Factually! with Adam Conover - Spotify Is Even Worse Than You Think with Liz Pelly

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

It’s no secret that Spotify pays artists extremely poorly, but it turns out they don’t treat their customers much better. Author and journalist Liz Pelly’s new book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, investigates how Spotify has accelerated the collapse of the music industry, along with their shady practices such as filling playlists with stock music—fooling customers into listening to artists who don’t actually exist. This week, Adam sits with Liz to talk about how a service that brands itself around “discovery” is actually flattening the music-listening experience of customers worldwide. Find Liz's book at factuallypod.com/booksDownload Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/2vjj5nrh #CashAppPod. As a Cash App partner, I may earn a commission when you sign up for a Cash App account. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures.--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thanks so much for joining me on the show again. You know, during my lifetime, there has been a revolution in how we listen to music. And a couple decades into it, I think we can all admit that the revolution sucks it's shit we should go back things are bad now because look music itself is as good as it has always been but the industry

has only gotten worse for artists and for listeners like us and much of that is thanks to Spotify to explain where we are today, we gotta go back in time a little bit. Sorry to use my grandpa voice, but in the 1990s we had these things called cassettes and CDs that cost money, or your parents' money. And, you know, there were disadvantages to this system. Your Alanis Morissette CD would get scratched up in your backpack, you'd have to buy a new one, you know, it wasn't perfect. But it coincided with record profits for the music industry.

Artists were actually making money because people were buying physical objects from them. But then there came along a little service called Napster, and suddenly music was free. I was in college when this took off, and Napster was more popular than Adderall. Were the files buggy and low quality? Yes, but my generation got used to the idea that music should be free and omnipresent and this idea would go on to have some pretty horrible repercussions. First, the music industry tried to compete with free piracy by selling MP3s one at a time for 99 cents through iTunes and other music stores, but that turned out to be somewhat of an unstable business model that was quickly replaced

by a far more evil system called streaming. And enterprising Swede Daniel Ek came up with a better idea. In Swedish, he said, let's have a platform that people subscribe to that has all of the music. Let's make deals with all of the labels, then squeeze artists royalties from 50 Directions, and devalue music so it is a passive and endless background experience. And that is fucked up, because the result has been that artists are making far less money

than they ever have before for making the music that we all cherish so much, and our listening experience is now mediated by a gigantic algorithmically driven company that just wants to keep us hooked on their service rather than giving us music that we actually care about and respond to emotionally. I mean, Spotify today has 644 million users and it dictates everything about how the music industry functions from the artists to our ears. And it is a perfect example of how platform capitalism distorts and extracts things that we value from our culture and our economy.

And today we're going to discuss how they do it and why exactly it is so screwed up. But before we get into it, I want to remind you that if you want to support the show, you can do so on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. And if you'd like to come see me on the road, head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. Skip the algorithm and come give an artist some money from your own damn pocket, please.

And now to discuss how Spotify screws over working musicians and listeners. My guest today is Liz Pelly. She's a music writer. She's the author of the essential new book, Mood Machine, The Rise of Spotify, and The Cost of the Perfect Playlist. This book is an absolutely incredible walk

through what Spotify did to our ears and how we can fight back. Please welcome Liz Peli. Liz, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me. So streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, couple others dominate our music listening habits right now. They dominate the music industry.

They've given consumers what we feel is a big advantage over the old way. Right now we just pay a couple bucks a month and we can listen to anything we want at any time. What are the costs of that convenience though? Yeah, that's a great question. And in a lot of ways, I feel like that's sort of what I spend my book unpacking. I think it makes sense that people have been really drawn to streaming and that the rise

of streaming has been so successful because from a consumer standpoint, streaming is this unbelievable value. You know, you get all of the music in the world for $11. But like a lot of things that are cheap, streaming does come with some high costs. And what I do in this book that I just wrote is try to spell out some of those costs, both for the listener and the artist. I think for a long time, people have known, or it's starting to become more popularly known,

that streaming for independent artists and artists that aren't on major labels does not really pay very well. You always hear these headlines and statistics about how artists are getting paid fractions of pennies per stream from major streaming services. It's a little bit not factually accurate because the way that artists are paid in streaming is through this really complicated revenue share arrangement. But the impact on musicians in some ways has become maybe clear in a straightforward way.

There are other impacts on musicians that I try to outline in the book, such as the way in which streaming has sort of pushed artists to think of what they do, to think of themselves more as like content creators than musicians has sort of pushed this kind of individualistic, atomized content creators, sort of musician influencer model of what it means to be an independent musician.

All of the data that musicians are now confronted with, all of the ways in that impacts how they conceptualize what they do as artists, because you're constantly bombarded with just all of these stats. I think any creative person knows that it can be, it can really cloud your sense of what you're doing, your own creativity when you're constantly being bombarded

with stats about your own work? Yes, I'm confronted with that in my own work here on YouTube. I post a video and then I look at the dashboard and it tells me how many people watched it and they stopped watching it after X number of minutes and this one's performing not as well as the other one and it makes you tune what you're doing to the algorithm. That's actually the entire point is it's training you to make stuff that does

well on the algorithm as opposed to following your own taste or listening to your audience organically. Yeah. Yeah, totally. You know, something that I always think about, especially as a writer, you know, there's all of these platforms for writers, uh, to like do newsletters and the platform economy has come for journalists now as well in some ways you know and in some ways you know it's

interesting you have these platforms that offer you all these stats about your articles and people click this link people you know opens this for this many minutes this was popular this wasn't and I always think about like I you know for two years after I graduated from college I worked in a newspaper and it was this very straightforward thing when you walked in the door, like the editorial people sat on this side and the marketing people sat on this side. And obviously people talk to each other, but in some ways, like if you sat on the editorial side of the office, like what you did was pretty different than what happened on the other side of the office. And in some ways it was like, yeah, I kind of rather not know what's going on over

there. Just let me, you know, write my articles and like not have to think about that stuff. Um, so, you know, it's, it's a kind of interesting how, um, like muddled that has become in this era of these like so-called creator platforms. Well, as part of turning us as artists or journalists or other people who create things into content creators, which is another word for Uber driver. When, when you're a content creator, you are just freelancing for the algorithm and they are giving you all this data so that you can feed the algorithm better

and hopefully make some money. But the reason for you trying to make your content better so you can make money is because they're not paying most people. So you're part of a system, whether you're on YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, Spotify, you're part of a system where like hardly anybody's being paid, but they're giving you stats. And hey, if you increase your stats, maybe you could be one of the lucky ones who does get paid. Maybe you could be Hassan Piker or whatever, whoever's big on YouTube, whoever's big on Spotify. If you tune it just right,

it's part of like proving why you're not making money. To you, you know? Because it's like you suck and if you were better, you would make more money, as opposed to again, allowing you to focus on your art. And I think, you know, this is true of all these different fields, but there's something special about music that makes us dislike this idea, because we know there's a place for music where where the artist is trying to

optimize how well it does. You know, that's what Brian Wilson was doing when he's trying to get Beach Boys songs on, you know, to hit number one. He was trying to make something that would work on the radio. There's a place for that in pop, but we also really treasure artists who are just making work that comes from their heart and they don't give a fuck whether or not we like it

or whether the algorithm likes it, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think it gets harder and harder for musicians who are trying to operate in that kind of art first space to find ways to sustain what they're doing in an economy that is so hostile to not just music, but the arts in general. Yeah. And it's really interesting. So just to tie the loop on the opening question that you're asking about consequences. So the book starts with the listener and looks at all of the different ways in which streaming has had

consequences for the listener and the way that it's reshaping the way that people find music, the types of music that is incentivized, the sorts of things that end up on the playlists that you might be listening to, the types of listening behaviors that are incentivized. And the other half of the book, like I mentioned, is about the impact on the artist. And it's not necessarily this neat, like, I started when I started writing, it was in these two halves and the structure kind of like, you know, bled into each other over time.

