Let’s say a band self-releases an album on Spotify that garners 100,000 streams in one month. That band, we’ll call them Fatty Smith, includes a vocalist, drummer, bassist, and guitarist, who each would take a cut of the $350 paycheck: a one time payment of about $87.50. Fatty Smith has a friend, PJ Starving, a singer songwriter very active in her local music scene. PJ Starving recently headlined a festival celebrating the 10 year anniversary of a local record label, but none of her songs received more than 1,000 streams last month, so Spotify considers her a hobbyist and pays her nothing. This is the complicated, mathy, and grim reality for artists who put their music on Spotify.
Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, out on paper back this November, explains the seedy history of a tech company whose origins, as it turns out, has little to do with music. Mood Machine begins with the regional history of piracy in Sweden – a country-wide reaction to corporate culture so virulent that record labels considered Sweden a “lost market.” Pirate Bay, a Swedish music and file sharing platform, thrived until 2008, when police raided its data center and charged the founders with violating copyright laws at the urging of American major record labels. While Pirate Bay cofounders began their prison sentences, Spotify picked up its pieces and released a beta product using music the founders took from Pirate Bay themselves.
The notion that Spotify came into existence to “save music” is a complete farce, as Pelly explains. Daniel Ek and Martial Lorentzon, Spotify’s founders, came from advertising tech. Music appeared the easiest traffic source, as opposed to video which takes up more storage, to sell advertising. Spotify never intended to fairly compensate artists as their motto “giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art” misleads.
Before Spotify turned a profit, to convince major labels to join the streaming service the company promised labels benefits and advances with no obligation to share with artists. Building on the same strategies long established by major labels, Spotify intentionally obfuscates the system of artist payments. For starters, the familiar viral number of $0.0035 per stream is purely symbolic. Spotify pays artists a relative percentage of the entire revenue pool, which forces DIY artists to compete with Taylor Swift. My first paragraph reads like a middle school math problem because it is so complicated to elucidate what goes on behind these artists’ payments, but it takes a child to see it’s not fair.
For a moment, let’s return to our hypothetical artists Fatty Smith and PJ Starving. In order for them to earn minimum wage ($15 an hour) they would each need to have an estimated 800,000 streams per month. 80% of artists on Spotify have less than 50 monthly listeners. Using Spotify4Artists, an “optimization tool” launched in 2013 that presents music to artists as data and metadata, our artists crunched some numbers. They realized that in order to make some money, to get as many streams as possible, they should release music individually. Spotify4Artists also revealed that their most popular songs had the least amount of words and were heavy on instrumentals. In other words, music that can go unnoticed in the background.
Streambait, which Pelly calls, “content created for the sake of engagement,” like TikTok or Instagram Reels, became the ideal music ecosystem. Artists like Khalid and Billie Eilish, whose music operates on vibes with a monotone of feeling, serve the streaming platform greatest. Their inoffensive sounds – moody easy listening – thrive on playlists with the emotional depth and stink of a can of cat food. Playlists like “Chill,” “Night Drive,” and “Chillin’ With The Homies” capitalize on a vibe to accompany a listener on their main-character journey, rather than create a music experience akin to listening to a record.
To maximize the amount of time a listener spends on the app (i.e. profitability), in 2016, the company hired playlist editors to create mixes that would coalesce around a “vibe.” These “lean back” listeners – users overwhelmed by choice or who play Spotify in the background – became the company’s target audience. The result is a highly curated app that insulates music tastes based on a data driven technocracy. Nothing about Spotify’s algorithm recommendations is genuine. Even the “Discovery Mode” playlist where listeners love to find their favorite new artist is a payola-like scheme where labels exchange royalties for playlist placement.
The term “Ghost Artist” emerged in 2016 in connection to Spotify’s PFC (Perfect Fit Content) program. Spotify hires fake record labels who in turn pay session musicians to churn out “chill tracks” that get high placement on playlists. I took a look at one of these Spotify “chill” playlists and found an artist called softclouds (lowercase letters seek to assert some kind of false indie sentimentality) – a nonexistent artist who claimed to be “from the dark corners of Sweden,” a pretty creepy fake bio considering the vibe is relaxation, not vampire-emo. softclouds releases crunchy nonsense with an occasional piano trill or a singular rumbled drum beat; 500,000 monthly listeners and no results on Google. It is easy to imagine the PFC program slipping into a mindless AI driven muzak.
Pelly makes it clear, in her short explanatory chapters supported by interviews with musicians, former Spotify employees, and record labels, that Spotify homogenizes music. Its emphasis on data based recommendations push artists towards the mundane and deliver opacity in place of vibrant music scenes. For example, “Indie” no longer refers to an artist on an independent record label, but a marketable sound. At this rate, listeners will forget to associate their music with a human artist entirely.
Spotify’s exploitative practices pushed our friend PJ Starving to quit music, who now has a corporate job to survive. However, Pelly believes there are choices in face of Spotify’s domination of music and what is essentially a payola piracy scheme. All members of Fatty Smith removed their discography from Spotify and opened an all ages music venue and community center.
It is possible to listen to music without Spotify or any streaming services. (Pelly noted that YouTube Music has an even lower payout rate than Spotify.) Pelly looks towards public library music databases like the streaming archives in Seattle, Iowa City, Austin, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis to name a few. I myself have not streamed music in over a year. With some speakers I found on the street and a receiver, record player, and tape deck that my local record store fixed up for me, I can avoid the whole streaming enterprise. Though Pelly does not recommend this individual-centric undertaking. Instead she proposes collective action to rally the government to pay artists fairly. She concludes not in a defeatist mindset, but calls on artists, music lovers, and independent record labels to organize.
