Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
Liz Pelly
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
Takeaways:
- Spotify aligns itself with which ever team is more advantageous at the time. When trying to get institutional buy in from the majors, it markets itself as a way to stop Piracy.
- Started as an ad-platform. Music was just a way to drive traffic to ads. Created by ad-men.
Values music based on number of streams, but that is not a great value indicator. Mostly ends up favoring really bland background music for
Made me really want to step away from passive music listening and also to not listen to albums as much.
Encourages a auteur/individualistic approach to artistry. Stand out artists tend to be stand alone, not groups/bands. This makes collective action harder.
Spotify is a two way market place. One side is selling music to listeners, the other is trading worse royalties for boosted exposure to artists. But the secret third is selling user data from both of those sides to data brokers.
Think Opposite.
Spotify wants you to stream them all day, wants you to let them choose what you listen to so they can steer you to the cheapest music (AI generated), they also want to collect all your data so you can send it to them.
This devalues music and over saturates your mind. Maybe it would be best if did the opposite. Instead of listening to music in the background all day, do shorter focused listening schedules.