But part of the reason why I was thinking about it in these two ways is because in Spotify's own, you know, explanation of its business model, it refers to itself as a two-sided marketplace where it says that on one side it is selling a product to listeners, new subscriptions, and on the other side it's selling a product to musicians, which are all of these promotional opportunities on the platforms or they're selling advertisements, they're selling. So they actually, to some extent, think of the musicians who are trying to circulate their work on the platform and try to maybe piece together a living. They actually see them as customers,

not necessarily as people creating, people laboring and creating work that makes their whole scheme possible. Yeah, that sounds like a nice way to relabel a grift to me. It reminds me again of Uber, right? Where Uber would make ads that were aimed at the drivers. You should drive for Uber because we're your side hustle. We're how you're going to pay for that nice meal out, because you drove a couple Uber rides.

And it makes sense to rebrand your barely paid workforce as a customer base that you are empowering. If you want to distract people, if you want to distract the public from the fact that that is what you have done,

is you have impoverished a base of laborers. Oh no, they're not laborers. They're customers who are taking advantage of our wonderful product. That's what it sounds like to me. Do you agree? Yeah, absolutely. I have a whole chapter in my book, Chapter 14,

and that's literally called An App for a Boss. And it's about exactly what you're describing, which is the parallels between the atomized individual musician content creator held up as this model independent artist in the streaming era and the parallels between, you know, other gig workers essentially. Um, and yeah, it totally makes sense. Like, I think you put it really well that if you have a, you know, workforce, it's not being paid compensated fairly. Like, you know, uh, how do you deal with that? Like, oh yeah, let's just pretend that they're. Yeah. I mean, I have to say you keep saying things that keep like ringing in my

head as, oh, that's true of me. You said an app for a boss. I'm like, yeah, that's my boss. Now my boss is the YouTube algorithm. Cause that's where, uh, you know, most of my work goes up. My boss used to be a person at a cable company who was, you know, what would make a specific request of me and I, I negotiated my relationship with them, et cetera, et cetera. And we had real people who were trying to reach. And now my,

my boss is this app on my phone that says, Oh, you did a good job this week. Literally sends me a recap every week. Oh, good job. You got your numbers up this week. Try again next week. Um, and so I'm a part of this fucking apocalyptic future as well. Let's jump in though and talk about some of the most shocking revelations in your book because I think they're gonna be a good way to get into this broader conversation about Spotify.

You uncovered that Spotify is using something called ghost artists in their library. What are ghost artists? Yeah. So, um, in the first half of the book where I'm talking about, you know, the, the impact of Spotify and the listener, I sort of trace an early history of the company. Um, and I talk about how when Spotify launched, it really was more like a search bar. You know,

you had to know what you were looking for. You had to be looking for a specific album or specific artist. And it was really only as the company expanded and was trying to grow after it launched in the United States, was trying to grow its user base, that it turned more towards curation

and these in-house curated playlists, algorithmic recommendations. And with the sort of rise of the streaming playlist also came sort of this popularizing and championing of what the music industry over the years called the lean back listener. So you know, someone who is happy to just put on a study playlist or a focus playlist or a dinner playlist and have it play in the background. And maybe it was less concerned with exactly what artists are on that playlist

or anything like that. But it was just looking basically for like sounds to fill their days. Can I just say, this is like a full form of listening that was fully enabled by streaming. You couldn't really do that apart from putting on the radio in the CD era or even in the MP3 era to just like, I want to hit play and have an infinite amount of music play. And I started, once I got, I'm not a Spotify user, I use Apple Music, but once I got it,

I started listening, that listening pattern sort of organically developed in my life as well. And so I understand why they latched onto this as, oh, here's a new type of listening that is only possible on our platforms, let's support it. Yeah, you are right though. The concept of the lean back listener wasn't created in the streaming era, but it was, I think, definitely really championed

and popularized and normalized. There were like different versions of lean back listening in the radio era. And some might even say that the digital service that really pioneered this was more like Pandora than necessarily Spotify. But I think there's a particular reason why lean back listening has become so popular

in the streaming era, which is that optimizing for the lean-back listener is a way to optimize for listeners that are quote unquote engaged. It's funny how engaged are you really if you're just leaving music on in the background all day, but users who stream endlessly all day long and who are generating the most data and whose engagement metrics are the highest. And yeah, all sorts of things we could talk about. But for the sake of the ghost artists conversation, it would appear that there is a moment in Spotify's history

where their executives realized that if so many of their users were coming for playlists and not necessarily concerned with the music that was on the playlist, but more just looking for something to fill their day, that, you know, like I think in my book, I write, you know, the thinking seemed to be like, why pay full price royalties

if listeners were only half listening? So starting in about 2016, 2017, there started to, these stories started popping up in the music industry trade press. One of the first ones was in Music Business Worldwide, which is like the, one of the main music industry trade publications. And it was a story claiming that a source had told them that Spotify was creating its own fake artists to fill its leanback playlists for studying and sleeping and focusing. And that artists in genres like jazz, classical, ambient, and lo-fi hip hop were being affected

by this. And over the years, the story would sort of bubble up in the trade press here and there. Spotify always denied that they were creating these artists, but they never really denied the existence of some sort of broader arrangement. But it was always really mysterious. I feel like for like almost a decade, it was sort of this unsolved mystery. Like, you know, who are these fake artists? Like, how is this happening? You know, what's the deal? A lot of times you would see people on social media, like every few years, a post would go viral

where someone would go, hey, look, I was listening to the study playlist and I noticed that all the artists on this playlist, their album is attributed to a stock music company called Epidemic Sound based in Sweden. The artists- I know that company. We've used them on my television shows before. We've used Epidemic Sound based in Sweden. The artists- I know that company. We've used them on my television shows before.

