Liz Pelly, my identical twin sister, is seven minutes older than me. We've both been writing about music since we were teenagers, so I've had a front row seat to her emergence as a paradigm-shifting critic of the streaming economy. I’ve watched her make principled decisions around music and her work with remarkable consistency, from our very first jointly authored cut-and-paste zine when we were in elementary school, to our investigative music reporting for our high school newspaper, and then onto our careers as journalists.

Her debut book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, with its unflinching inquiry into the origins and consequences of the streaming industry, is no exception. Drawing on over 100 interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine pulls back the curtain on today’s highly consolidated record business and its impacts on artists and listeners.

At the time of this conversation, in March, Liz had done 90 interviews about Mood Machine. I was happy to be the 91st.

At your book launch back in January, Max Alper asked you about your roots as a person for whom music has always had incredible social value, in addition to artistic value. I felt like you dodged his question so I want to re-ask it. Can you talk a little about your experience as a participant in music, rather than a critic?

Thanks. I really dislike talking about myself, but have agreed to make an exception for you, which will be interesting.

I think I'm a testament to how one conversation with one person can change the trajectory of your life. I have a memory from seventh grade, where at the lunch table our friend Lauren said, "Oh, you like music? Do you have Napster on your computer? You should go home and download music by The Ataris and Bright Eyes." And I went home and did that. Lauren ended up bringing us to a show in someone's garage not long after, which, as a 12-year-old, completely terrified me.

That moment definitely sticks out in my memory as an early introduction to local and underground shows. It launched a few years of our lives that revolved around pop-punk, emo, and hardcore scenes, meeting people on MySpace and LiveJournal who were interested in music. I didn’t choose for music to embed itself into my life and become the social fabric of how I knew all of my friends. It was just more interesting.

I do think there's something specific to understanding yourself as a participant in music, rather than someone who is listening and observing from the outside. When you're a participant, you have a seat at the table, you have a sense of agency. You also meet a lot of musicians. It doesn't surprise me that someone with such a rigorous critique of Spotify has also been participating in music since they were 13 years old.

I like telling that story as my key into a whole larger world of music, but it wasn't really until getting involved in college radio and booking house shows that I really started to get a sense of what punk is, and what DIY culture is.

I think participation in DIY and independent music gives you a certain sense of power analysis about the culture industry, and it really pushed me to invest in this mode of thinking about collective culture. But the book is also journalistic, and I drew on academic works around the political economy of digital music media, too.

There's this sentence in the introduction where you state very lucidly: "I've long been confounded by the expectation that we simply accept the dealings of the powerful as unexplainable." That sentence always stands out to me because I hear you so strongly in it—the totality of experience of a person who, from the time she was a kid, wholeheartedly believed that, and continues to live by her values.

It's an eternal teenager sensibility.

I think it’s worth carrying it as far as you can in life. When you’re a kid and you start to see how big the world is, it’s exciting and also infuriating. When we were teenagers, Liz instigated a crusade against Walmart at our high school. When Walmart arrived at the mall in our town on Long Island, Liz organized a protest where we distributed pamphlets encouraging people to boycott, with information about sweatshop labor. This was in 2006. And to be clear, there were maybe five of us participating in this protest, but it’s still such a powerful memory for me.

At the beginning of Mood Machine, you write about these charged anti-globalization protests happening in Gothenburg in 2001, and how they anticipated pro-piracy groups taking root in Sweden. Activist groups that supported piracy were asking questions about free music, and whether culture should be a public good. You write about how the normalization of piracy in Sweden paved the way for a company like Spotify to take root, because the music industry had basically given up on the idea that it could make money there. Is there a connection for you between your teenage crusade against Walmart and your criticisms of Spotify?

Definitely the seeds of hating corporations are all right there. As a teenager, I came across this book called United Students Against Sweatshops that had been put out by Verso, and it made a really big impact on me. It’s interesting to think about how a teenager in suburbia would be learning about this anti-corporate perspective, as a ripple effect of the anti-globalization protests in the late ’90s, early 2000s.

In the first chapter of my book, I talk about a group in Sweden in the mid-2000s called Piratbyrån, which consisted of organizers, hackers, ravers, and punks, some of whom had been involved in the anti-globalization protests in Stockholm at the beginning of the 2000s. At that point, the whole battle over Napster had already played out. Piratbyrån was created as a response to a Hollywood-aligned lobbying group in Stockholm called Anti-Piratbyrån, the Anti-Pirate Bureau.

It was a moment of questioning the corporate capture and consolidation of cultural industries, and people were challenging the effectiveness of copyright. At the time there were really some interesting arguments being made about music as a public good, but there weren’t strong enough labor protections for musicians to carry out the logic of that thinking. It allowed for piracy culture to be co-opted—Olof Dreijer talks about the rise of streaming as a gentrification of file-sharing—and maybe it speaks to the philosophy’s weaknesses that Spotify was able to emerge.

