Book Review: Mood Machine

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 business is notoriously opaque, but 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.

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly will be published on January 7, 2025. Atria Books provided an early galley for review.

As a card-carrying member of Gen-X, I tend to not stream music myself. If I want to listen to things, I use playlists from my own personal music library. However, I get the appeal of these services, especially amongst the younger generations. Still, I was fascinated to learn more about the inner-workings of Spotify and thus was attracted to this upcoming book.

I was not aware that a lot of the streaming services were born out of the file-sharing piracy activities of the late 90's and early 2000's as a method to counter the use of technology in those endeavors. I also found it interesting that one of the goals for Spotify was "mood inducing" (thus the title of this book), a concept that dates all the way back to the original phonograph records by Thomas Edison and starting in the 1940's with the creation of Muzak for work places and retail stores. The discussion of AI usage to analyze and prioritize songs in playlists for listeners was very topical as well.

The further I delved into Pelly's well-researched treatise the more I came to realize why streaming services failed to pull me in. Here they were focusing on the passive listener, the one who wanted background music that set a mood. That's not the way my music listening experiences were built growing up. I was very much about the song and by extension the album - the creative expression of the artist. The closest I'd ever get to a "mood" playlist would be bringing together tracks to supporting a night of dancing (which, while having some emotional threads is much more about physical exertion).

I certainly appreciated Mood Machine as it gave me quite a bit to think about.