We've used Epidemic Sound library stuff. Yeah, so very interesting. So Epidemic Sound is one of the main partners in this program at Spotify. So, yeah, these artists, their work is attributed to the stock music libraries, the artists profiles. They have this generic

AI generated art, there's no profile or bio and you Google the names of these musicians, there's nothing about them anywhere on the internet. So, some people are just like, oh, it's just stock music, but some people, it raised more questions for them because these tracks were getting really prominent placement on really popular playlists made by Spotify, their editorial playlists. So Spotify has a team of in-house editorial playlists and a lot of these tracks were And a lot of these tracks were, you know, getting millions of streams and they're really popular on these playlists. In 2022, a Swedish newspaper did some more reporting on the subject and they were able to use documents that they got access to through a royalty collection agency in Sweden to determine that there were hundreds and hundreds of tracks released under different pseudonyms that could be attributed to just this really small group of songwriters based in Sweden and that they were all connected to this company called Firefly Entertainment,

this really mysterious company that no one knew anything about. I had personally, basically as soon as I started covering Spotify, which was in the first article I wrote about Spotify came out in 2017. Someone who worked in an independent record label emailed me and was like, you should, you should cover this fake artist story. Like no one knows what's going on. It seems like Spotify is making fake artists and like it's affecting, you know, artists and who make instrumental music. So I knew that when I started writing the book, it was one of those things I'd have to dig into. And I was actually really surprised when I started interviewing musicians, people who worked in the music business,

former Spotify employees. And then for the book, I cite internal Slack conversations that I was able to review, like some internal documents that I was able to review. It turns out that there's actually this team internally in Spotify, and this is a program that has a name called, it's called the Perfect Fit Content Program. There's a specific group of playlist editors that look after these specific playlists that are sort of these more like ambient relaxation background playlists, things you might listen to when you're

really eating dinner. And then there's this specific group of production companies that make this music, including Epidemic Sound and Firefly and also like, you know, a list of several others. And they're the ones that are commissioning artists to make this music. And then there's a special licensing deal in place where Spotify licenses this music for a rate that allows them to make money. So you would assume like a lower royalty rate because it's, from what I was able to review and talking to former employees, it's very clear this is a program through which the company saves money and that its music, you know, their internal description of the PFC program

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that their own customers are listening to and the customers don't know that that is what they're listening to. It's not disclosed anywhere. There's no thing in italics, hey, guess what, this is Spotify original music or something like that. It's just slipped in there.

So the first thing that's fucked up is yeah, the public doesn't know. We have a presumption of how music works. That Spotify tells us that these are all the greatest. We have every artist from around the world making music. We don't have any expectation when we're listening to Spotify that some of the songs are made by fake people. I mean, it's just they're creating an army

of Milli Vanillis out there, right? Yeah, no, absolutely. And just like to clarify one thing, you know, like, if you, you know, in Spotify's telling of it, just to like be clear about like how they've characterized it, is that, you know, they say that, you know, none of these artists are guaranteed placement on playlists, but that there clearly is an arrangement where these artists are guaranteed placement on playlists, but that there clearly is an arrangement where these companies are providing this music. There is a direct line

of communication between the companies providing this music and this certain group of playlists editors. And then, you know, they are getting paid with, you know, a different type of royalty arrangement that makes it more profitable for Spotify. But yeah, the thing about it that to me, one of the main things that makes it concerning is exactly what you said, that it's not labeled for the public. I think that's something that is really important is that these playlists at Spotify, these editor curated playlists since the beginning of the Spotify playlist ecosystem emerging have been presented as editorial.

And I think that in any other situation, if you are being recommended something under the banner of editorial, and there were secret commercial arrangements that were influencing actually why you had been recommended the song. Like that would be considered, you know, noteworthy or wrong or, you know, cause for alarm. So it's deceptive to listeners in that regard, I think.

That is wild. And I can under, look, I can understand how we got to this place, right? Like I think about, uh, what does it mean? Five, six years ago, the YouTube channel, lo-fi beats to study and or relax to was a big hit, right? And that collected all this music that was a sort of an organic genre of music that people were putting on SoundCloud and stuff with these, of these low key beats like, mm, don't, with like just a little bit of saxophone with these low key beats, like, mm, kss, donk, mm, kss,

with just a little bit of saxophone or whatever, low key beat. A lot of people started listening to that, and I'm an Apple Music user, Apple Music popped up a couple playlists in that theme, right, there's one called Bedtime Beats, there's one called Beat Instrumentals, and I would listen to those playlists and go,

you know, all these songs sound pretty similar. Where, you know, who are these artists? And I started like looking up some of the artists names and sometimes I would see on Twitter, they'd be like, ooh, I got on the Apple music playlist. I'm excited. I was like, okay, these are artists who now that the playlist exists,

they are pumping out music specifically to feed the playlist, right? Maybe it's even music they don't care about that much, but they're like, hey, if one of these ends up on the playlist, maybe I'll make 500 bucks or something like that, whatever the royalty rate is. That itself is already a sort of slightly odd commercialization of music, right?

Because it's no longer an organic form. It's like someone is trying to feed the playlist, but it is such a short hop from that to the company saying, you know what, why are we even bothering to pay people at a higher rate to come in the door and give us stuff that we might like? What if we just like pay some company less than average to just churn the shit out for us? And I think what that does to the music is it it removes the artist from the equation, right?

It turns into turns it into nothing but a commodity, like a widget factory. Hey, well, yeah, let's just get someone to give us widgets. Who cares who the fuck made it? Well, us caring about the artist that made the music has been like a foundational part of American, at the very least, music culture for more than a century, right? Like having the name of the artist and being like, I give a shit who that is. Oh, I like Scott Joplin or whatever, right?

That's been what music is to us. And this is a severing of the artist from the music in a way that's kind of unsettling. Yeah, absolutely. And it's so funny that you bring up lo-fi hip hop beats to study and relax to also because in my book, you know, Ghost Artists is chapter five and chapter four is the chapter called the Conquest of Chill, where I sort of talk about this phenomenon of the concept of the

chill playlist as sort of like a current day cultural phenomenon and try to historicize it a little bit in the history of mood music and music and pure moods. I talked to a bunch of lo-fi hip-hop beat makers, including some that have made music for playlists like lo-fi beats to study and relax to. That's a scene that has particularly particularly been impacted by this practice because there actually are independent DIY producers who really are invested in the history of lo-fi hip hop who are huge fans of like Jade Dilla and Madlib and this whole history of meat making and are sort of like making music in that tradition who talking to them is really interesting, like talking about how this like online scene of beat makers who, you know, are just like really big either like fans or students of that kind of era of music or that tradition watch like their kind their burgeoning online scene change as this music became playlist fodder, essentially. Yeah.

And how it became less about this online scene of people who were sharing tracks and then just became this cash grab, essentially. And then the next chapter is about the ghost artists on Spotify. And those artists in particular, some of them, there are some artists who were specifically really affected by all of these playlists being filled with all these ghost artists. And it's not only lo-fi hip hop, but like I mentioned, also the ambient music, classical jazz. And one of the things that's so disturbing

about this practice is that there's no shortage of musicians making instrumental music who are really trying to figure out how to make a living in the current digital music economy who would really benefit from being on these playlists. And not only is it cutting off a lot of opportunities for these artists,

but then also like you said, as listeners, even if these are background playlists, I feel like I listen to music in the background in my house sometimes, but I usually listen to the radio or independent radio, local community radio. But even when it's in the background, something will catch your ear and you're like, oh, that community radio. But every once, you know, even when it's in the background, something will catch your ear and you're like, oh, that's cool. What is that? I'm going to, you know, wait for the talk break and like here to like,

here someone says this is, or, you know, um, maybe someone, I don't use Shazam, but like, you know, someone else might be like, let me Shazam this. I want to know what this is or let me go look it up. Um, uh, and let me like research this artist, you know, when you, when you're listening to is just pure, uh, stock music, just pure vibes. It just really makes it less about the artists that you're listening to or the community of artists you're listening to. And just, it's just all about the playlist.

