Hot and ready pizza. Hi everyone. Anthony Fantano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. I hope you're doing well.

We are about to embark on a very interesting conversation, one that centers around the magic of reading, as I just finished this new and fantastic book, Mood Machine. It's a work by journalist and music writer Ms. Liz Pelly. In chapter after chapter on this book, she dives into the inner workings of the Spotify platform and also music streaming broadly, and just basically goes over all the ways in which streaming and Spotify are destroying the well-being of musicians, destroying art, really creating a crappy experience for listeners too. Here is a link where you can buy this book for yourself and gain all of its knowledge. And yeah, I hope you guys enjoy the Conversation. Let's get into it. Here we go.

Anthony: Let's get into it. I think maybe the best place to start is sort of with what I guess you could say is Spotify's alleged modus operandi, the reason the platform exists, kind of its pitch to the music industry that this streaming platform being here and getting people through the door, paying customers by getting them into a subscription model is going to fix piracy, and it's going to save the music industry. And I wanted to ask you straight up, do you personally feel like that is the case because from the sort of dichotomy of things that you describe in your book, it seems like what's happening instead is that it's just saving the record labels. Meanwhile the artists, especially those who are on the lower end of fame and popular spread, are still very much seeing the effects of piracy. It's just happening in a more widespread way. And it's Spotify who's facilitating it.

Liz: Mhm. Yeah. You know, one of the really interesting aspects of writing and researching this book was going back to that era in the mid-2000s, post Napster post file sharing pre-streaming, and thinking about and researching the different conversations that were happening amongst musicians at that time. A lot of the conversations around file sharing weren't just these conversations around, should musicians be expected to give away all of their music for free? Are listeners entitled to getting all the music in the world for free? But there were also a lot of, in some ways, more interesting conversations that were happening, too, about the effectiveness of copyright, about what it means to have access, universal access to culture. Should we be entrusting the corporate music industry to be good, responsible stewards of the archive of recorded music history? How are independent musicians going to make a living in the new music economy? And it was pretty interesting realizing that while there's been this long time narrative that streaming returns the music industry to growth, there's so much money in music now. Like you said, saving the music industry didn't end up being the same thing as saving music. And for a lot of independent musicians, a lot of these questions that they were asking pre-streaming or questions that musicians are in some ways still asking today. So yea, it was super interesting to research that period of time and also to research the ways in which the conversation around piracy and file sharing in Sweden, in particular, where Spotify was founded, also took on this sort of different political dimension than the conversation around piracy and file sharing did in the United States. For example, there were sort of these bigger questions being asked about file sharing and the free circulation of music. It wasn't automatically seen as a negative thing. People were asking questions. Is it good for culture to have universal access to music? And because of that and because piracy was so rampant, the music business started seeing Sweden as people. It described to me a lost market, which made them more willing to try out something like Spotify there.

Anthony: No, that's an excellent part of the book. And it's the whole first portion of the book for anybody who hasn't read it yet, you really do kind of like go back years and years and years to give a great and very accurate picture of how exactly we got to this point and how something like Spotify coming out of this culture in Sweden that was so based around piracy, I was actually blown away to learn that there was even a political party based around how rampant piracy was around that time. There was a whole political movement around it because it was such a big discussion in Sweden and had become a huge focus point for the music industry because of how crazy the piracy culture was over there. And it's just kind of interesting to learn how many of the major platforms that people, some people, may kind of nostalgically remember at this time, be it Pirate Bay or be it like MegaUpload, Kim Dotcom, that was all kind of a part of that wider culture over there and madness at the time. Spotify being so closely aligned with all of that, it's easy to see how something that a lot of people have so much distaste for currently could have been ushered in in a way where this is actually kind of radical. And the major labels are actually sort of scared of this thing. So maybe it being ushered in is to the benefit of everybody.

Liz: Yeah. I feel like the way it's been described over the years, the way I talk about it in my book and how other writers have talked about it, is that Spotify is sort of happy to align itself with piracy when it made them seem cool and when it made them seem like disruptors to a massive number of music fans who really like piracy. And then they were happy to align with the music business when they were trying to get the licensing deals that they needed to launch their beta product, or when they were trying to get the labels on board with their whole with their whole model. So yeah, that was a super interesting history to unpack and to remember, also the reality that this company was started by people with roots in the advertising industry is also pretty important prehistory and context for understanding Spotify, who the two co-founders, their backgrounds were in ad tech. And I think to them it seemed obvious that there were a lot of people who had grown to really like having access to all of the music in the world. And there were labels that were trying to figure out how they could profit from that. But it was the interests of independent musicians that I think were never really taken into consideration or seen as an important piece of the puzzle to solve.

