Spotify helps the business, not the artists: Discord in the land of milk and honey of music

Spotify is a musical paradise. Thanks to the Swedish online service, which founder Daniel Ek himself touted as a "heavenly jukebox", you can listen to almost everything that has ever been recorded and released, anytime and anywhere.

When Spotify was launched in 2008, the company also made a promise to the world. It wanted to save the music scene. At the turn of the century, online platforms such as Napster had made it possible to download albums and songs for free and illegally via file sharing. Musicians and record companies were suddenly deprived of their wages.

In her extensively documented book "Mood Machine," American journalist Liz Pelly traces Spotify's path. She shows how the online service adopted the pirate principle of file sharing itself in order to develop a legal business model from it.

Spotify owes its success to a technical innovation. The lengthy downloading process has been replaced by streaming, where the music starts immediately with a click. And when the platform reached an agreement with the major labels in 2009, customers were able to be offered a virtually limitless range of music. Those who do not have too high expectations of sound quality are well served.

Meanwhile, platforms like Spotify are ensuring that artists are earning something from their work again - although most of them are only earning a small amount. Spotify distributes the revenue according to the percentage of individual titles in the total streaming volume. Part of it goes to collecting societies, another part goes to the labels, which ultimately pay the artists a fee.

The major labels share the majority of the pie. The over-presence of their international stars has meant that only crumbs are left for everyone else. Music pieces that are clicked on less than a thousand times a year go empty-handed anyway.

According to Liz Pelly, the labels are partly responsible for the musicians' often low incomes. Nevertheless, she does not hold back in her criticism of Spotify. The fee system is non-transparent and reduced entirely to commercial categories. In addition, the musicians are sometimes confronted with downright extortionate business practices.

The so-called "Discovery Mode" is an example: individual songs are to be given more presence on the platform if the musicians waive part of their royalties. Spotify promises to invest the amount saved from the fee in promotion. How exactly this works, however, remains a mystery. No one is forced to use "Discovery Mode". But as soon as some competitors decide to do so, the others have to go along with it in order not to expose themselves to an incalculable competitive disadvantage.

Spotify is problematic not only in terms of its business practices. The same applies to the online service: the medium is the message. Its structure has far-reaching effects on music culture.

You can imagine Spotify as a gigantic music library - a paradise for lovers who know exactly what they want to hear. For everyone else, however, the oversupply is too much to handle. The fact that the agony of choice can have a paralyzing effect on consumers is not what the inventor intended. Before founding Spotify, Daniel Ek did not make a name for himself as a music specialist, but as an expert in search engines and advertising. The musical traffic on Spotify was also intended to be used to acquire advertising.

He then discovered that the majority of Spotify customers are people who just want to be bombarded with music. These passive, uninterested listeners used to be served by top 40 radio programs. Today, they determine the "main stream" to a certain extent.

Spotify is therefore using playlists to boost consumption among passive listeners. Pleasant song menus such as "Today's Top Hits", "Songs to sing in the shower" or "Your favorite Coffeehouse" are intended to accompany consumers during office work, fitness training or relaxation phases. Therapeutic repertoires are proving particularly successful: exhausted contemporaries are clicking en masse on playlists such as "Relax and unwind" or "Mood Booster". There are even sleep playlists, i.e. soundscapes with a sedative effect.

Spotify has stylized its music service as a meritocracy based solely on customer preferences; the streaming numbers seem to be directly related to the quality of the music. But Liz Pelly finds it easy to put this idealization into perspective. In fact, it is precisely the playlist culture that reveals the extent to which Spotify influences consumption. It is the company's own curators who select the songs for individual playlists - often in secret agreement with the major managers.

However, a place on a relevant playlist can be crucial for the success of a song and thus for a musician's income. Artists therefore have to adapt to Spotify's trends and aesthetic clichés. Pop has always been about commerce. But Spotify increases the pressure to forego artistic peculiarities in favor of demand.

This can affect the details of their work. Since the beginnings of Spotify, it has been observed that pop songs often forego formal features in order to get to the point or the chorus as quickly as possible. Customers have to stay tuned for at least thirty seconds in one go for the stream to be recorded numerically. Meanwhile, the influence of Tiktok has further simplified song structures. Similar to Tiktok video snippets, song snippets are intended to stimulate the senses instantly.

There are certain "vibes" and "moods" on Spotify that are particularly popular. This applies, for example, to ballad-like songs with melancholic female voices; Billie Eilish and Lana del Rey were evidently the style-defining artists for the genre. Countless similar songs are now strung together on corresponding playlists. The individual singers are increasingly degraded to anonymous and interchangeable subjects. In this context, Liz Pelly mentions the "Lofi Girl" playlist: It led to a misunderstanding, with some fans believing that Lofi Girl was the name of a pop star.

The devaluation of individual artists made it easy for Spotify to eventually enrich the playlists with generic products. There are special production companies that provide the right content (Perfect Fit Content - PFC for short) for individual playlists. However, the musical ready-made goods appear on Spotify under fictitious artist names. In 2022, the Swedish daily newspaper "Dagens Nyheter" is said to have identified a group of twenty songwriters who were behind around five hundred so-called ghost artists.

Ghost artists have the advantage that their products are cheaper than hits from well-known artists. But of course the content becomes even cheaper when AI populates the playlists. The importance of AI for Spotify playlists is therefore likely to grow in the future.

In the last few years, playlist culture has evolved. While they were previously compiled by Spotify curators, they are now increasingly generated algorithmically. Algorithms are designed to adapt repertoires to the personal needs of individual customers. Based on ongoing listening behavior, they can complement personal preferences with similar sounds, songs and playlists.

The principle of personalization boils down to Spotify knowing a customer's taste better than they do themselves. This way, they no longer have to choose. With a single click, they can be provided with pleasant or even healing sounds throughout the day.

However, the brave new world of music does come with risks. Just like online advertising, which often shows you products you've already bought, Spotify will play the same thing over and over again. And if you get tired of it, you can listen to a sleep playlist to help you fall asleep.

Liz Pelly: Mood Machine. The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria / One Signal Publishers, 2025. 288 pp., Fr. 39.90).