Yeah. And it undercuts the actual artists, right, that Spotify claims are its customers. You said before that Spotify sees itself as a two-way marketplace. The musicians are the customers, and so, hey, you're gonna be able to make money on Spotify. Are they telling those musicians that simultaneously

they are undercutting them by paying other musicians through a stock music company less to compete with them. Yeah, come put your money, come put your music on Spotify, but also we're paying some other poor motherfucker, who's a real musician by the way, there's a real guy playing the keyboards for that stock music company, but that person is being paid even less than you to make the same shit. And guess what we're gonna promote in our algorithm more, because it's cheaper for us, the stuff that we made. Like, that's not a marketplace, that's not a customer relationship.

They're, they're under, I mean, this is the shit that Amazon does, right? Where, hey, yeah, put your stuff on Amazon, but also while you're there, we're gonna undercut you so you can't actually make any money. I mean, how is that not fraudulent? How is that not something that we should be prosecuting if they weren't a Swedish company?

Yeah, totally. I mean, I should say, I didn't find any evidence of algorithmic boosting of this music, but just by the nature that it's being given a platform, it does mean that it has a chance of becoming more popular, which I think does boost its chances of becoming algorithmically surfaced if people add it to their own playlist or whatever. And then, yeah, after the article, this particular part of my book was released as an excerpt in December in Harper's Magazine. And after it came out, a lot of people on social

media were saying things like, it's like the Amazon basics of music. And I thought that was like a really funny and interesting comparison. I will say just today, a Swedish musicians union released some sort of like open letter to Spotify, like demanding answers about the PFC program, which I thought was really interesting. That's great.

But I want to return to the point that you made about this being a disruption to an organic scene, because what was cool about the Lo-Fi Beats to Study and Relax to YouTube channel when I used to go to it was you got the sense that you were getting a window into a real scene, that there were real, you know, weirdos in their bedrooms somewhere on the internet going like, I love making quiet lo-fi beats to chill out to. And then here's this YouTube channel that's like collecting them, you know? And I enjoyed listening to that for years,

but then once it's on Apple Music and it feels corporate, it feels algorithmic, it just feels like they're feeding me sludge. I don't like to listen to it as much because I'm missing the human element. I don't like to listen to it as much because I'm missing the human element. And it, I don't know, there's such a big gap between those things. You know, there's a station that I listen to, a very long standing internet radio station that I recommend to everybody actually, it's called Soma FM.

Have you heard of Soma FM? It's like sort of dates to the early tech era. They have a lot of mood music radio stations. It's like sort of dates to the early tech era. They have a lot of mood music radio stations. They have one called Groove Salad, which is for me really good writing music. They have another one called Drone Zone, which is really good sleeping ambient music.

And I enjoy listening to this partially because the music was chosen by an actual curator. And I'm like, okay, this guy's just really into electronic music. He's curating a couple moods. He's grabbing actual songs from albums. He's paying royalties. Not a huge amount, because there's only a couple thousand listeners. But it feels like an organic expression of a real scene.

There's a huge difference between that and Apple's recently launched Chill Radio, right? That's their new radio station. Their first radio station was Beats One, which was meant to be sort of like a BBC kind of, BBC Radio One kind of thing, charts and hit makers and celebrity shows and shit. But now their new radio stations are just like, hey, just chill, hit the chill button

and we'll play chill slop for you. You don't care what it is, you just care that it's chill. Lean back, you know, do whatever you gotta do. Have sex, study, do whatever you need with this in the background. It feels empty and robotic. Having that bit of human care, knowing that there's a human caring somewhere in the chain

is like actually important to me. Do you think it's important to the public though? Does the public care about this? That's, you know, it's a great question, like because something that, like two things, you know, something that I kind of chart throughout the course of my book is, at least from Spotify's perspective, this sort of recurring theme over the throughout the history of the maybe past 10 years or so of this company and looking at the evolution of their playlist ecosystem and recommendation system more broadly. There's this thing that I felt like kept coming up

that they were in pursuit of, which is even from the early days, if you'd listen to the music programming executives, it seemed like they were always chasing this ability to essentially provide like one button that someone could push when they open the app and just get like the perfect soundtrack at any moment. Like, you know, it came up in interviews

with one of the guys, interviews I found with one of the guys who ran the play listing startup they acquired in 2013, who helped launch their play listing operation where he said, our goal as a company is just to have one play button and to have so much data that we're incorporating that all someone will have to do is open the button, hit play. Then later on in the history of the company in 2018, their co-president, Gustav Soderström, you know, at their investor day in 2018 talked about how the goal for Spotify was self-driving music, you know, where you just open the app and the music would sort of like, you know, know how to organize itself based on data inputs that you're giving them.

And then, you know, the concept of genre I talk about later on in the book is kind of like, you know, came about through algorithmic experiments and trying to just have a button that you could press for like a genre and get whatever you want. So anyway, it just seems to me that like, and it's not just this, this happens with like other types of AI products as well. But there seemed to be this like,

you know, user that they have conceptualized as the average user who is someone who like opens the app. And like the idea of thinking about what they have to listen to is just like horrible. They're like, oh, I can't think about music. Like you have to just tell me what to listen to. And it's funny because like, you know, I'm sure that, you know, there's a lot of really busy people out there. There's a lot of people who stare at a library and get overwhelmed and don't know what to choose. But I don't necessarily know that the solution to that is like, oh, we have to make it so that people don't have to think. But if you're operating from the perspective of like, our goal is just maximum engagement, maximum user engagement at all times.

Maybe that's what you would want to be in pursuit of, but it certainly is not a way of thinking that is popular amongst people who are really into music. I don't think it's a way of thinking that's popular among people. And that's what's so strange about it is that it's like they're telling their audience what the goal is.

It's not coming from the audience. I mean, look, there's situations in which you wanna just hit a button, listen to music. I think when people are driving, there are a lot of people prefer listening to the radio than choosing music. Cause like, well, I got my five stations, I know that they're there, I switch between them if there's a commercial, I'm done, right?

Because you're driving, you don't want to be fiddling and going, oh, what do I want to listen to next? Makes sense. But that's not the case in all situations. And also, I don't know, I find the one button use of these services kind of personally disgusting. Like, when I use the MyStation feature on Apple Music, and again, it's not Spotify, it's Apple Music, so maybe the algorithm's not as good, the effect of it is that it makes me hate my own taste.

Like, it plays back for me the music I have been listening to most recently. And I'm like, no, that's what I was just listening to. I don't want to hear it again. Like I, I literally, I love this artist in LA named Sam Wilkes. He's a bassist and a jazz producer. And he makes this beautiful spacey wobbly jazz. That's like really good for a lot of parts of my day. I'm a genuine fan of the guy, puts out a couple albums a year. I think it probably does pretty well on the algorithm

because it sort of is pretty good lean back listening, even though it's also very good tuned in listening. And I listened to a lot of him over the last two years. Now, when I hit the Apple Music Station, the My Station, it plays me like nothing but the guy, and I'm now sick of it. It has made me sick of, I hit skip because I've heard this too many times

and yet it won't fucking let up. And there's, where's the dial to give me more new stuff? Where's the dial to, there's the Discovery station. I don't like that station either for whatever reason. I feel like it's feeding my own shit back to me. You know? And I literally have a revulsion from it. And I genuinely think Apple Music's a better service

than Spotify in a lot of ways. That's why I use it. So I don't, I mean, is this something that people actually want in your experience is to just hit the single button and be served, I don't know, like algorithmic slop. Yeah, yeah, no, it's interesting. Also it's, it's super interesting to have a conversation

with someone who's an Apple music user too, because I think that- We're very rare. We're a rare breed. And it is something where, where people find out I'm an Apple music user and they like look at me in a weird way. They're like, why?

