My background is as a music journalist. I started writing about music when I was a teenager for the local alt-weekly newspaper. I went to journalism school, but, like many other people, my real education about music happened through being involved in college radio. It connected me with the local music community and the underground scene, and I started putting on basement shows for touring bands.

After I graduated, I worked in this alt-weekly newspaper, and I also continued throwing shows and doing a radio show. In the mid-2010s, I lived at a collectively run community art space in Brooklyn. That’s where I lived when I started researching Spotify. I was sort of balancing both: being a person who was involved in collective organizing and show booking, but also trying to maintain a foot in the world of freelance journalism — like a lot of us who balance a lot of different things at once.

I’ve always been interested in asking these bigger questions of independent music: What does it mean to be independent when we are seemingly beholden to all these platforms at odds with our values? I was also kind of bored with music journalism and trying to think of some more investigative stories that I could pursue. At the newspaper I worked at after college, I had been covering the Occupy movement and writing about local organizing efforts. Later, I missed doing journalism that felt more critical of power.

So I came up with a few ideas for music industry stories that I could pursue that also had to do with interrogating the culture industry. One was Spotify playlists. As I write in the introduction to Mood Machine, I happened to have a friend who was working in the music business who suggested a point of entry for the story. And I just started writing essays about streaming, first for the blog of a music nonprofit called CASH Music and then for the Baffler.

No, I definitely think that it’s a book about the streaming model more broadly. There are other themes, too. In some ways, it’s a book that uses the story of Spotify as an entryway into a bigger story about the state of the consolidated music industry today and the impacts and influence of corporate consolidation more broadly on music, but Spotify isn’t even the only entryway into that story. At first, I thought about writing a book that was just about streaming more broadly, but I found that I was writing a book about Spotify while doing that.

In general, there are lots of different economic arrangements within music right now that I think require criticism and imagining beyond. It’s not that we just need to imagine beyond streaming. Even the Bandcamp model, where artists get to set their own price and get most of the money, is still a market-based model.

But streaming in particular has this really complicated system that warps the way we think about musical value. Artists aren’t paid per stream. They’re not paid directly. The payments go from the streaming services to rights holders based on this really complicated revenue-share model called pro rata, where rights holders are paid based on market share, or what streaming services call stream share.

So, if you are a major label and your catalog accounts for 20 percent of all streams on a streaming service within a given royalty period, then you get 20 percent of the eligible royalty pool. The contract you sign with the streaming service determines what that eligible royalty pool is. And each rights holder has their own contract with a streaming service. They’re all protected by nondisclosure agreements (NDAs).

Most artists never get to have a sense of what’s in those terms. But it’s common knowledge in the music business that the major labels have negotiated better arrangements than even some of the biggest independent record labels — better arrangements in terms of what qualifies as the eligible royalty pool, what is the per-stream rate, what are the minimums on certain tiers.

But it’s still super, super mystified. So I think there are things that you could do to make that arrangement fairer — whether it be more transparency in terms of the contracts or streaming companies experimenting with user-centric streaming. The United Musicians and Allied Workers have a bill for a Living Wage for Musicians Act that would create an additional royalty stream on top of the preexisting royalty model that goes directly from the streaming services to the musicians. And it’s based on precedent within what currently exists now for digital radio in the United States. So, there are things that you could do to make it less exploitative, while also imagining beyond it all.

Something that I try to make clear in the book are the different types of cost-saving strategies that a company like Spotify implements in order to reduce how much money they’re spending on paying royalties. For streaming services like Spotify, the way to make money is largely through selling subscriptions and selling advertisements. They make a lot of money doing that, but then they have to pay out 70 percent of it, so most of it has to go to rights holders.

They’ve started implementing certain strategies to reduce the amount of money that they have to pass along to the rights holders — one being building out these really popular playlists for what they call functional purposes. So: music for studying, sleeping, chilling, winding down; and then filling them up with music that is licensed with improved margins, according to their own internal description. They fill them with music that is cheaper for them to license through practices that are not very transparent.

And then there are also these strategies that are ingrained into the business model. So, things like Discovery Mode, where they’re asking artists to accept a lower royalty rate in exchange for algorithmic promotion. And that is something that a lot of people in the independent music world were quick to liken to a form of modern-day payola — or a “payola-like practice,” to use the more legally sound way of referring to it.