Anthony: Yeah. No, I mean, there's even a point when you're talking about the prime playlisting human playlisting era of Spotify that you even sort of dug up some connections that some people on that wing of the company had to traditional radio programming industry, which, I thought was like kind of a revelation because there have been times in the past when looking at Spotify playlists and personally observing the effect Spotify's curation was having on people's tastes is, to me, wrong. Why does this feel like the 2000 Clear Channel Viacom era all over again in terms of how it's dictating people's tastes? It feels like once again, we've gone back to this homogenization of and siloing of people's access and exposure to different types of music in that area through media control. All this power and influence is kind of like underneath one umbrella.

Liz: Yeah. And I thought that was so interesting to go back and trace to when the platform started to grow when the executives at Spotify through the mid-2010s were thinking about growing beyond their initial consumer base. The first people to jump on board with this model, or some of their early adopters as they call them, were really enthusiastic music fans. But at a certain point, the company realized that it had to grow beyond just those independent music fans or people who are really into music and reach a more mass mainstream audience as they explained it at the time. And part of that growth and trying to reach listeners beyond just enthusiasts was part of what drove their efforts to become more of a curated service, playlists, mood-based recommendations, more personalized recommendations. The shift towards curation happened around the end of 2012, into 2013. And you know, tracing that early history of when the concept of the Spotify editorial playlist first emerged, and the types of influences and the types of people that were employed at the company at that time, I think it was really interesting to see that the people that were chosen to lead these initiatives weren't necessarily journalists and editors. At first, there were people who had connections to, like you said, hit predicting and the mainstream songwriting worlds, things like that. In the early days of the Spotify playlist economy artists were really sold on this idea that the Spotify playlist ecosystem was this data-driven meritocracy, and they referred to it, and they still refer to it as this intricate model based on a broadcast radio model where there are these feeder playlists at the bottom and they'll try out artists on these less popular feeder playlists, and then they look at the data and see what's performing. And if songs are performing, they'll increasingly move them up to more mid-tier playlists. And then the top of the playlist is today's top hits. One, I feel like there's there's so much baked into that in terms of, that's such a specific way to think about music and culture, and it has specific values associated with it. It's a specific idea of curation that's being advanced there. Talking to people who worked at independent record labels and independent musicians at the time, a lot of them were just like, totally mystified by this and said that they never really saw the magic of this playlist pyramid working out in their favor.

Anthony: Right. Let's let's talk about this because I feel like we've glossed past something really quick, that 2012, 2013 era, that prime playlisting era where it was really kind of ramping up and gaining influence and actually impacting the way musicians were making music and the type of music people were listening to. I have to say in your book, I've never in one set of pages, condensed, read the word "chill" so many times, and now my skin just fucking crawls when I think of, 'Oh yeah, that's chill. That sounds chill.' Like I catch myself now whenever I'm thinking of, 'Oh, how do I describe this song? I have to review it. That's kind of chill.' And I get nauseous when I think of chill music now. So, with the way the playlists and the algorithms were working and the way that they were using the data to sort of like drive certain songs and make others more obscure and see less exposure among people. It all sort of led to this singular direction where we were getting on these playlists like the blandest, most wallpaper, most non-attention-grabbing versions of every single genre that these playlists were being built around. If you could, for everyone who hasn't read the book yet, describe what exactly this "chill vibe" and energy that Spotify was building, that so much of their playlist was curating around.

