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Mood Machine by Liz Pelly review – a savage indictment of Spotify

The global streaming behemoth has made music blander and life harder for artists, according to this enraging portrait

In its initial iteration, Spotify wasn’t even specifically intended as a music provider: the concept was to stream movies, until Ek and his co-founders realised that the size of the digital files involved was prohibitive. Meanwhile, in the early 2010s, the company shifted its focus from “music enthusiasts” to what it calls “lean-back consumers”, effectively the kind of people who would once have turned the radio on in the morning and left it burbling in the background all day. The purpose of the playlists it designed to target them – “chill vibes”, “mellow morning”, “mood-booster” – was, and is, to provide unobtrusive background noise or, as Pelly suggests, a latter-day equivalent to muzak: nothing striking, unusual, out-of-the-ordinary, or indeed any of the things one might reasonably want music to be.

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