Except that in the past, payola was something that happened in private: you can imagine this image of a record-label person putting some money under the door of a radio station or handing off a bag of cash in secret. Now these payola-like practices are part of the business model — something that Spotify talks about with their shareholders and publicly on their website. Part of the product is giving artists the “opportunity to participate” in these really extractive programs.

For years, many other music tech critics and I have talked about how the streaming model pushes this idea of a one-size-fits-all solution for all of music. And how in imagining alternatives, we have to imagine beyond the one-size-fits-all model.

It’s hard to generalize about what music communities need. I think, for a similar reason, it’s hard to really generalize about how far streaming and tech companies have shaped music culture. It’s different depending on who you’re talking about. There are so many different ways in which listeners and musicians themselves relate to music and the concept of music. In lots of ways, streaming has set incentives that have nudged artists and listeners in one direction or the other — sometimes in really overt ways, sometimes in really subtle ways. Some musicians have really felt those platform pressures, though.

Something that came up in the reporting for the book, particularly in interviews with people who run independent record labels, was how artists are confronted with so much data from these streaming services, and how that data can still more insidiously have an influence on you — even for musicians who aren’t necessarily pop-aspiring or in pursuit of relentless growth.

The general public interfaces with Spotify through this main Spotify app, but there’s another app that artists interface with, called Spotify for Artists, where they’re given this data dashboard, and all these stats on their catalog. They’re told which songs are doing well, what playlists they were added to, which tracks are unexpectedly taking off, how people are finding their music, that kind of stuff. Even beyond just streaming services, we’re at this moment where all artists are expected to not just be musicians but also content creators.

So maybe, in addition to contending with their streaming metrics, they might also be dealing with other apps’ metrics: “If I posted this way, a lot of people found it, and if I [posted] this way, no one found it. When I talk about what my songs are about, no one interacts with it, but when I post my face, more people are finding out about my shows.” And now you also have Substack data, Patreon data — all these different data dashboards.

I think a certain type of artist wants their music to be free and easily accessible and would tell you that they would rather you just download their music from a file-sharing site, or maybe they put it up for free on Bandcamp. They would rather you do that than listen to it through a streaming service, where there might be the illusion that the music is free. But actually, [Spotify CEO] Daniel Ek is making millions and millions of dollars, and then investing it in military AI tech.

And there are certain types of artists who say, I would rather you just get my music for free — download it through my Web 1.0–style site that I coded myself in a text edit document. And when an artist is saying that, I think that it’s cool to follow their lead — download their music from their Web 1.0 website that they made on Neocities or whatever.

Then some musicians maybe don’t like what streaming stands for, but they’re in that other weird bucket where actually they are making a small amount of income through all of their streaming royalties. And they have tours to pay for and bandmates to pay. And still, they would prefer that you buy their records directly, where they’re making more income than from streaming.

Toward the end of the book, I talk about listening to artists — listening to what musicians are saying about the best ways to support their work. But I also acknowledge that it’s individualistic to say: “Listen to each individual artist and figure out what they’re asking for” in terms of how to support them. It’s not a perfect diagnosis of the problem. I do think that one of the best approaches right now is just following the lead of artists and music communities and paying for music when you can, if you can afford it, but also not being under the illusion that streaming is a meaningful way to compensate the vast majority of independent artists, especially ones operating at a DIY or grassroots level.

Yeah, that is true. That’s part of the reason why — not to give away spoilers — at the end of the book, I’m talking about the fact that the UK Musicians’ Union has a campaign advocating for universal basic income. I talk about countries like Ireland, where they’re piloting a basic income for artists program. I talk about countries like France, where they have a special unemployment scheme for musicians that allows artists and musicians who play a certain amount of hours, out in the world, to regularly access certain public funding.

I think that it is worth questioning the idea that, for every artist, the monetization of copyright is going to be the most effective way to support music. It’s also really tricky now, though, because — especially in conversations around AI — copyright is an important tool for music communities to rely on in protecting their work from exploitation by tech companies. And in some ways, it shares a lot of parallels with the dawn of the file-sharing era and streaming. So, it continues to be a really tricky conversation.