Liz: Yeah. So the chapter that you're referencing is honestly one of my favorite chapters in the book called "The Conquest of Chill", sort of looking at this concept of the vibes playlist as this streaming era phenomenon and trying to contextualize it within the broader history of not just mood music, but technology companies using the promise of mood stabilization through music as part of selling people on new technologies. So this involves, in part the history of music, but also other ways in which entrepreneurs and the record business since the dawn of recorded music, basically have used a similar tactic. So what you're asking about is the ways in which the rise of the chill playlists in the height of this. I interviewed this one former Spotify employee who referred to the years 2016 to 2019 as the peak playlist era. And that was really helpful for me, actually, because there is sort of a sense these days that in a lot of ways, streaming curation has gotten much more personalized, and that the impact of these editor-curated playlists, while they still exist, has kind of diminished a little bit. But there was this period of time where these editor-curated playlists were really influential in the music business, and artists and labels, even in the independent music world, were really focused on getting these placements and that they were really driving streaming revenues and making a big impact on artists and labels ability to survive or thrive in the streaming ecosystem. Something that has been interesting to me since that time is the way in which the prevalence of mood-based playlists, which were specifically part of the strategy of growth, then prioritizing certain types of music. Something that you hear a lot is that artists would see in their discographies that the one song on their album that album that did the best on streaming was the song that was the mellowest or the most straightforward, or the song that would work well on a coffee shop playlist or a chill vibes playlist. And you know what? What happens when you have a kind of curation ecosystem that is repeatedly rewarding the same types of styles is that it does have this flattening effect in some cases on the types of music that people are making. But also, certainly with how musicians conceive of what type of music is going to be successful in that environment. And it does, I think, contribute to a sort of muzak-ing. That's the way I talk about it in my book, is that streaming has contributed to this musaking of different –

Anthony: Yeah, there's a muzakification, if you will. No, I mean, it's also one of my favorite sections of the book too, because you effectively – and somebody in chat just mentioned this – kind of like that YouTube study beats vibe – And what you draw in interest to, what you draw a connection to, interestingly, is something that often I will think about because obviously I've been reviewing for so long that sometimes I'll kind of nostalgically think back to different eras, or scenes or waves that had been like happening during certain points in my career. And every once in a while, my mind does go back to that primordial time period in the early 2010s, around this same period that we're talking about where it really was prime creatively for like the left-field instrumental hip hop beat music scene. And they were like making so much cool stuff. And Brainfeeder Records was putting out one album after another, after another, after another. And even though some of these projects didn't necessarily hold up as album pieces per se, people were just eating it up and loving it. And then eventually through Spotify and through things like these YouTube streams, there is, as you said, this flattening of all of this stuff and it's sort of like ends up screaming louder than the original scene itself for this music. And it sort of becomes people's conception and perception of the genres. And when they want to go to listen to these sorts of sounds, they'll go to Spotify first, or they'll go to a YouTube study beats playlist first. And as a result, all of these artists who've been making these records, they're sort of being drowned out. And now there's absolutely no money anymore for them to actually make these albums unless they get placed on one of these playlists.

Anthony: Maybe the next topic we can get into is the AI aspect of all of this. Because, as you also say in the book, it's becoming harder and harder to get placements on these playlists and others because they're more and more chock full of AI music instead of music made by actual artists.

Liz: Yeah. And just to respond to something that you just mentioned... To me, there's this small section in that chapter that I just mentioned where I interviewed a bunch of producers who have made music in the lo fi hip hop space, who talked about the impact that certification has had on that scene over the years. Something that really stuck with me was one of the producers that I interviewed, talked about how in the streaming era, it became really easy to reach a really wide audience through these curated playlists, but it became harder to make meaningful connections or feel that anyone listening would remember your artist's project or that listening to these playlists would cause anyone to go actually research who the artists on the playlists were. And this has happened with various different scenes over the years where the prominence of a really popular playlist will make it easier for people to become fans of a specific playlist or a sound and not necessarily dig further into learning about the artists on those playlists. And I think that severing of the relationship between listener and artist that sometimes happens when streaming platforms shape listening behavior around their own discovery tools is one of the big things to be mindful of in this environment or to put our attention on is like how streaming service works to shape listening behavior around one of its own tools. It kind of cuts out that relationship in some ways. In some ways, what I talk about is how what the music industry calls for, for years has been calling for is lean back listening or passive listening. I would just say it's kind of the impact of playlistification in general in some ways. Because it has contributed to these dynamics where people aren't as maybe concerned with what actual artists they're listening to, and they're just going for a specific vibe or specific mood or specific playlist. It does make it a lot easier for services to slip in music made by generative AI. I have two chapters of the book about what I refer to as ghost artists or this so-called fake artist phenomenon on Spotify that people have been talking about for like a decade now. And when the relationship between the art, the listener, and the artist has kind of been cut off that way, it makes it, unfortunately, a lot easier for these companies to normalize prioritizing content that is cheaper for them, which I think is one of the main reasons why tech companies and the music business is interested in AI music is because there's this promise of cheaper content. And that's certainly, as people who care about music, is something to be critical of. I guess one other thing I always like to point out with the conversation about generative AI and AI also more broadly, is that there are a lot of concerns and there's a lot of hype around generative AI right now. And it's absolutely legitimate, artists and people who care about music should be really concerned with the ways in which music is being used without artists' consent and training generative AI music systems in order to create cheaper content and displace music curatorial systems. I also think it's important to remember all of the ways that AI and machine learning have reshaped the way that we discover music and understand music, and the way meaning is created in music through things like algorithmic recommendation. And this – I talk about in the introduction – this kind of mechanized way of listening to music or discovering music that has become advanced in the streaming era.

