Catching a Vibe: How Spotify Licensed an Experience and Commercialized a Culture

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly (First One Signal Publishers, 2025)

Review by Kimberly A. Bain

For the avid Spotify user who spends many hours per week curating a playlist that can alleviate sorrow, set the mood when bored, or help endure a considerable work commute, Mood Machine seems enticing. As with most works that lay out the details behind a global entity, gaining this drama-infused, inside knowledge is exactly what one might hope to find in Mood Machine. Identifying who might be at fault for the commercialization of culture through a fast-fashion type of business puts the popular streaming service in an unpleasant light.  Through detailing Spotify’s cultural commercialization, Liz Pelly clarifies that artist exploitation has many aspects that cannot be easily understood through any single perspective.

Mood Machine begins with a brief history of Spotify focused on a clear thesis: Spotify’s consistent intention was to operate as an advertising platform, and not necessarily a music platform. This is made clear through the identities and aims of the developers of Spotify who came with backgrounds in marketing and advertising, such as Daniel Ek, the CTO of an online doll browser game, and Ek Lorentzon, a tech entrepreneur focused on affiliate marketing. Finding ways to navigate around license and copyright restrictions was an important early objective of Spotify, rather than catering to the creative and financial needs of those who were featured on its platform. Spotify sought to establish a new space beyond the piracy efforts of Napster to create a new cultural experience, which ultimately resulted in the exploitation of both its artists and its users. Spotify’s precarious business model is on full display here, including marketable opportunities for curated playlists and data-tracked, mood-based compartmentalization. Throughout Mood Machine, Pelly demonstrates how Spotify’s commercializing of a vibe has reinforced the idea of experience over content, marginalizing individual artists and their work by making them disposable as a means of production and making users baseless pawns of Spotify’s marketing.

To set the stage for how Spotify, once hailed as a refuge for independent artists marginalized by Big Music, became a household name in artist exploitation, Pelly reflects on the 21st century issues with widespread music sharing that existed as piracy. Pelly introduces the entrepreneurial hoops that Spotify had to jump through to provide an experience that rivaled that of pirating platforms such as Napster in her chapter, “The Bureau of Piracy.” By creating “a product that was ‘better than piracy,’” Spotify sought to be the counter-cultural response to the need that would be filled with the new, albeit “legal” Resistance of Big Music (14). The counter-cultural vibe that Spotify evoked made it seem a haven for independent (indie) artists who vibed with its “free service with advertising [that] paid right-holders a percentage of ad revenue” (17).

Spotify’s efforts to focus on curating a marketable experience, rather than providing a valued space for the artist, or music itself, led to the commodification of artists through curated experiences. Pelly highlights the efforts which exploited independent artists in the chapter, “Ghost Artists for Hire.” Spotify brings in “fake artists” to create what is considered “perfect fit content,” or PFC, to capitalize on the fact that many of its users are not actively listening to its content but are simply trying to capture a “lean-back” vibe through a passive listening experience (58). It may be a surprise to some listeners that it then becomes easy for Spotify to write off and commodify music makers to encapsulate that “lean-back” experience through content farming and curating experiences of particular moods, such as “Calm.” Many of the stock artists that are featured in these PFC playlists have little relevance outside of the playlists they are on. 

In a manner that prompts Pelly to ask, “While the real music artist please stand up?”, investigations to track down these eponymous artists in the chapter “The Background Music Makers,” are almost humorous as Pelly encounters the reluctance of these artists to divulge information about their clandestine dealings with the entertainment companies that contract them to produce PFC. Providing artist reflections allows Pelly’s audience to feel sympathy for those who are at the same time complicit in marginalizing the visibility and quality of established artists’ work. PFC music makers aren’t exactly getting rich off their efforts. She points out that, “Pesky protests for higher royalty rates aren’t an issue when your playlist is filled with artists who don’t exist” (75). It becomes clear that there are no winners in the game of Spotify. Those who sought refuge as independent artists ultimately become exploited and marginalized by Spotify’s efforts to curate a cultural experience through strategic marketing.

In the chapter, “Streambait Pop,” Pelly considers the influence of soundbite social media dominance and Spotify’s streaming frequency as a new cultural paradigm for today’s pop music. Pelly notes, “When platforms repeatedly prioritize one type of thing over another, the scope of what’s possible in a given media environment starts to narrow” (90). In fact, the audience of Mood Machine may grapple with feelings of guilt as they remember a time that they rushed to stream a song on Spotify simply because its soundbite was featured on a viral TikTok video. Making the reader complicit in the cat-and-mouse game of music exploitation grabs the reader's attention by warning them of their contribution to that exploitation.

