streaming vs listening

Apple Music, Amazon, these aren't our competitors. Our only competitor is silence.

– attributed to Daniel Ek

Notes on Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly.

This book’s topic (commoditisation of experience, near-invisible algorithmic degradation, cartel bullshit, mechanisation of the human soul) is very important to me; her background research is great (she actually reads all those unreadable cultural-studies theories for you, and interviewed dozens of insiders over 8 years of work); and her lens (real indie/DIY/punk) is rare and useful. And obviously streaming - AKA the present and future of music - is a really complicated cultural shift which richly deserves a few books.

But this one is poorly written, focuses on irrelevant details, and the resulting evidence is so weak that she can only really insinuate that something bad has happened by quoting corporate statements and using weasel adjectives on them. (It’s important that all the deals, mergers and acquisitions that formed the behemoth be listed somewhere, but it’s tedious stuff which she tries to make exciting by, again, making it sound dastardly.)

What changed since 2006? (I don’t say that Spotify is the cause of most of this):

passive personalisation plus autoplay
passive playlisting (but this is just a return to radio!)
the “content creator” identity, delegation of label A&R and marketing to the performer
backgrounding and “lean-back listeners”: people choosing to play muzak in their own homes
“Perfect Fit Content”: zero-royalties commissioned muzak which presents as real music
Dematerialisation: music is no longer something to have in your house, to look at, to attend to, to hold onto. e.g. the decay of album cover art as part of the experience
Shift of demand away from new music to catalogue music
Shift of musicians’ income share away from royalties and towards gigs and merch
Shift from single-purpose music machines (Walkman, radio, hi-fi) to “hardware that almost ensure a listener will be splitting their attention between music and some other activity”.
23% decrease in chart song length, 2000-2024. This is not about user attention spans - it’s to get more per-stream income!
Supposed huge decrease in the length of chart instrumental intros 1986-2015 1) pre-dates streaming and 2) is probably an artefact driven by the mid-80s being strange.
Huge decrease in key changes per chart song also pre-dates streaming.
One machine measure of melodic diversity in the top 100 fell steadily by a quarter, 1977-2016.
Chart lyrics are 22% more repetitive, 1960-2014. Also a pretty steady increase over the whole period.

The only clean hit there is song length imo.

Spotify vs The Record Industry

The book severely needs to go comparative: how does Spotify compare to past corporate regimes? She makes no mention of consumer surplus (in 2006 consumers were paying >$1 per song, and so maybe $0.10 per play on average, for a tiny catalogue and huge switching costs; a heavy user like me now pays $0.01 per play and can sample from maybe half of all recorded music). The mainstream radio scene was way more corrupt than Spotify.

My teen students now don’t know how to torrent; this is actually a massive endorsement of Spotify (and Youtube) - they managed to outcompete free and ad-free.

(It’s totally fair to ask how much of this consumer surplus is from hitting musicians’ income. The answer is not really known, and is confounded by musicians increasing touring and merch, but it can’t be hugely negative since most UK musicians report making roughly the same pittance now as they did before.)

On the artist side, regardless of how hardcore your sound is you can get onto the biggest distribution platform in the world in minutes and get paid (a pittance), which obviously wasn’t true 20 years ago. Yes, Spotify does all kinds of cartel shit on the margins, and there still lots and lots of industry plants and astroturfing - but gatekeeping is still obviously weaker than before!

Pelly claims that “the story of Spotify is the story of a broken music industry desperate to keep existing… Of an already highly consolidated industry growing ever more consolidated”. But it turns out that streaming actually did weaken the oligopoly. Hesmondhalgh et al tell us: income per musician is roughly the same as before streaming (i.e. very very low); despite number of musicians is way up. Major label revenue share is at its lowest ever (still absurdly high, 70%). Concentration on top 1% songs is also down! (though the top 0.1% are still as robust as ever):

the percentage of total album sales accounted for by the top 100 CD titles was in the low 40s in the late 1990s, but then declined to under 30% by 2019. But even more striking is the streaming figure. The top 100 streaming titles (i.e. tracks) accounted for over 10 per cent of total UK streams in 2014, but declined to just over 5 per cent in 2019. It seems clear then that streaming is associated with a shift in concentrations of popularity down the ‘long tail’ and away from a hit-driven business.

And the genre of mood music is very very old - incidental music, light music, elevator music, lounge music, “beautiful music”, piped music, easy listening, smooth jazz, muzak. The only difference with Spotify’s kind is the scale, the intentional blurring of the boundary between mood music and real music, and the fact that users have a little more choice in the matter than before.

You gotta blame the users

She complains about both algorithmic homogenization (simply untrue for 80% of users - they were already as homogenized as it’s possible to be) and the nepotism of the playlist editors, who you are best-served directly pitching your song to.

As so often with left critiques of market practices, it’s amazing how little agency she accords users. They choose the platform, they push play, they choose not to think about the content, they choose to use it as background to chores, workouts, studying - and to a lesser extent they also choose not to really listen. Certainly it’s a bad look to be haranguing the masses for their ignorance and poor judgment - but you should commit to the bit if you want to separate artistic merit from popularity.

There's nothing inherently neutral about setting up a system that wrapped up all of a song's worth in its replay value. To do so is to suggest that a song's potential to ignite mass enthuasism, and thus mass streams - or its capacity as background fodder, streaming endlessly, unnoticed - should determine its worth.

