How Spotify Monopolized Music
Welcome to the podcast Organized Money. You can listen to today’s episode on Apple on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
After file-sharing decimated the music industry in the late 1990's, tech platforms, and music publishers spent years finding a profitable solution to the problem of free music. Spotify was the result.
For investors and major labels, Spotify was a triumph: it revitalized the business of recorded music, and accommodated a public that had grown used to having instant, on-demand access. But for artists and smaller labels, it has only exacerbated the problem of making a living.
Today on the show, Matt and David talk to Liz Pelly, author of the new book Mood Machine: The Rise Of Spotify And The Cost Of The Perfect Playlist, to find out how the dominant platform in music streaming was founded, how its algorithmically driven recommendation system flattens musical taste, and how its "payola-like" activities skirt the regulations that governed terrestrial radio for decades.
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The conversation once Pelly leaves seems to stop one step away from the real lesson. The problem isn't that people who don't love and can't recognize great music are running the means of production and access. It's that middleware like Spotify, through networked apps that log user choices, outsourced "taste" to the millions of consumers (qua gig workers) that listen.
And, of course, not necessarily in a good way. First, obviously, every user is providing free labor in this algorithmic expression of "taste", as the discussion with Pelly covered, filling the role of record producer. But second, as she suggested, this "algorithmic taste" is fed & manipulated not to make better, more fulfilling music, but to learn how to provide streams that maximize listening engagement and opportunities for profit. Like the Apple App Store, it's a race to the bottom, and we've been more than happy to show the middleware exactly how.
It's a small distinction, and your "Bezos doesn't love books" as a heuristic isn't far off, but the nuance is important.
We're being used to sell ourselves what satisfies us most inexpensively, not what, given real infinite choice and exposure, we'd choose or want to hear. We're in a land of Little Debbies, not World Pastry Cup winners. And that's a shame, because, at least with digital media (contra pastries), once you've created perfection, the price to share with the world is no different than any other content, and quickly approaches zero.
What we want isn't a romanticized notion of interested humans curating our playlists like radio DJs and old record execs. What we want is for art, not (simply) profit, to be the algorithms' primary driver.
Where's the app in Pelly's inbox that does that?