Anthony: Yeah, there's even, and in regards to the AI music on the platform, a pretty hilarious part of the book where you draw, or kind of dig up a really funny irony that they've found instances of AI music on the platform being streamed or engaged with by bots. So you just literally have robots listening to robots. There's literally no fucking human in the loop at any point.

Liz: Yeah, yeah. That was, I thought like a really telling example of – I think in the book I ask, is this just the logical conclusion of where all of these like mechanized ways of thinking about making music and listening to music leads to eventually?

Anthony: Yeah. No, I mean, people are bringing up in the chat the dead internet theory, which I mean, does connect to this for sure. Let me ask you maybe some broader questions that I want to engage with based on everything that you say in the book. The first of which I see three big tiers of the industry at this point. The record labels. You have the streaming services. And you also have the distros, like DistroKid, the kind of middlemen who are facilitating a lot of this uploading to these platforms to get musicians and get people on to these various places. Do you think this hierarchy is going to remain this way forever? Because at least for me, in my view, it sort of seems like at least one of these three doesn't need to exist. And eventually, at some point, as dog-eat-dog capitalism always gradually does, one ends up swallowing the other. For me, maybe it's the distros, but who may it be, in your opinion? Do you think eventually one of these three will get absorbed into the other and we'll see even more consolidation of the music industry?

Liz: Well, something that I talk about in the introduction and try to make clear throughout the book is that a lot of what we're criticizing, streaming services or talking about streaming services, you're also talking about the major record labels who are partners in many ways to these companies.

Anthony: They are connected and they have a stake in the company as far as stocks and everything to the tune of millions and millions of dollars.

Liz: Yeah, the major labels make so much money off of the streaming ecosystem. The streaming model as we know it could not exist without the cooperation and participation of the major record labels. So in a lot of ways, the types of industry practices that we're talking about and the dynamics that are talking about, it's as I wrote in the introduction, it's as much about what's stayed the same as it is about what's changed. The major labels have incredible influence and power in the music business. And it's hard to imagine a situation where that is not true unless there is some massive wave of antitrust action or some efforts to investigate and regulate these companies. So it's hard to imagine that not being the case. Something that is interesting that you see, something else I say is that a lot of the economics of streaming and the story of streaming, I think, could be understood as a fight for market share. And the labels and the major rights holders because of the pro-rata model in which rights holders get paid through streaming, rights holders are always trying to grow their market share or as streaming services call it, stream share, the number of total streams that they have on the platform in a given royalty period. And because of that, you've seen a lot of investment from the major labels into independent distributors and these companies that allow independent labels to have more of a foot in the so-called DIY distribution realm. So I don't really like to futurecast or make predictions about these sort of big players in the music business. But it's not hard to imagine a world where the major labels continue trying to buy up and consolidate more corners of independent distribution.

Anthony: And yeah, I mean, in the book you do cite instances at least the labels taking interest and owning some of these distros and it seems like there is at least some consolidation for sure at play. Another thing that I was wondering if you had done any research into – I don't remember it being discussed deeply in the book – but something I've always questioned about Spotify's presentation versus almost any other streaming platform is why do you think they make such a big deal of posting the numbers on the platform in terms of, these are the monthly listeners, not just for the artists, of course, as they would see them. But these are the monthly listeners for your favorite artists. And here's how each song is getting streamed, and how many hits it has, and so on and so forth. Usually, I don't see that being so much the case on other platforms. And given Spotify's lack of transparency on pretty much every other issue, the major labels, various connections, and monetary vested interests in Spotify, do we even have a reason as outsiders to trust any of these numbers? Could all of this be totally made the fuck up, or is it verified in any way outside of some reporting to the Music Industry of America or Association of America? Oh, yeah. This this went platinum. It's it's doing really well. It's great. I mean, should we trust these numbers, or is their reasoning behind showing these numbers to the public on Spotify's part?

