Mood Machine
The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
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Mood Machine
Narrated by:
Liz Pelly
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Narrated by:
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Liz Pelly
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By:
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Liz Pelly
About this listen
'[a] cool-headed but powerful polemic...' Sunday Times
' A studs-up assault on streaming economics' The Guardian
'A vital addition to the genre... arrives not a moment too soon' The Telegraph
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 a 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.©2025 Liz Pelly (P)2025 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
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Critic reviews
'A spirited debut. . . . Evocative prose and sharp analysis combine for a trenchant critique of the music streaming industry that calls for concrete reforms 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.' -- Publisher's Weekly
'A strong indictment to rouse consumers into considering just where our commitment to music is headed.' -- Kirkus Reviews
'Here is the clearest and most thorough job of reporting-and-critique I've encountered on how Spotify, through a juncture of corporate interests, data science, surveillance, vibes theory, and cliché, has engineered a zombie impostor of musical culture. Liz Pelly helps you see and hear how it happened. Her work is an act of decency against degeneration.' -- Ben Ratliff, author of Every Song Ever
'Mood Machine is so much more than a book about music streaming. Liz Pelly has painted a portrait of modern capitalism through the lens of Spotify, a mega-app that manages to encompass all the ways that Big Tech is both homogenizing and alienating, dulling our senses while offering the illusion of abundance. Spotify, in Pelly's hands, is a fun house mirror-world where our musical tastes and desires are warped to fit the needs of accumulation rather than art.' -- Sarah Jaffe, author of From the Ashes and Work Won't Love You Back
'Much has been said about the somewhat tense relationship between artists, listeners and streaming. But with Mood Machine, Liz Pelly has written the definitive breakdown of Spotify and its influence on the music industry. Anyone wanting to learn more about playlisting, and to understand why they like what they like, should buy this book.' -- Marcus J. Moore, critically-acclaimed author of High and Rising (A Book About De La Soul)
'We know intuitively that our relationship with music is changing - often for the worse. But to read how and why this relationship has broken down is devastating and infuriating. Liz Pelly lands this story on a hopeful note that will galvanize those of us who dream of a different future for the music industry. I couldn't put it down.' -- Zoë Schiffer, author of Extremely Hardcore
One sided but interesting, badly read
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This is not just the story of how Spotify stumbled into becoming the world's primary music streaming service, it's the story of the musically blind leading the musically blind down a dark alley that has all but completely killed music as a human expressive cultural form. From the consumer's reliance on playlists that provide mere background noise (muzak), to Spotify's forcing consumers down specific listening paths, to the grasping corporations inventively seeking more and more ways to pay less and less to artists, t's all here.
The question might remain, will music kill itself completely or can we somehow find a way back to properly valuing music and the artists who create it? It seems to me, though, that the real question after reading this book is, do we as a society even really care?
Compelling
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If you can get past that, the actual story and research done here is really good, and was really interesting. But I would recommend if you're interested to get the physical book, because the audio is really hard to listen to.
Struggled to get past the voice
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