What? No, it, well, it's interesting to me because, you know, I, my instinct is that a lot of the criticisms that I'm making are criticisms, not specifically of Spotify, but of the streaming model more broadly. And a lot of what you're saying really tracks with like other, what I hear people say about Spotify all the time. Um, you know, something that I often say and that others have said also, it's like a way of understanding this is that, um, in a lot of ways, uh, streaming recommendations, um,

you know, are in some ways, you know, kind of like risk management tools for streaming services, you know, like for streaming streaming services, the main way that they make their revenue is through subscriptions. You subscribe, you pay $10 a month. Their primary concern is just that you don't delete your account and that you retain your subscription. And one of the ways in which they're able to determine whether you're a satisfied customer is if you're streaming, how long are you streaming every day? And there's an interview with a former employee in my book who says that at a certain point, they just kind of realized that the way to keep people on the platform is to just

point, they just kind of realized that the way to keep people on the platform is to just provide them what they want or what you already know they like. And I always try to differentiate between what they like and what they know you'll stream because what streaming services have on you is a pool of your listening data, a pool of what you've streamed in the past. And from that, they can try to make a prediction of what you might be statistically likely to not hit skip on in the future, which is not necessarily the same as what you like. But what that means is that oftentimes what you're getting is just your music taste pitched back to you.

You're getting your music taste served back to you. And there were actually, at least in the history of Spotify, there was an earlier moment when they were first getting into algorithmic recommendation and first building out their algorithmic recommendation tools, where there did seem to be more of an emphasis on discovery, on showing you stuff that you'd never listened to before. And something that was really interesting

in my research for my book is I tried to pinpoint the moment where like personalization on the front page with the top priority billing shifted away from discovery and shifted towards made for you. Because those things seem similar. They're both different types of personalization, but they're actually so different. Discovery is like the idea of discovery is that you're listening to music you've never heard before. Whereas Made For You is mostly just here's a bunch of stuff you've listened to in the past that you might hit play on again in the future.

At a certain point, Made For You really won out. And I think in a lot of ways, it's one of the many ways in which the rise of TikTok kind of has, in some ways, influenced Spotify and other platforms and both, you know, the streaming economy and the platform economy more broadly. There definitely is this moment, And then around 2019, 2020, when Spotify just became, the focus became much more on personalization and personalized homepage showing you the right thing, the right... Like as soon as you open the app and less on these curated editorial playlists with all their flaws, they were still in theory playlists made by a team of editors, human editors who are doing some oversight. And yeah, more towards just, you know, algorithmic recommendations.

And some of those playlists in the past, it was a big deal to get on them, like the rap caviar playlist on Spotify. It was like the editor of that playlist. Oh, this is the number one tastemaker in hip hop. You know, you really wanna be on this playlist. Like this is the new radio station. And that actually had some cool to it, but it doesn't feel cool to be like, oh yeah, I got recommended the new future song or whatever. But I'll go recommend it.

But I think the appeal to people, you use the language made for you, we have started in the past couple of years to see these algorithms as giving us some sort of self-knowledge, almost like it's a horoscope. Like, oh, the algorithm has watched everything that you've done and this is for you.

It knows you, it knows what you like. And I do think that started with TikTok when people started to say, oh, TikTok diagnosed me with ADD because it gave me all these ADD videos. TikTok knows me you like. And I do think that started with TikTok. When people started to say, oh, TikTok diagnosed me with ADD because it gave me all these ADD videos. TikTok knows me so well. Oh, TikTok knows what I like. And people started sort of seeking out that algorithmic,

you know, analysis of who you are. And that's a powerful thing to be told who you are by a giant corporation. It does impact people emotionally. And I'm susceptible to it sometimes too I'm like, oh, yeah, show me my wrapped at the end of the year Show me my app whatever Apple music calls it the replay show me what I listen to and oh, yeah recommend me something I might like but The fantasy of it is that we're gonna be given shit that we enjoy

The reality is that we're just sort of, the algorithms aren't that good. And they give us a lot of boring stuff we've already heard before. It feels like the public is filling in the gap and making this stuff seem more powerful and compelling than it really is. Yeah, totally.

I mean, one of the things in my book that I talk about is like this experience of going through the Spotify interface and being, especially as the interface became like more hyper-personalized and there's all of these like endless niche mixes, which are kind of like a variation on their daily mix. And you know, I was looking through and would find, you know, like, sad mix, sad morning mix, sad crying morning mix, like driving sad mix, like all of these different types of sad mix. But then I would like click on them. And it was, you know, oftentimes, like kind of the same music on all of them.

And in a certain way, it seems as though, you know, there's just this idea of, you know, what your taste is that has been determined by these various algorithmic systems, these personalization systems. And then they're basically just like trying to find all of these different ways to serve it back to you in ways that seem different, but are like kind of all the same.

And I find that to be, you know, it's kind of like the new version of the classic, you know, illusion of choice phenomenon. Wait, tell me more about that. Oh, you know, like the, you know, illusion of choice. It's sort of like this thing where you go into a grocery store and it seems like there's like a hundred options, but like they're all owned by the same small handful of corporate corporations.

Where, you know, like, you know, in some ways it's kind of like you look at this app and it seems like you have all of these different options, but it's really just the same algorithmic taste profile that they have on you, rebundled in different packages. And at a certain point, I think the current era of streaming recommendation becomes less about selling you an idea of music and it becomes selling you these various ideas of who you are as a listener.

I think that it's interesting the way in which these classic marketing tactics play out in the ways in which they're encouraging you to just hit play. I talk a lot, but I do have moments in the book where I talk about rap. There's one year for the rap campaign where in addition to giving you your scorecards and telling you, you listened to this for this many hours and this is your top artist of the year, they also gave you your audio aura and they told you what moods you listened to the most this year. They made these hyper-specific mood cards. And I, you know, kind of talk about it in the context of like, how in the streaming era, like, you know, it's,

it's less about like recommending you like music and more about kind of like recommending you a version of yourself essentially. Yeah. and more about kind of like recommending you a version of yourself essentially. Yeah, it seems like that is the main thing that they are trying to serve to people is here's who you are, not here's what you might like, but then there's a lot less ways to say here's who you are than there are types of music in the world. Does that make sense?

Like it's gonna be like, yeah, you're a chill rap guy. Like, and then it's just gonna serve you the same 20 chill rap artists. I guess it, it seems like a very strange thing for Spotify to do to go from a service where almost every song ever recorded is available on the service. That's the first thing that they're selling, right? And now what is it?