Liz: Well, it's interesting because I think that we definitely should question the value of these numbers. Like I always say, streaming metrics, data that comes from streaming services, isn't necessarily data about music. It's data about that streaming service. It's data about what does well on those streaming services. What sort of thing is prioritized in that specific environment? There's so many examples of artists that have horrible streaming numbers but that could play a sold-out show with 250 people, and then examples of musicians that have millions of streams that if they had a show in New York, not even ten people would show up. And I think that's one of the really strange things about how streaming metrics work. If you talk to musicians, they'll tell you that streaming metrics have become such an important part of how they get booked. Or, if a certain label in the music industry will take them seriously. When we know that there's such a direct correlation between what these numbers can actually tell us about, true fandom and musical community. So I definitely think that it makes sense that they're so prominent for streaming services because, in a lot of ways, it's kind of the core way in which these services determine value. If these services are driven by a need to bolster engagement, everything that they do is driven by wanting to boost user engagement, keep people streaming more, keep people, extend listening sessions. So it makes sense that there would be so much value put on data in this environment.

Anthony: Yeah. I mean, one of the biggest half-truths that I see all the time in terms of the monthly listener numbers on any given artist's page is you'll go to an artist's page, you'll see they have a certain amount of monthly listeners, and you'll see the tracks that are getting them that kind of engagement. And over and over and over, it'll be features on other people's songs. And you and I, as music fans, know that that doesn't necessarily always translate to an actual fan who's engaging with your stuff. People may be streaming that track that you're featured on because they're a fan of the artist that you collaborated with. And yet on a lot of these platforms, including Spotify, this showcases this artist's work, this thing that they featured on. We consider it to be like a prime piece of their catalog, even though it may just be like a guest appearance. It counts toward their overall monthly engagement with everyone. Drake has been known to be this guy who, for a quick moment, drives a lot of people in the direction of a certain person or a certain figure or a certain artist by having them feature on a track and they blow up for a minute and then it sort of ramps down pretty quickly, and it seems like, in a way, the streaming services are also part of that web effect, that domino effect of, yeah, this person has 11 million monthly listeners on Spotify. But as you say, they try to book a tour and they have to cancel the whole thing because they can't fill up the venues that they're booking.

Liz: Yeah, or there might just be one track that's on a really popular playlist, and the consumption numbers might be high because a lot of people are listening to that one playlist. But who is actually clicking out of that playlist and going and researching this artist? Definitely the numbers ought to be questioned. It's important to remember that these metrics do not equal value. Value is determined by so many different things. Different people value different things about music. There are different reasons why people make music. There are different reasons why people listen to music, and not every single person who makes music is trying to be a pop star or the goal isn't always limitless growth. That's one of the things about this environment that is super challenging for independent musicians or people who make music where maybe the goal is sustainability and not just endless growth, is that these are platforms that are designed specifically for music that scales, both financially and also in terms of how music ends up being surfaced in recommendation algorithms and things like that.

Anthony: No. And a part of that infinite scale in that growth and that value that Spotify sells musicians on is this idea of, you can build your fan base here and you can get exposure here, and one of the platforms, new mechanisms for doing that, as you discuss deeply in the book and even cite its connections to the history of Payola is their whole Discovery Mode thing, where either a label on your behalf or you as an independent artist, agree to give Spotify an even larger share of money made from streaming your tracks in exchange for potentially more exposure of that song to the broader public. But I wanted to ask you – because you don't definitively say this in the book, not to my recollection, anyway – but were there any instances in which, in your research, you actually found this to have worked for somebody who is maybe on the more independent end of the spectrum? Because giving so many artists such wide access to such a promise and such a program, I would imagine, would just get millions of people through that were like, 'Yeah, yeah, have my track exposed to more people, have this track.' Like again, millions and millions of tracks. Wouldn't that theoretically just create more noise? Does that actually end up exposing any of this music to a wider swath of people at the end of the day? I imagine with so many people engaging in Discovery Mode, as they probably most likely are, does the algorithm even know where to silo these tracks to people to get them to fucking listen to them?