Pelly invites the audience into the experience of cultural exploitation by detailing the process of data collection and behavior tracking in the name of creating “the perfect playlist” (99). In the chapter “Listen to Yourself,” Pelly reflects on how data-optimization resulted in Spotify’s methods becoming “more about treating [a listeners’] own taste as a world of its own to be studied, sorted, packaged, and sold” (99). In other words, if listeners are simply in search of passive “chill vibes” through these curated listening experiences, Spotify can use that search behavior to streamline the user experience, creating an identity for the listener that is defined by their engagement with “packaged and sold” chill vibes (99). The idea of sorting user’s personalities in boxes creates an ominous mood for this chapter that steers audiences to the question of how far Spotify will go to curate the experience it wants its users to feel like they are authentically having.

Pelly attempts to make one last rallying cry against artist exploitation by Spotify in the chapter “The First .0035 Is the Hardest.” By explaining that artists apocryphally make .0035 cents per stream and identifying that “it would take over eight hundred thousand streams per month to make the equivalent of a $15/hour job,” Pelly sets the stage (148).  However, this narrative seems to focus on the general struggles of musicians as a whole. Pelly also considers the challenges that may or may not have to do with Spotify’s practices, noting “A 2018 study conducted by…found that the median musician earned between $20,000 and $25,000 per year from a mix of music and non-music jobs” (154). While the argument remains that Spotify has taken exploitative measures to create a curated cultural experience for its users, Spotify gives musicians a direct and accessible culprit of their exploitation. One needs only to reflect back on Michael Jackson’s protest of Sony Records’ exploitative practices of taking control of his music as a stark contrast. In 2002, few may have known or clearly understood how Tony Mattola, Sony’s then CEO, could have pulled it off. Identifying a clear culprit in artists’ exploitation allows for a sense of visibility that did not exist in 2002.

Throughout the book, Pelly reinforces the idea that Spotify’s intention has always been to create an advertising platform. She argues that “Spotify had been lauded as an ad-tech product in search of a ‘traffic source,’ which happened to eventually become music” (162). Understanding Spotify’s original marketing intentions provides a sobering perspective on the commercialization of music through a curated experience and the marginalization of individual artists. However, Pelly seeks a scapegoat in Spotify and somewhat clumsily justifies this scapegoating in the chapter “Streaming for Surveillance,” in which issues of data collection and sharing are brought to the table through of the concept of “surveillance creep,” when “a surveillance system might start out with one purpose, but over time…shift and expand beyond its original use case” (145). Pelly presents a warning not only to exploited music makers, but also to Spotify’s listeners. Spotify already shares user data with third parties, but if Spotify could use its collected data for more nefarious purposes, it probably would. However, prognosticating about what Spotify could do, doesn’t address the dangers of data collection as clearly as the author intends.

Another point of speculation that Pelly seems to grab onto is Spotify’s political interests in the chapter, “The Lobbyists.” This is an intriguing topic that starts with the question, “Why was Spotify hiring former White House aides? And why were they lobbying the sitting United States president to make vacation playlists?” (197). Pelly's argument in this chapter rests on the supposition that lobbying is something to be skeptical about regarding Spotify’s efforts to “sway decisions around various bills on consumer data privacy rights and regulating platform monopolies” (199). Much of this chapter focuses on posing questions surrounding Spotify’s CFO’s salary, referencing the hire of a post-White House employee to handle government relations, and challenging Spotify’s revenue origins. Little in “The Lobbyists” has to do with any specific Spotify political lobbying. It’s possible that Spotify’s clever marketing strategies are rubbing off on Pelly here, making her believe the company is more politically powerful than it is.

Mood Machine gives an eye-opening account of a moment in time when crafting and curating culture means more than the substance of that culture, and that the road to exploitation can be paved with less thought than one might expect. Through Pelly’s account, Spotify’s endeavors seem like more of a sign of the times than an intentional infiltration or subversion of culture. It can be said that the machine only works when it keeps getting fed, and, in that case, there are multiple entities involved in that feeding process, including both artists and users. Despite the blame that Spotify may receive for being at the heart of the problem, Mood Machine creates a conversation that provides space for the reader to understand that in the ecology of culture, all members have a part to play.

Kimberly Bain is an assistant professor of English at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Her favorite genres to read are self-help nonfiction and Southern Gothic fiction.