Ten years after it's been available in the United States, now what they do is they want you to hit play and they want to give you a very small selection of algorithmically selected music, some of which is fake, like just chill, lo-fi beat hip hop. And then they wanna give you an audio aura that says that you listen to that. And that's about it. Where I'm like, you have all of music history before you. Why not go like, hey, we see that you've been listening to a lot of 90s hip hop,

but you've never heard J Dilla. Would you like to go on a deep dive into J Dilla's catalog and we'll give you a little, you know, or something like encourage your exploration. If I imagine what a streaming service looks like that actually helped me engage with music more in the, in the way that say, I don't know, the criterion channel does on, uh, for, for film, right? Criterion channel will be like, I don't know, the Criterion channel does for film, right? Criterion channel will be like, why don't you deep dive into this director this weekend?

We're doing a special feature on this director. Here's five of their films. Oh, I'm gonna learn something about cinema history and broaden myself as a movie lover and I have a positive emotion towards the service. Spotify or Apple Music could easily do that and yet they do not, even though they are more positioned than any group ever to do such a thing.

So why not? Why are they abandoning music itself seemingly? Yeah, great question. I mean, this is the kind of stuff I think about all the time. You know, like if you listen to the top executives of Spotify talk these days, they'll say things like that for Spotify, the AI is the product. What they're actually selling isn't necessarily access to all this music, but it's the interface where they have all this data on you and all of your past listening behavior, and they're

able to recommend you the perfect playlist or audio book or podcast that you might want to hear at a given moment. And there's so many reasons, I think, I think why that shift, you know, may have taken place or that why this might be the the emphasis. But I do think that like in a lot of ways, you know, something I something I explained at the beginning of the book is that like Spotify didn't start out as a music company. The people who started it, their backgrounds are in advertising.

They were like they were ad tech guys. Um, who had like, you know, um, an idea for a way to deliver content for free and have it be supported by ads. And then it was only through, um, you know, the negotiation with the major labels that the subscription model emerged. And it was, you know, there's conference appearances from one of the co-founders of Spotify where he talks about how in the early days

they considered doing a video service but the files were too big. And it was easier to get a beta product off the ground using the smaller files, which is music, you know? So it's like, and how they were a advertising product in search of a traffic source, you know, so it's like, and how they were a advertising product in search of a traffic source, you know, and music ended up being the traffic source that worked. And in some ways it seems like it always has just been

kind of like a media delivery product in search of the cheapest traffic source possible or content source possible. And, you know, there's so many ways in which they've squeezed music to try to make music as cheap as possible, whether it's through PFC or these different algorithmic discovery tools that they sell musicians in exchange for lower royalty rates

or the move to podcasting, which they don't have to pay any royalties on at all. They have to pay for partnerships with like, you know, um, famous people. But, um, in some ways, you know, I think you could see it as part of this pursuit of a, um, less regulated industry, uh, industry that allows them to have content that they can serve to users for less money. That makes a lot of sense to me that they started an advertising

because that makes sense why their business would not be one that gives me what I want, but instead tells me what I want, right? Like Spotify and Apple Music to a certain extent cease to be the kind of businesses where I go, oh, you know what? I want to listen to XYZ. Oh, the service will give it to me,

which is what iTunes originally was. I want to hear this music. Oh, I can buy it and have it on my iPod. Now they tell you what you want and that's what advertising does. That's not what the music industry does. They're shoving it down our throats. And I got to say, I think it's a bad thing

that a company with that ideology is now virtually a monopoly in the music space. The other company being Apple, Spotify and Apple being the two dominant players. I guess there's Tidal and some other also rands, but like, what does it mean for music as not just a genre of entertainment, but, you know, part of the human experience when a company that got started as an ad tech company that is just designed to have you hit play and make no other choices is monopolistically in control of this entire sphere of human art almost globally?

Yeah, no, it's a great question. And yeah, I feel like it's hard to necessarily call them a monopoly, but it's definitely true that they have outsized influence and that they're the most popular streaming service and they hold a really uniquely powerful position in the music business and setting incentives and that it seems like Spotify, Apple and Amazon kind of seem to like follow each other in some ways. And I think- I did forget about Amazon and YouTube,

but I was making my list. Those are also big players. Yeah. But I think there are enormous consequences like for the way that people listen. I think that music and audio in general, it's really hard to encourage a sense of media literacy around sound in the same way that maybe it's more possible to try to teach or encourage around visual media or the written word. And, you know, I'm not like totally

sure why that is. But I think that in some ways, I think it has to do with the way that, um, you know, audio and music and sound have been, um, like systemically devalued. Um, so in some ways, you know, like, hopefully. If the, you know, book could encourage people to maybe have like a stronger sense of media literacy or criticism that they bring to not just Spotify, but streaming culture in general. I think that that would be positive. And if it could encourage other stuff like that, that would also be positive.

And I think that for me, the reckoning to take place is, yes with Spotify, yes with streaming, but also just sort of with the role of like music and society, you know, I think with other mediums and art forms, we see their value in the world in a different way. Like books, for example, we more easily see as a public good to be funded through, you know, public libraries, like art to be funded through grants. There's like barely any public funding for music in the United States. And at the end of my book, like in addition to talking about

the importance of strengthening the ability for musicians to unionize, have a collective voice, in addition to talking about different policy interventions that might be helpful when it comes to digital payola, ways that like the FTC might consider doing some oversight of the contracts between the streaming services and the major labels. I also kind of offer this picture of just how we might conceptualize the revaluing of music in society in general at a time where it really does seem like music has been devalued.

So thinking about looking to countries around the world that have different ways of funding music. So like, I talk about how during the pandemic, like Ireland piloted a basic income for the arts program. I look at different examples of like public libraries around the world that have funded local music streaming libraries. I point to different artists groups that have created cooperative music streaming services. Obviously, none of this is like the alternative to Spotify or the alternative to streaming. But something that I say in the book is that, for musicians and listeners,

I think one of the issues with the streaming model is the suggestion that a one size fits all model for music could ever work for all of the different types of musicians and listeners who exist in the world. And I think that as you imagine alternatives, like pushing back on the one size fits all model and thinking about different types of ways that digital music might exist

for different types of listeners and different types of musicians could be helpful. Do you think that we'll ever see a cultural pushback against the algorithms? Because right now people are really all in on Spotify, again, to the extent that I get made fun of for using like Apple Music, which is a different streaming service.

People are really all in on this service. But when I look back at the history of music, I look at, for instance, the consumer revolt against Milli Vanilli in like like, what, the late 80s. Or I look at the rise of indie rock or alternative rock as being like a response to what was perceived as the intense homogeneity of commercial music. And of course, those movements became eventually

commercialized themselves, but it was an organic, like, upwelling of people saying, fuck that, I want this instead. Those were real movements among music fans who had moral values about how they felt music should be made. It should not be too commercial. It should be an authentic expression of the artist.

Do you think that we will ever see something like that or is the power of these algorithmic services just too large? That's a really good question. I mean, it certainly has felt like for years now that we're sort of moving towards some sort of moment because I definitely think that, I started writing about this in 2016, 2017, and it has become like a far less niche concern.

Like, you know, years ago, it seemed really niche to talk about the issues with streaming or like the state of the digital music economy or or like, you know, how technology is impacting or listening behavior. But now, you know, it doesn't really seem like a niche issue anymore. And even just seeing, you know, the media response to something like the fake artists stuff, or like, you know, at the end of my book,

I talk about this group called United Musicians and Allied Workers who have sort of led this like independent musician solidarity movement. And they did this campaign a couple of years ago called Justice at Spotify, where they had protests outside of Spotify offices like all around the world on the same day. And, you know, demanding like increased payment, transparency of contracts and to digital payola. And I documented it in my book.