When we were teenagers, we had this very simple and intuitive sense of right and wrong, and Walmart fit directly into the “bad” bucket. Obviously you can't really make a clean metaphor, but Spotify is similarly profit-minded in how it exploits musicians, brings low-cost stock music to the platform, and mitigates the experience of listening for people.

In some of my early interviews around the book, I caught myself saying things like, "Obviously it's great that people have access to music. I'm not against free music, but when things are made free, there can be high costs that come with them." And I remembered that, funnily enough, that's literally the subtitle of a book about Walmart form 2005: Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices.

The first excerpt of Mood Machine, published by Harper’s in December, was a chapter on ghost artists. They’re popularly known as fake artists, but you make a distinction in the book where you refer to them as ghost artists instead.

People started using the phrase “fake artists” around 2016, 2017. But in the years I spent writing the book, a bigger conversation about generative AI music started to take hold. I needed to clarify that these tracks are not, for the most part, made using generative AI. They are musicians hired to make these tracks under unfavorable conditions, and that phenomenon was setting the stage for AI to take over in a concerning way.

When that excerpt came out, the music critic Ted Gioia made a post in his newsletter talking about how impressed he was by your reporting, particularly because as a journalist himself, he’d had his own pitches rejected by mainstream media outlets who didn't see the value in investigative journalism on streaming. He pointed out that it took an independent journalist such as yourself, to bring this story to light. Why do you think mainstream music media has tended to disregard streaming?

I don't know if it's been disregarded entirely. Certainly there's been no shortage of important coverage on streaming in music business trade publications and stuff. But what sorts of stories are being told? What Ted Gioia wrote in his newsletter resonated with me. I thought this would be an important story, but I knew that if I tried to pitch it to a mainstream publication, I wouldn’t be able to tell it in the way that I wanted to. The space typically afforded to these topics tends to be a hot take, or a 1200 word piece. There needs to be some clear news hook.

I was just at a talk at Brooklyn Public Library where the labor journalist, Hamilton Nolan, was talking about the difference between business stories and labor stories. He articulated labor journalism as business reporting told from the perspective of workers.

The music business should talk to musicians more often. I guess in some ways that's advocating for a more pro-labor perspective on music business journalism. In this book, there's as many musicians interviewed as people who work in the music business. I wanted to talk to the people who actually do the work that makes the whole scheme possible.

To some extent, I think the mainstream music business and media has shied away from this conversation over the years because it would require them to interrogate themselves and engage a political perspective about corporate consolidation. Maybe there's some reluctance to do that kind of grappling or self-reflection.

From my perspective as a music journalist, it's so hard to get a feature assigned anywhere if it’s not about a famous musician, because publications are so concerned with traffic.

Well, journalism is in crisis. This book exists because there wasn’t another way for me to conduct a seriously sourced cultural investigation into the state of music media and music technology. In some ways, my preference would be to just have a staff job at an alternative newsroom or something, but where are those?

The first time I read Mood Machine was in January 2024. We went upstate on a writing and editing retreat, and while we were there, the news broke that Pitchfork had been gutted by Condé Nast. I had worked for and with Pitchfork for the previous 14 years, and about a dozen of my colleagues and friends in the Pitchfork Union were fired.

It felt depressing and also really telling. I’m curious if you have any other thoughts about the relationship between streaming and the crisis of music journalism?

The decimation of journalism over the past two decades, maybe longer at this point, has had so much to do with changes in the advertising business. For better or for worse, journalistic outlets, including music magazines and music publications, largely used to exist because of advertising. And the way that digital advertising has moved in the past 20 years is directly related to the rise of the platform economy. Spotify started as an advertising platform, which I think is really important to remember when thinking about the history of this company and the rise of this model.

The original Spotify business model was about creating a library of content, and I hate the word “content,” but it’s the one they use. At first they weren't even sure if it was going to be for music. According to early employees, they'd considered video, audiobooks, and other products. They were looking for a traffic source for advertising, and music was what they landed on for a multitude of reasons. This company was started by people with backgrounds in ad tech.

So in some ways, both the rise of streaming and the decimation of journalism have been completely tied to the shifts of the digital advertising market. In seeing how journalists are trying to respond, improvise, and create new alternatives, it's obvious that they were always in a vulnerable position. Advertising never made sense as the primary source of funding for music or media.