Liz: That's one of the questions that came up a lot in interviews with people who work at independent record labels, and also questions that have been publicly posed to the company in other op eds and open letters and things over the years, is this idea that with a program like this, does it mean that if everyone else is enrolled in it and I'm not, then does it affect me because I'm not enrolled in this? What if everyone enrolls at the same time?

Anthony: Once everyone's doing it, there's no priority.

Liz: Yeah, except we're all taking a lower royalty rate. We know who that would work out well in favor of. One thing I heard from some independent record labels is that the frustrating thing about it was that when they did enroll in it, they did see a boost in the track that they would enroll on it, but in exchange for a lower royalty rate. And it sort of puts independent artists and labels in this position where they feel pressured to enroll in programs like this or to take advantage of these so-called promotional opportunities. And it's also not just Discovery Mode. There's also banner ads and things like that, that the company sells to musicians as so-called promotional opportunities. According to people I interviewed, there is pressure to want to participate in these things. But it's hard to see it financially working out to the benefit of most independent musicians.

Anthony: The banner ads and the advertisements in general that you mentioned are wild to me in terms of what little success Spotify has seen in terms of using that as a mode of profit on the platform. Because, as you say in the book, Spotify pretty openly acknowledges that so many of these playlists are based on lean-back listening, background listening, how is Spotify actually able to sell advertisers on spending millions of dollars getting your advertisements to the ears of our listeners when they openly admit to music fans, investors, everybody that people just basically have our shit on in the background and don't really pay attention to it. It sort of seems like the antithesis of what an advertiser would want in terms of getting people to engage with their product.

Liz: Well, the way they kind of hype it up is that because people have our service on all day, we have all different sorts of data about different things that they're doing throughout the day. So they sort of –

Anthony: All day. And also in the book, as you say, all night, because you talked about people at the company being really hyped that they have these really popular sleep playlists. People just have this shit on while they're sleeping. It's kind of crazy.

Liz: Yeah. Yeah, that was a really funny part of the reporting.

Anthony: Oh, sorry to interrupt. I'm probably spoiling too much of the book, but there's just a lot of great parts.

Liz: Oh, no. Thank you, thank you. Yeah. No, I appreciate the close read.

Anthony: It's really quantity over quality. Kind of an irony to all this is another thing that I remember early on in the years of Spotify – and maybe you could speak to this a little bit – is how quickly they ended up nipping in the bud some of these artists, independent artists that found ways to game the system by putting a random silence album on the platform, or a white noise album, and fans will stream that and generate us money for our next record, or for a tour or whatever. And it seems like those Spotify actively stamped all of that out and said this is bad, this isn't true to what our platform does. It seems like they turned around and just started doing that exact same thing for themselves.

Liz: And I feel like not just Spotify, but also the major labels and other platforms like do this too. There's often this dynamic amongst major power players in music. You don't get to exploit artists, only we get to do that, or you don't get streaming metrics through sleep playlists, only we get to do that sort of thing. It's pretty funny.

Anthony: Okay. Look, I have a ton more questions, but I think I should probably ask you some for some closing thoughts here, especially for those who are in chat and citing their distaste for Spotify and things that they do to sidestep Spotify or engage in the musical economy in a way that benefits the artists more that they care about. You talk about this a lot in the book, and I'll leave it to you to illustrate, but what exactly do you think listeners should be doing to help the problem in the immediate? There are a lot of artists who cite things or come up with their own versions of the Patreon model. There are other listeners who are like, well, Spotify sucks, so I'm just going to use Tidal. But a lot of what you write about in the book seems like the real solutions around this are more around unionization and worker power, and listeners and musicians banding together. How do you sort of foresee that happening?