But it’s not its worth - just its revenue. An anticapitalist should really know the difference.

(I’m now boggling a little at imagining a paternalist Spotify which gave higher rates to worthy music, like Lord Reith. This would be forcing most users to subsidise stuff they don’t like! Fine by me, but good luck with that.)

But

Still, she’s basically right and deserves a lot of credit for walking this beat so long and for breaking the story of their one distinctive crime against art: the Perfect Fit Content scam, a systematic programme of replacing real music with mood music they don’t pay royalties on.

One of Spotify’s avowed goals was to increase the amount of music people listen to, in sheer duration and streams. This seems to have happened, whether or not they caused it with e.g. mega-playlists and autoplay. This is obviously good for their revenue, but also good for artist incomes. The subtle point is that this could end up being bad for their art.

Oliveros makes the distinction between “hearing” (automatic) and “listening” (intentional). The maximal case against Spotify is that they end up flattening and degrading music (whether they mean to or not): first make music ubiquitous, desensitising users and making listening harder; then make users devalue albums, long-form music; then make users devalue individual pieces of music and individual artists; then commission lots of cheap crap under fake names to replace expensive real artists; then create third-party opportunities for fuckery; then (maybe) replace the session musicians with AI slop.

The case against that case is: about half of people don’t notice the difference between art and slop, so you aren’t taking anything away from them by giving them slop. And the counter to that is: there’s a lot of people inbetween who could have been listeners and won’t be.

Misc notes

* Above I cited ways the old regime was more corporate and concentrated. But another way of thinking about it is that the corporate work got decentralised: every artist who wants to do it full-time is now their own little A&R and PR operation. And this doesn't decrease the problem, it just makes the commercialism less visible.

* I didn't know the majors got lots of equity in Spotify right from the start.

* She makes much of Spotify lying in corporate press releases (e.g. that their intention was to "save music", e.g. that it was a democratisation). I suppose some of you need to be told about the ontological status of Santa Claus too. (EDIT: In the comments, Charles takes me to task for my dismissive cynicism here. On balance I think that's right - we should call out bad behaviour even if it is universal - and it would be right even if there were no sincere founders who actually viewed their main purpose as improving the world. I still think that in the reference class of people who started in advertising, and pivoted 5 times, and don't measure progress on their stated goals, intense doubt is warranted. But we can be cynical and still find it bad.)

* "These were the people for whom streaming was made by [sic] and for: major label execs, consultants, ad men, and venture capitalists, all working to get their own share of the pie." Well, yes, as usual.

* "It does not seem coincidental that the DIY blog era started winding down around 2012, a year after Spotify launched in the US." 1) more like 2010, 2) it is coincidental; Spotify is nothing compared to Facebook.

the mixtape - as one-to-one musical transmission, an expression of a fixed idea through song and sound collage, as an enemy of the industrialized record industry - actually serves as a useful foil to the data-tuned, ultra-surveilled ways music circulates on streaming playlists... the exchange is never truly one-to-one.

* Certainly playlists are much less meaningful than mixtapes. I'm old enough to have received a couple of actual mixtapes, handmade cassettes with weird transitions and little snatches of TV recorded through the deck's built-in mic. I still have them and still remember their content and meaning.

* There's an interesting secondary market and black market in streams and playlists. This actually creates a sort of DDoS vulnerability for artists: you can get their royalties stopped or their tracks taken down by botting them.

* From elsewhere:

Röhr is behind over 2,700 songs that have been released under various fake artist names on Spotify. Some of those names include Minik Knudsen, Mingmei Hsueh, Csizmazia Etel, and Adelmar Borrego. His music across all of these pseudonymous artist accounts on Spotify, according to DN, has been streamed approximately 15 billion times. Johan Röhr is one of the 100 most streamed artists on Spotify of all time... on one of the large instrumental playlists, called Stress Relief, which has over 1.45 million followers, 41 out of the 270 songs on the playlist are by fake artists whose music is made by Johan Röhr.

* "behind levelling the playing field is a deeper assumption, too, that artists should want to be operating in a one-size-fits-all model - or that independent artists should want to conform to the norms of the winner-take-all pop star systems". This is one of the few places that I actually agree with academic slander about the neoliberalisation of the self.

* With the exception of one or two monoculture monsters like Swift I think it's fair to call the current scene fragmented. This is the flipside of weakening the majors and surfacing the long tail of small artists. Even though I love weird music there's something sad about this. Somehow at the same time subcultures seem way weaker than in 2005 - _group_ fragmentation??

* Why do I care so much? Because I love it, and but because music is a technology of the self - maybe the most common form of self-expression and self-exploration, weighted by time.

So Pelly is not capable of analysing this huge messy new phenomenon (but does better than anyone else so far through dint of sheer effort and cynicism). To supplement this book with actual evidence I recommend this shockingly good UK government report. For a much better book on the 1995-2006 runup to Spotify read Witt. Until 2023, Glenn Macdonald was one of the most important people in the music industry and he has [a book](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199504414-you-have-not-yet-heard-your-favourite-song) denouncing some of Spotify's stuff from the inside.

MUSIC FOR EVERY MOMENT

streaming vs listening

Notes on Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly.

Spotify vs The Record Industry

You gotta blame the users

But

Misc notes

See also

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