But even at that time, I remember being like, even like five years ago, this would have seemed like, well, maybe like three or four years ago, even like at that point, like this would have seemed like, well, maybe like three or four years ago, even like at that point, like this would have seemed totally wild. So I definitely feel like momentum has been building for a while and it's that people,

at least people who are like really big music people, I think are kind of like hungry for some sort of change. Yeah. Yeah. I certainly, I mean, look, I listen to algorithm music all the time, but after I do it for too long, I'm like, I got to listen to something fucking real. And I go look at some pitchfork reviews, or I listen to, there's an online radio station here in LA called Dub Lab that is sort of, that is like programmed by real people, has real DJs who actually have adventurous taste. And I'll put that on for a while and see if I'm interested.

Sometimes they're just playing some like weird noise sound collages and I can't really get into it. But sometimes they're playing like, someone's playing like old vinyl, like R&B records or something. And I'm like, this is sick. And I hear about some new artists. People, I really think they're underestimating people and how much taste

they actually have and how lumpy our experience of what we want to hear is, that we actually don't want to eat a smooth, soylent shake of music every single day until the day we die, that we do need something authentic and that they are failing to provide it to us. Um, before I let you go, I want to make sure we talk about the finances a little bit more, um, about, of the music industry under Spotify. You mentioned a couple of times,

digital payola payola. I know as being the old scheme where record labels would like pay to get a, a record radio play as like a bribery, um, to, to make something fake popular. And it was, I believe outlawed probably by the FCC decades ago. You probably know better than me. What is digital payola today?

Yeah, so I think there are many different versions of something that might get called digital payola today, but specifically with, when it comes to music streaming and, you know, specifically with Spotify. Technically, you know, what I write about in the book, it should be said, like for, for the lawyers out there that technically, like, you know, what we're talking about is not payola, but it shares many qualities with payola. And I think that the practices that have emerged, you know, on Spotify and streaming services, I think that these practices upset people

for similar reasons that Paola has historically upset people. So one thing that I talk about in the book in this chapter about, you know, payola like practices, what is what I've been told is the, you know, a more correct term for them. It sounds like you just had a conversation with a lawyer like two hours ago, but I'm going to respect it. I'm going to call payola, but you can, you can, you can hedge all you want. Tell us what it is though. Yeah. So Spotify has this program called Discovery Mode that they launched in 2000, 2020, 2020. And it basically, you know, asks artists to

accept a lower royalty rate in exchange for algorithmic promotion. So a musician or more directly like a musician's label or the rights holder that services their music to Spotify can accept a 30% royalty reduction in exchange for being boosted in things like daily mix, autoplay and radio. So those are like the three, you know, discovery tools on Spotify that are impacted by this program.

So, you know, if you ever open Spotify and there's like a daily mix or a niche mix or a radio station where it'll be like artist radio or then yeah, autoplay. So like when music starts playing after you finish an album and it just starts autoplaying music. So those are the things that are impacted by this. I mean, this is, it's so infuriating

and it's like a clear and shitification tactic to borrow Cory Doctorow's word that like, it's something that happened. I remember on Facebook when Facebook started at first saying, Hey, get fans on your page, get likes on your page, get followers or whatever. Oh, but now you can't reach them. Now you have to pay us to reach the people who you collected. It's like, okay, we, we put all your fans on our service.

Now that they like you, they added you their library. Oh, but we're not going gonna actually play your music for them unless you give us some money in the form of a reduced royalty, which is giving them money, because that's how you get your money, is by the royalty. So, you're paying Spotify... And of course, once you're paying Spotify a fee for the promotion, well, then they can just withhold promotion until you pay the fee.

It's very obvious how this works. Anyone who has used an online dating app where you have to pay to get more visibility is familiar with how this works. Oh yeah, until you pay them, nobody fucking sees you, right? Yeah, yeah, totally. And you know, one of the concerns while talking to people from independent record labels and musicians about this

was the concern that, you know, okay, well, if I'm morally opposed to discovery mode and I don't want to do it, but everyone else in the same genre as me is doing it, then, you know, does that mean that my music is never going to be, you know, surfaced because the playlists are filled with people who have enrolled in discovery mode

or my chances of being recommended significantly go down. Um, and, but then once everybody has signed up for that service, right? Once you have a hundred percent penetration on discovery mode, then no one is getting recommended more than anybody else. Cause there's only a certain number of listener hours in the day. So now you're all being equally recommended again, except now you're all making less money. Yeah. Yeah. What the fuck? Yeah, totally. And it was interesting. So the thing that specifically also, I should say, makes it different from Payola,

according to, you know, various music policy people I spoke to, or, you know, various, uh, music policy people I spoke to, um, or, you know, um, a couple of music policy people I spoke to, um, is that with payola, it was under the table, right? Like, you know, it was, uh, it was illegal and it was considered wrong because you, they were being, you know, um, uh, discrete about it, but this is actually out in the open, which almost kind of even makes it worse. Like it's just part of the business model. And that is like uniquely bad in its own way,

because there's actually like a huge economic incentive for Spotify to get artists enrolled in this program, because, you know, it's part of their business model. My last question on the finances, and by the way, this is a complete grift and scam, and it's a scandal that they're doing it, and it's clearly horrible for the music industry and is an abusive practice in my view.

As bad as anything that Uber does, as bad as anything that Amazon does, as bad as anything that any of these companies do. But it fits a pattern of the tech industry sucking the money out of an existing industry towards itself. Um, and so that brings me to the macro finances. I grew up in the nineties. This was the high watermark for musicians making money when they were selling

CDs, you know, like a large artist could, you know, buy a mansion off of just people buying their CDs. Uh, today we have probably more people listening to more music than ever, and paying Spotify or Apple Music for the privilege from 10 to $15 a month, which is, you know, if you think the average person, do they buy more than 12 CDs a year?

I'm not, you know, at 15 bucks a pop, like yes or no, but they're paying a healthy amount of money into the system, and yet musicians are making less money than ever and are not able to make a living off of their sales. Indie artists especially went from being able to sell CDs at shows to only making fractions of pennies from streams.

How is it possible we have more people listening more than ever, paying money into the system yet the artists are making less? Like what is the big macro change that has happened that causes this? Because it looks like it's just worse for everybody except for Spotify. Yeah. I mean, you're right. It's like there is a lot of money in music, but where is it going? And I think that, you know,

something that can be illuminating is to learn things like the fact that, for example, Daniel Eck, the CEO and co-founder of Spotify, there's a headline that's been going around recently about how Daniel Eck know, Daniel Eck is now officially like more wealthy than like any musician has ever been in the history of recorded music or something like that, you know? Like I think in some ways, I think, you know, there are a lot of ways that you could explain it, but it's clear that the people who have benefited the most from this model are top streaming executives and major record labels. And the question of how much money gets back to the artists, like it is a reflection of the streaming model being one that is set up to benefit a specific type of musician whose music streams massively,

and not all music is set up to stream massively. That doesn't mean that it's not good. The per stream valuation of music is a very specific way of thinking about the value of music. There's plenty of music that people highly value in their lives, but they don't feel compelled to sit there and listen to it on repeat all day. That's the kind of music that doesn't do well in this economy. There is a lot of music that does do well in this economy, you know. Lo-Fi beats to study and relax to. Yeah. Do quite well. Yeah.

