#mood machine

This feels relevant here.

Archived link in case you need it:

By Liz Pelly

An unsparing investigation into Spotify’s origins and influence on music, weaving unprecedented reporting with incisive cultural criticism, illuminating how streaming is reshaping music for listeners and artists alike.

Drawing on over one hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today’s highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed.

Building on her years of wide-ranging reporting on streaming, music journalist Liz Pelly details the consequences of the Spotify model by examining both sides of what the company calls its two-sided marketplace: the listeners who pay with their dollars and data, and the musicians who provide the material powering it all. The music business is notoriously opaque, but here Pelly lifts the veil on major stories like streaming services filling popular playlists with low-cost stock music and the rise of new payola-like practices.

For all of the inequities exacerbated by streaming, Pelly also finds hope in chronicling the artist-led fight for better models, pointing toward what must be done collectively to revalue music and create sustainable systems. A timely exploration of a company that has become synonymous with music, Mood Machine will change the way you think about and listen to music.

Instead journalist Liz Pelly has conducted an in-depth investigation, and published her findings in Harper’s—they are part of her forthcoming book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.

Mood Machine will show up in bookstores in January and may finally wake up the music industry to the dangers it faces.

Pelly started by knocking on the doors of these mysterious viral artists in Sweden.

Guess what? Nobody wanted to talk. At least not at first.

But Pelly kept pursuing this story for a year. She convinced former employees to reveal what they knew. She got her hands on internal documents. She read Slack messages from the company. And she slowly put the pieces together.

Now she writes:

What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.

In other words, Spotify has gone to war against musicians and record labels.

At Spotify they call this the “Perfect Fit Content” (PFC) program. Musicians who provide PFC tracks “must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative.”

Spotify apparently targeted genres where they could promote passive consumption. They identified situations in which listeners use playlists for background music. That’s why I noticed the fake artists problem first in my jazz listening.

According to Pelly, the focal points of PFC were “ambient, classical, electronic, jazz, and lo-fi beats.”

When some employees expressed concerns about this, Spotify managers replied (according to Pelly’s sources) that “listeners wouldn’t know the difference.”

See complete article

Wendy Rule released a new album last year.

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

Liz Pelly: I think part of the reason is that there is a hunger and desire on the part of listeners and musicians to participate in media around music that feels more intentional, and that is respectful to the art form. I also should say I'm a big fan of listening clubs. People meeting at their houses or in a community space; like having a book club but for records. Listening clubs, as well as gathering for the purpose of people collectively listening to and discussing music, can be a powerful way to recommit to the social aspects. as well as It's an important way to contextualize learning about music from the people around you.

John Baccigaluppi: A lot of our readers are producers, engineers, and studio owners. Having a listening session or club at your studio once a month could be a productive wary to do this.

Liz Pelly: I think calling it a club feels like an important part of the social aspect. You're not coming to hear some expert talk about their record. Everyone's on the same page to listen to a record and talk about it. I do also think that listening sessions, where someone plays through a new record that they just made and talks about it, could also be an interesting way for someone who runs a studio to think about their studios as social spaces, to the extent that they/re able to. That's definitely something that we need more of, not just in music, but in general in our world. Places where people could go without necessarily feeling they have to buy something to connect with people in their communities, people with shared interests, or to learn about music. That would be one thing you could do.

tener que preparar café, porque no me gusta el café

escuchar música constantemente

lo del café es bien tolerable porque es de esas cosas que no te gustan pero son parte de la chamba, aparte no puedo negar que algo de interesante tiene todo ese arte del barismo con la máquina de espresso

pero lo de la música sí me pasa de vueltas porque se supone que yo controlo lo que suena en el área de atención (para los clientes) pero mi música le resulta súper aburrida al equipo de producción que está atrás mío haciendo los panes y ellos necesitan electropop o pachanga o salsa para energizarse con su labor manual. yo disfruto esos géneros, pero no todo el día todos los días y menos cuando la ponen en paralelo a lo que yo estoy poniendo en el parlante para los clientes y se cruzan las dos canciones y yo soy el que lo sufre porque estoy al medio!!!! eso es lo único que me está volviendo un poco loco csm jajaja y me tiene pensando en el libro Mood Machine constantemente, tengo que leerlo!!!