Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly. Atria/One Signal Publishers, 288 pp., $29.
The release party for Mood Machine took place in the beginning of January 2025, at the theater at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn. The author, Liz Pelly, whose book argues that the streaming music giant Spotify takes advantage of artists, surveils subscribers, funds AI warfare, and forced upon us the popularity of “chill” muzak, was interviewed by Max Alper, a radical composer who used to post under the handle @la_meme_young. It was copresented by The Baffler, where much of Pelly’s reporting into Spotify’s exploitative practices was first published, and United Musicians and Allied Workers, an upstart union that is leading a campaign to pass legislation that would increase streaming royalty rates, was on hand to table.
It’s hard to imagine that Spotify’s top brass would have agreed with much of what was said either in the book or at the event. Which is why it was so strange when, less than two weeks later, the …