Inoffensive music that all kind of sounds the same, does well, right? Yeah. I mean, as long as you're not being, you have to have music that both streams well and is not instrumental music that can be replaced by ghost artists. So there is, there's a lot of factors going on, you know? But I think that that's like, you know,

maybe one way of understanding the reality. There's this quote from a few years ago where Daniel Eck, in an interview, said that musicians can't expect that it's enough to just make an album every few years and think that that's going to be enough. Like, the types of music that used to make it in the old music economy, not all those musicians are gonna be able to make it in the new music economy. And to make it in the new music economy,

you have to be continuously releasing new music. You have to have continuous engagement with your fan base. There has to be strong sense of storytelling around what you do. And basically just being like, you have to release more music and release it faster, and you have to be an influencer. When I hear continuous engagement,

continuously releasing music, storytelling, it's like, release music. I feel like there's this model musician who can do really well. It's like release music all the time, really quickly, a huge high volume of it. Ideally, you're a solo entrepreneur releasing music by yourself. You have no co-writers, you have no label, you're directly uploading it through a digital distributor so that you

don't have any label or manager taking a cut. And you're also on TikTok promoting it all the time and making up dances and jokes and stuff and being a comedian and an actor. So that people discover your music through TikTok because they're, you know, certainly not discovering it through streaming. So if you fit like, you know, check all of these boxes, then, you know, you know, maybe you could, you can make a living. Well, and look, it's not a bad thing to necessarily check boxes or to have the structure of a medium affect the art that's made. I think again, about, you know, top 40 radio in the sixties,

it created the war between the Beach Boys and the Beatles that brought us such great music. Brian Wilson and the Beatles were trying to win and get number one every week. And it was like, hey, let's put out a new single, let's hit number one again. And that sort of incentive can be good. And I think you could probably find examples

in the streaming era of someone going, I'm gonna fucking nail this streaming thing, right? In the same way that I'm trying to hit the YouTube algo every week, right? And maybe I make some good work as a result. But I don't think we want that to be the only reason anything ever gets heard. I don't think we want that to be the only reason anything ever gets hurt. I don't think we want, you know,

every pianist in the world to have to be an influencer. We don't want other forms of music to be pushed out. And the amount of power that the platforms have at this point, like I don't want Daniel Eck deciding what kind of music should be made or deciding what kind of music I should be listening to or telling musicians here's what you have to do. I want the musicians to fundamentally be in charge

and I think that is the repulsion that a lot of people have from this change in the business is like, who the fuck told this bald motherfucker in Sweden to like tell every artist what kind of music to make? It pisses me off as an artist and as a listener. Yeah, I totally agree. And I agree with you too that like, you know, there definitely is good music

that gets made within these parameters. And there's also a lot of good music that kind of like happens to do well in the streaming era. And it's like, you know, no shade to those artists or to any musician who's trying to like make the system work for them, to be honest. Like, but it, I think it is just sort of when you have a system

that repeatedly rewards the same types of things over and over again, there's a lot that gets left behind too. So what do you recommend to folks listening? You mentioned that earlier in the interview, different models of supporting music. What are some of your favorites and what are your recommendations to folks

who want to sort of break out of the algorithmic bubble and bring some humanity back into their music listening and fight back against the streaming hegemony a little bit? Yeah. Well, it's interesting you mentioned DubLab earlier, because I actually think that like Independent radio and online radio is such like an interesting sort of like antidote or like alternative way of discovering music in the streaming. Yes. And it you know, whether it be like your true alternative or your supplement. I mean, like, there's lots of different types of listeners. And I'm for someone who has so many thoughts on this. I'm also someone who doesn't necessarily like telling people what to do.

So like for me, it's like, I think of like alternatives to streaming through like buying music directly through artists and building an MP3 library. Maybe for you, it's like, you're looking for something to supplement streaming, to like discover music in like a more human way. And I definitely feel like tapping into local radio and independent stations, like, um, you know, these independent internet radio stations that really

emerged in the streaming area is not just like ways of discovering music, but also kind of like these hubs of independent music culture in a way that I think is really cool. Yeah. And some of them are really thriving. There's Dublab, which you mentioned, Soma FM I mentioned. There's NTS Radio in the UK. My dad is a huge fan of this one called Folk Alley.

Have you heard of Folk Alley? It's like a former NPR or a public radio station that just streams folk music 24 hours a day and I'm sure has a loyal fan base of, you know, 65-year-old former folkies who want to listen to new folk music, and they do pledge drives, and it's clearly a really thriving corner of music culture, and that stuff is all over the place.

And it just requires a little bit more personal energy from us to go find find or starting a vinyl collection or whatever it might be, like that personal connection with music. Yeah, yeah, totally. Like there's also, there's this great app called, and I never say those words, great app, never comes out of my mouth ever.

Yeah. But this thing called Radio Garden, that's just sort of this like globe that you can like scroll around on and click on different countries and explore like radio stations in different parts of the world. And it's very cool for like checking out and they have like curated pages

of radio stations and stuff and. Yeah, you can just scroll around and be like, oh, what are people listening to right now in Iceland and click and you're listening to a streaming station or Africa or anywhere else. I mean, it's so funny that at the moment when we have the most access to the most different forms of music globally, so many of us have funneled down our experience of music to a

single algorithm from a single company that just gives us what we have heard before. It is such a sadness that we are not using this opportunity to broaden our horizons, but it's right there for us to take it if we want to. Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, the internet itself is like great for music. I think like, you know, there's, you know, so many, there is a lot of power in being able to like access music from all around

the world and like, you know, find music bloggers and radio stations and independent record labels and mail order stuff from people. You know, it's I think that it's kind of similarly with how people have kind of like forgotten what the internet is. And like, there was this moment where people kind of forgot what the internet was and they just basically like went on Facebook. I think like with music, like people have kind of like

forgotten what the internet is too. And they just have like a streaming service that they're trapped in. But they're, yeah, there's more out there. The door is open should you choose to walk through it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Liz. It was such a thrill to have you. The name of your book is Mood Machine,

the rise of Spotify and the cost of the perfect playlist. There it is, there's a copy, Liz Pelly. If you wanna pick up a copy at our special bookshop, you can do so at factuallypod.com slash books. And when you buy there, your purchase will support not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. Liz, where else can people find you on the internet and where can they read the excerpt of your book?

Please shout it out. Oh yeah, so that excerpt was published in Harper's Magazine and yeah, like my website is lizpelly.info and if you go there, you can find a link to it. Liz, thank you so much for being on. It was wonderful talking to you. Thank you so much.

Great speaking with you. Well, thank you once again to Liz for coming on the show and thank you to all of you for supporting this show on Patreon. Remember, five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. For 15 bucks a month, I will read your name in the credits of this show and put it in the credits

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Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time on Factually. I don't know anything. That was a HeadGum podcast. Hey, I'm Gareth Reynolds and I have a new podcast on HeadGum called Next We Have. Now this show is for people with short attention spans, which is everyone. I mean, you're probably trying to skip this ad right now, but don't because you now legally

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