Liz: Towards the end of the book, I point in two different directions, because there are two ways that we could think about how you make these platforms more fair or how you support the work of artists who are working together to have a collective voice to try to hold these platforms accountable. And then at the same time, how do you support people who are building alternatives or how do you work to directly support the culture that you want to see thrive in the world and the systems that exist outside of the corporate music business? I feel like we have to be able to do both at the same time. So I have a chapter of my book called "The New Music Labor Movement", where I chronicle the emergence of this group called United Musicians and Allied Workers. And I specifically tell the story of this bill called the Living Wage for Musicians Act. They worked with Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib's office on writing and introducing. And I encourage people to check out that work, to tap in there and follow the ways in which collectively organized groups of musicians are calling for these services to be more accountable to listeners and musicians. Supporting the new music labor movement is one thing. I talk about different cooperatives like this other bit in the book about this co-op called Catalytic Sound, which I think is an interesting instructive model on how groups of musicians might imagine moving away from the Patreon model and more towards working together cooperatively to create these other instances. With the catalytic model, people can pay $5 a month to have access to stream the work of these 33 musicians who run this platform together. And then rather than paying per stream, they split the royalties evenly. That's an interesting example of something that could get artists away from the per-stream valuation of music and maybe something that other scenes and communities might try to replicate. I talk about the role of the public library and public funding. What would it look like if our country supported public funding for the arts and music? I try to outline this whole constellation of ideas. But mostly, for the average listener, I think that it comes down to participating in the types of alternative music ecosystems that you want to see thrive. Whether that be buying music directly from artists and independent record labels, going to shows, booking shows, supporting your small tape labels, and starting small tape labels. Supporting community radio and Internet radio. I know that's something that you're a fan of as well, college radio. Booking shows, and getting involved in your local DIY scene through booking shows. I'm always pointing people toward this book called In Every Town. It's this great guidebook on getting involved in your local scene and booking DIY shows. Just participating in the stuff that you want to see continuing to exist.

Anthony: Oh, what's that book again? I haven't I didn't catch it.

Liz: In Every Town: An All-Ages Music Manualfesto. It's such a good book on, if you're wanting to get involved in your local music scene as a DIY show booker, starting like a collective or something like that. And I think also, there's this really important role of criticism and music journalism, I think, in thinking about the alternatives here as well. I'm curious what you think of this as well. Because it seems like we're in this moment where so much of the ways in which music is contextualized and shown to people is really shaped by data and metrics and this real culture of optimization. It's a way of thinking about music that's not only non-critical, but also in some ways sort of like anti-critical in that it discourages thinking about music and thinking about the ways in which we might actually want music to be contextualized. Yeah, I'm curious, what you what you think about the role of music criticism in in all of this?