I think so. In Mood Machine, I quote a conference talk from Meredith Whittaker from Signal, where she talks about AI fundamentally being an extension of surveillance ad-tech. More recently I heard someone else talking about how AI — consumer AI and generative AI tools — is just a new type of narrativization of surveillance practices. Sucking up as much information as possible in order to create new types of products for people to subscribe to or consume, or to make their business models function in a more profitable way. I don’t know if I’d say that it’s Spotify specifically — but I do think that the whole surveillance-driven platform era really, in some ways, laid the groundwork for what we’re experiencing right now.

At the beginning of the book, I talk about how the free circulation of music online was really valuable to the evolution of the platform era — and not just with streaming services but also YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. These platforms all had strategies involving music: getting musicians onto the platform to post material, draw in their audiences, and attract users. In some ways, music has always been an instrument of surveillance platforms. It’s not that surprising that music is also being preyed upon in this next era of consumer platforms, based on surveillance and the normalization of it. But it’s still disturbing and something that needs to be fought.

I think that it’s possible that it was doomed from the beginning. But like you, I have my own personal experience. I think one of the reasons why writing about music technology is interesting for me is that I also grew up with file sharing, MySpace, LiveJournal, Tumblr, the MP3 blogs. Before the consolidated social web took over, it felt like there was more potential to use the internet in ways that enriched independent music culture — not just financially but socially, especially in the music blog era. It wasn’t just connecting people with music but also connecting people with passionate, independent music writers from around the world. It was breathing energy into musical connection in a way that didn’t feel like the technological underpinning was restraining it in some way — it felt the opposite.

Was that a facade? Did someone else, somewhere else, know that we were just offering up all our passion and writing and thinking for free to these systems, and fueling advertising and training AI systems in ways that we probably didn’t even understand? It’s super interesting to think about, especially considering that at the time, companies like the Echo Nest [a music intelligence and data platform currently owned by Spotify] were training their AI systems on music bloggers’ writings.

I often wonder what would happen if today, big data for music companies was openly using information from all the music blogs in the world to train AI systems to make connections among artists and then power a multibillion-dollar streaming platform. Would there be more public pushback? Probably. It’s unclear how far all the data that the Echo Nest sucked up from music blogs is still part of streaming recommendation systems. But it was part of the foundation of algorithmic recommendation on Spotify.

Yes. In the book, I’m never calling for a consumer boycott or saying we should all delete our accounts. The main reason is because I’m a person who believes that boycotts should come from mass movements or from organized groups of artists. I think that it would be way more meaningful if a group like UMAW [Union of Musicians and Allied Workers] or AFM [American Federation of Musicians] or some sort of organized group of artists or a union tried to organize that sort of thing. But the book has a clear perspective about the relationship between creative labor and capitalism and the importance of minimizing the influence of corporations in our lives. And some people have told me that they read Mood Machine and then deleted their accounts.

I don’t use streaming. So, it’s my perspective that to have a more meaningful relationship with music and to more meaningfully compensate the people who make the work that you listen to and to have deeper connections with art and music communities, it’s important to find ways to relate to music outside of streaming services. I do think that people moving to different ways of listening to music online makes a lot more sense.

Yes, of course. I mean, to me, that is what is so interesting and powerful about, for all of their problems and flaws, DIY music communities. We have decades and decades of examples to look for in music self-organizing alternatives. So I obviously believe that alternatives are possible. What I tried to lay out in the end of the book is an argument both for reform and revolution. I talk about labor organizing to hold streaming services accountable, to pay artists more and to rethink business models. While I was writing the book in 2023, it felt like writing about potential FTC [Federal Trade Commission] intervention made sense. But that was 2023.

There are also things that are happening in other countries, like Canada and France, with new taxes on streaming services to fund local music and local musicians. It’s worth thinking about all of this policy stuff, but the book ends by looking bigger than that. It ends with artist cooperatives, public libraries, looking and thinking what would it look like if we funded music and art through universal basic income and public funding, basic income for artists programs. Ultimately, I think a lot of the problems that are raised when we talk about streaming services are issues of corporate consolidation and capitalism more broadly. These are issues of what’s at stake when we allow corporations to have too much influence over music and culture. There’s another way.