It's horrible that there are so many people out of work, but [it feels important] that media companies are considering cooperative alternatives, nonprofit newsrooms, and membership models, and asking these big questions about the role of public subsidy in the future of journalism. It's like yeah, you wouldn't solve the problems created by a VC-funded ad tech platform by creating a new VC-funded ad tech platform that's slightly less horrible. It requires really looking at the roots of the problems and the ways we relate to culture, and advocating for and supporting people who are having these more robust conversations about ownership.

Do you think that the mechanisms of streaming are intentionally obfuscated in order to keep artists in the dark?

Yeah, definitely. Actually, I have a really vivid memory of talking about that with you, and you playing me the Laurie Anderson song, “Only an Expert.” That song captures a large part of why these companies invest in complicated systems, so that artists will have to defer to "experts" to understand them. Part of the process of demystification is putting forth this idea that it's not too complicated. We can have a greater sense of media literacy when it comes to audio culture, and actually try to wrap our heads around these things.

I also think it’s important to not underestimate readers—as Taja Cheek of L’Rain shares in the book, the music business tends to treat listeners like they're dumb. I think that applies to books too. I actually think people want to read about these tools that have become a normalized part of everyday life.

Yes totally. When you were trying to sell this book, it was rejected by one publisher who said it was too depressing, and on the same day it was rejected by a publisher who said it was too hopeful. And it's like, why can't it be both? Why can't it be dark and also hopeful at the same time? That's reality.

Since Mood Machine came out in the beginning of January, I've gotten to watch you read in New York, Baltimore, DC and now Barcelona, Lisbon, and London. Some of these events have really felt utopian to me. At the end of the book, you suggest that a solution to beginning to confront streaming is to foster conversations within your communities about how to revalue music collectively. A lot of the events I've been to have enacted that, and I think that's really powerful. I’ve looked around in those rooms and felt hopeful to see people converging who actually care about the intersection of art and politics.

The people who wanted the book to tell them which button to press in order to be ethical consumers found it to be depressing. But those who know that imagining healthier cultural ecosystems comes from active participation were the ones who found it to be hopeful, which is interesting.

Can you talk a little bit about what you've learned since the book came out?

That's been the best part of it. As one person, you can do all the interviews in the world, but you're never going to be able to fully have the answers for people. There have been some unsatisfying moments when people want a neat answer for, "Well, what's the solution?" But the cool thing about events has been that they open up this space for more people to chime in with ideas.

Something I try to really drive home in the book is that we don't need technical solutions to these problems. We need to rethink the social and political alternatives to these systems. There are so many risks to Spotify being our archive, but what does it look like to be a responsible steward of music?

You ask if a library can be a streaming service, a question that originated in a piece you wrote for the Pioneer Works Broadcast. When I was 18 and I first moved to New York City, I went to Fordham for a year and lived next door to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and took out CDs all the time. Some think the idea of a library streaming service is too idealistic, but people have been getting music from libraries for decades. A library-based service might not fully “solve” the streaming dilemma, but I think it would help foster intentional listening, which is part of the puzzle.

I started writing about library streaming in 2021, and it's something I remain really excited about. After that Broadcast piece came out, I heard so many stories from other people in music about how important going to get a stack of CDs at the public library was to them as a teenager. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to end the book with the public library as a possible alternative or “solution” for digital music access.

Jenn Pelly and Liz Pelly, 2005.Photo: Jenn Pelly

Your book came out the first week of January, and we saw all this imagery of the president flanked by these tech oligarchs. In late January, Spotify hosted a Trump inauguration brunch, and made a $150,000 donation to the ceremony. What do you think that says about the type of power Spotify is angling for? How does it contextualize the stakes of everything we're talking about?

On one hand it is super disturbing to see a company like Spotify make this big donation to the Trump inauguration fund and host a brunch with Joe Rogan and other right-wing podcasters. It shows what they're willing to do to continue attempting to have proximity to political power.

It’s probably equally disturbing to many musicians and people in music to remember that [Spotify CEO] Daniel Ek has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into a military AI company called Helsing. He sits on the board of Helsing, and has publicly advocated for expanding government contracts into AI militarism over the years. [Note: In June, Ek led a $693.6 million investment in Helsing and became chairman.]

I’m sure that the vast majority of working musicians don't want the money extracted from their music to be used for the purposes of investing in military AI technology. War Profiteers Out of Music should also include Daniel Ek, is what I'm saying.

Mood Machine has completely changed the way I think about music, listen to music, buy music. It's made me want to re-engage with my music communities in different ways. The writing is very matter of fact, which is intentional because you're taking these gigantic questions and topics and making them accessible. I think it is radical to demystify corruption in music in the way you have.

It's a tricky balance. I wanted to distill complicated ideas into a book that people would actually read without underestimating the reader’s ability to grapple with them.

It helps that music industry executives and Spotify advertising people are often accidentally pretty funny. Daniel Ek once said, “we're punks.” That's hilarious. ♦