Anthony: You know, I feel like this in part comes back to the numbers thing that I was mentioning earlier, because it's almost as if a lot of music fans mindlessly use these numbers as justification for, well, this must be good because everybody's streaming it, and if it's good, then anything that you're saying in criticism of it must be bad. Which is another thing that reminds me of this. This is like the 2000s all over again. As the internet, and that piracy period that we were talking about, as we transitioned into the 2010s, there was this new generation of artists kind of shaking things up, especially in the rap world, people were seeing a way forward through that in terms of, oh, this is new, this is a challenge to the status quo. This is something different, you know? And this is new and exciting and thrilling. And now it seems like we've once again reached a place where instead of seeking out something that's novel and different and going against the grain in some way. In a broader sense, we have hit another era of just blindly accepting, well, if it's popular, it must be good. What's kind of nefarious, even more nefarious about that with Spotify is like, we're using potentially fudged numbers to justify the validity of these things, at least back in the day. Obviously, the industry had a lot of control over the popularity of music back then, too. I think we wouldn't have something like a swing revival in the 90s without it being shoved down our throats. But anyway, at least you had to justify that popularity with physical album sales. You could say, well, this is platinum because it streamed this many times, and who the hell knows who streamed it or how many times or whatever. So the role that criticism plays in that dichotomy is that it's actually an instance of human thought and human curation rather than just accepting what an algorithm tells you either is good or that you're most likely to enjoy, which is just so gross because it's anti-culture, you know, and music is supposed to be a reflection of culture in some way. But especially after reading your book, the ultimate effect on things is really the full and complete decontextualization of music. If reviews serve any purpose, whether it's a positive review or if it's negative, at the very least it should contextualize the sound and the era and the content, the musical paradigm that a certain record exists in, or serves, or is in celebration of in some way. And just like you explain and illustrate in the book and in our conversation here, of course, when you give people all of this music and these playlists with so much ease, of course, when you don't make fans work at all to get a hold of any of it, they do little research into all of it when they happen to enjoy something, maybe passively, that they hear playing in the background. Which is why a lot of these playlists have millions and millions and millions of streams, but nobody actually digs deeper into any of the songs after the fact. Be like, 'Oh, this actually grabbed my attention. Let me look into this.' It's just so rare, as you illustrate, that that actually happens. The playlists don't actually create much engagement in that respect. It sort of reminds me of like, TikTok a little bit with because having had some pretty viral material and content on TikTok before. In the past, I was kind of surprised to find that unique to TikTok, sort of different than any other platform I've ever been on, it seems like you can get intense, intense, insane virality on there that doesn't actually translate into any greater attention to anything else that you do. And I was sort of shocked to find that musicians are experiencing the exact same thing, but on the Spotify platform, and arguably for much longer than anybody's been dealing with that sort of thing on TikTok. It seems like these platforms are unhappy with the fact that they're creating a bunch of influential artists and individuals who could potentially take their fan base and go somewhere else at some point or revolt against them in some way down the road if they're not happy with the way that they're being treated on the platform. And instead, these platforms are finding ways to separate the audience from the creator and make it so that you're only seeing them or only getting any mode of communication when you're doing something viral or you're doing something that scales, or you're doing something that fits into a playlist, or you're doing something that's going to get you a whole ton of streams. Outside of that, we're going to make sure that we do everything that we can to prevent you from having any access to these people, which, again, feels like we're in that old media mode again. The whole point of the Internet and social media and these platforms in the first place was like, 'Yeah, you're going to be able to communicate and organize and get mixed up together more if you so want to.' And it seems like these days, the purpose that they're serving more and more and more is to prevent more communication, more direct communication from happening between audience and audience, artist and audience, creator and audience, creator and creator. And again, I feel like discourse around all of this stuff, be it either a review or an article or even somebody who's running a music Twitter account or whatever should be to provide context for this stuff and actually show that there's human effort and passion behind these things. It's not just all some algorithmic soup. Unfortunately, all of this stuff is being ushered in in a way to where there's not as much distrust of these companies as there should be. And maybe it goes back to that era of Spotify being brought in as this antithesis to the normal way of doing things. And, 'Oh, yeah, they're cool because they came out of this whole piracy culture.' But now I feel like people need to start distrusting Spotify in the same way that they distrust health insurance companies or oil companies. Even your average person looks at an oil company and they're like, 'That's corrupt, that's bad. I don't like oil companies.' But they look at Spotify, which is also a very wealthy company connected to other billion-dollar companies, part of one of the biggest industries, entertainment industries on the planet, but people are just like, 'Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool.' They think nothing of getting music recommendations from Spotify, but they'll look at somebody like me or somebody else who does something similar to what I do and be like, 'Oh, yeah, I'm not going to admit that I got a music recommendation from Anthony Fantano. That's fucking lame. But I'm going to let Spotify's algorithms turn me on to some fucking AI music. That's cool. That's how I know I have taste.' So I don't know. Again, I feel like reviews at the end of the day – and I've been ranting – should provide information and context, and actually speak to the world or the background that the music is coming from, rather than just giving people music and art with no context, no greater understanding of what it's supposed to mean outside of what it looks like to someone in a playlist.

Liz: Yeah. I mean, I feel like in this environment there's this sort of idea that has been normalized, which is just to just trust the data. But actually, no, we should not trust the data and we should actively reject that whole idea. It kind of in some ways, that is the point of criticism, and it provides this opportunity to reflect on what the meaning and point of criticism is, which is asking questions, not taking things at face value. Actively paying attention to your own lived experience of a piece of music and trying to provide the most honest of an answer or perspective on it as possible, or context around it as possible, regardless of whether or not it's something that is moving the needle.

Anthony: Can you show me the book again?

Liz: Oh, yes. Yes. Here's the book.

Anthony: Yes. Liz Pelly's new book, Mood Machine. Buy it, read it. Get a hold of it.

Liz: Thank you so much.

Anthony: No. No problem. Thank you so much for taking the time. You guys need to get a hold of this book. It's an in-depth educational experience on Spotify and the streaming industry. Go to lizpelly.info, and you can find information on getting a hold of the book there. Thank you very much for coming on Liz.

Liz: Thanks for having me.