Book Review: Mood Machine The rise of Spotify and the costs of the perfect Playlist

Written by: Duncan B. on 25 March 2025

As Vanguard recently reported, music streaming service Spotify has been accused of helping to destroy the Australian music industry. A new book Mood Machine. The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by US music journalist Liz Pelly, exposes the dark side of Spotify, and the harm it is causing musicians.

Spotify was founded in 2006 in Sweden by advertising industry men Martin Ek and Daniel Lorentzon. Since then, Spotify has grown into a $67 billion media conglomerate.

This wealth has come at the expense of the musicians who whose creations Spotify exploits. The big three companies Sony, Universal and Warner control 70% of the recorded music market. Pelly shows how Spotify serves the interests of these companies, while making it difficult for independent record companies and musicians to get their work featured on Spotify.

Spotify also uses session musicians, and more recently Artificial Intelligence, to create a lot of the music on Spotify’s playlists. This means they have to pay even less for the music they stream.

Payments to musicians for each stream are pitifully low and hidden in an obscure payment system. A figure of $0.0035 per stream is often quoted to show how low payments are. In 2021 musicians mounted a campaign against Spotify, demanding that payment be raised to one cent per stream. They also called for an end to Spotify’s programme “Discovery Mode.” This is where musicians can accept lower royalty payments in return for algorithmic promotion of their music on Spotify.

In 2014 Taylor Swift removed her music from Spotify. She was quoted as saying, “I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists and creators of this music.”

Another risk from Spotify is the vast amount of data which Spotify harvests from its users. This data is then sold to data brokers for the use of advertisers. Currently, Spotify derives about 13% of itsrevenue from advertising, and aims to raise this to 20%.

Like the other tech companies Amazon, Meta and X, Spotify spends millions of dollars lobbying the US government in order to protect their interests. We are seeing this lobbying in action at presentwith the big tech companies lobbying to get the Trump government to take punitive measures against Australia and other countries which try to impose any sort of regulatory controls, restrictions, taxes or payments on these companies.

In trying to find a solution to the stranglehold that Spotify has on the music industry, Pelly sees the need for musicians to come together to find independent alternatives to Spotify to promote their music. These include community-based streaming services, based for instance in libraries. Here local
artists can make their music available within their community.

She says, “At a time when the music industry has insistently sold the idea of the hyper-individualistic solo creative entrepreneur as the model independent artist—where every artist is meant to act like the CEO of their own little media empire—there’s power in collectives of artists pushing back, and asserting that true independence comes from working together with the people in your community to build an alternative.” As one independent musician told her, “The music industry is not trying to help musicians. It’s going to come down to us, but they’ll do everything they can to break us.”

Australians have been world leaders in music, whether it be classical music, opera, folk music, country music or any of the many genres of pop and rock music. We must not let foreign-owned technological companies destroy this heritage.

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