need to pay more money to. Internally, Spotify called the program Perfect Fit Content and they placed songs from these ghost artists — all produced by the same few production houses — on playlists related to background music streaming during sleeping, relaxing or focusing. Those genres include jazz, classical, ambient and lo-fi music, and it highly affected indie artists.
“I knew I had to at least try to get to the bottom of it, and I was really surprised to learn that it is actually more of this internal program of sorts … and that there were specific employees whose jobs were looking after playlists that were largely made up of this content, and it was super-interesting and definitely one of the more surprising aspects of working on the book,” the author says.
Pelly, a contributing editor at The Baffler and also has bylines in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and the Guardian, started writing about music streaming and Spotify in 2016, and the book builds on a series of essays and reported pieces she had done in earlier years. “After I wrote my first piece on streaming, various people from independent record labels started contacting me, telling me that I should look into this fake artist story,” says Pelly, who completed more than 100 interviews with music industry players, former Spotify employees and musicians for Mood Machine.
“I think of this type of book as an entry into a broader tradition of music being a way in which a lot of people negotiate lines between art and commercialism. Over 600 million people listen to music using Spotify, so I think that the story of Spotify is a pretty instructive way to talk more broadly about, not even just the state of the music industry, but to have a bigger reflection on how we value arts and culture in our society,” she says.
Though the book focuses on Spotify, Pelly says there are also looming questions about rival music streaming services. “I think that a lot of the criticisms in the book that are made of Spotify are things that are criticisms that could also be made of other streaming services as well. I definitely feel like that is a piece for further investigation, as to how Apple Music and Amazon are making use of these sorts of practices as well,” she explains.
“I think that in some ways the book uses the story of Spotify to tell a bigger story about how the music industry is changing. It’s a perspective that personally I feel is needed at this moment in time, and I think in some ways the perspective is just questioning the role of corporations in music and in culture,” she continues. “And it’s really not meant to be a book that’s about this question of what is the most ethical streaming service, or should I stop using this streaming service and start using this other one? Hopefully opens up some bigger questions about what it would look like to revalue music at a time when music has financially and culturally been a bit devalued. I always say this is a book that’s about music, but it’s also a book about surveillance, politics and labor.”
She’s hoping as a result, readers will “rethink their relationship with listening.” She says while writing the book, her relationship with listening changed. “I personally was motivated to go back to mostly listening to music via MP3s … and buying music directly from artists. It’s a platform that is deserving of its own criticisms, but I’m a huge Bandcamp user. I live in New York City where we have incredible radio stations — WKCR, WFMU and other online community radio stations, so, personally, I think that writing about this subject over the past has in some ways motivated me to think more about how I listen to music digitally.”
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