Forum from the Archives: Liz Pelly on Spotify and the ‘Cost of the Perfect Playlist’
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From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Mina Kim. Coming up on Forum, Spotify was originally marketed as a democratic, anti-establishment music streaming platform. But according to journalist Liz Pelley, it has become a system favoring major labels and its own algorithmic playlists, all while underpaying independent artists.

Peli draws on interviews with former Spotify employees, music industry veterans, and artists to pull back the curtain on the music streaming giant in her new book, Mood Machine, The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist. We listen back to our January conversation next on Forum. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

As music has become increasingly, quote, playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed, in other words, the Spotify model, how has it affected artists as well as listeners? Spotify has more than 640 million users, including more than 250 million paying subscribers, according to the company's website.

But the convenience of having all the world's music at our fingertips for free with ads or cheaper than an album has a cost, says writer Liz Pelley. And in her new book, she lays them out. It's called Mood Machine, the rise of Spotify and the costs of the perfect playlist. Do you use Spotify and wonder how it operates or determines playlists? Liz Pelley joins me now. Liz, welcome to Forum.

Hi, Mina. Thank you so much for having me. Glad to have you. So I shared these user numbers, but how would you characterize Spotify's market dominance?

Well, I think that one of the reasons why I was interested in writing this book and writing a book specifically about Spotify is because it is simply such a large platform and where so many people go every day to listen to music. You know, streaming has become a dominant way that the vast majority of people listen to recorded music. And within the streaming marketplace, Spotify for a long time has not just been

the streaming service with the largest number of users, but in some ways has sort of helped to shape new incentives across the music business. So, you know, a lot of

Things that Spotify introduces years later, you'll see other streaming services introduce. And I think that the influence that it has had on both other streaming services and musicians and labels has been felt by, you know, not just listeners, but also a lot of musicians and independent labels, too. Yeah. How did it start out? What are Spotify's origins?

It's super interesting. So Spotify was founded in Stockholm in 2006 by two men, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzen, whose backgrounds were in the advertising industry. And it was a moment where, you know,

At the time that Spotify was founded, the music business had at that point spent years trying to recover from the impact of file sharing and music piracy on recorded music sales. So at that point, you know, different...

Streaming services had been created before. Spotify wasn't the first streaming service. And, you know, major labels had tried to launch their own streaming services. There was this streaming service called Rhapsody that had already arrived, but the streaming model hadn't really taken hold yet.

And in Sweden, you had Spotify, which was not just trying to start a subscription streaming service, but they put forth this model that was kind of new, which was the free tier. And at that point, the music business was really opposed to anything that had the word free in it because they saw subscription as the sort of way that they were going to recover from the

the way in which the concept of free music had really been impacting the music business for years at that point. In Sweden, music piracy was significantly more rampant than other parts of the world. And it wasn't only...

that piracy was really popular, but it also took on a political dimension in ways that were quite different from the life of piracy in other places around the world. There was even in Sweden something called the Pirate Party, which is a political party whose agenda involved advancing the concept of music piracy. And there's more debate about, well, maybe piracy isn't so bad for culture. Maybe it's good that people have universal access to music.

So the music business had started thinking about Sweden as a lost market. You know, no one is ever going to buy music there again. So there was a willingness to take a chance on something like, you know, a platform like Spotify with a free tier supported by advertising and

In Sweden, more than the music business would have been willing to try something like that in other places around the world. Yeah, so it takes off and comes to the US in 2011. How did Spotify pitch itself when it got here?

There were a few different things that I think shaped the way in which the company came to the United States. I mean, it was a lot harder for them to launch in the United States than in other parts of the world. But one thing that I think is of note is that in the U.S., there was more competition. There were other, not only other streaming services, but the iTunes model had taken hold in the United States more than it had in a place like Sweden. You know, the iTunes model

record store, iTunes MP3 store where people are buying MP3s. So one of the ways in which the company kind of reinvented itself after launching in the United States was that it was part of the company's shift towards becoming more of a curated service. You know, they had to kind of in the United States get past the early adopters, the music enthusiasts,

In the early years, the experience of not just Spotify, but other streaming services too, they were more like search bars. You would have to know what you were looking for when you opened these apps, what album you're going to search for, what artists you wanted to search for. And as these platforms, as Spotify, tried to grow beyond just, you know, the...

super fans and to reach a more mainstream audience, they started introducing things like playlist curation and algorithmic music recommendation, algorithmic music recommendation, and specifically things like mood playlists. So, and that's in part why it had to get so tied in with music.

major music labels, right? I just want to back up for a second. I do remember talking about how it was going to like totally level the playing field for music fans, for listeners, for artists, and it would do this based on data and so on. But that really isn't what happened, right? Yeah. So in order for

The streaming model as we know it today to exist in order for, you know, not just Spotify, but any streaming service that claims to offer, you know, all the music in the world, any music you could possibly think of. In order for that model to function, the participation of the three major record labels is necessary because the three major record labels, Sony, Universal and Warner, say that they're going to be able to do it.

sit on the copyrights that they own so much of what we think of when we think of the history of popular recorded music. So in order to launch in 2008, which is when Spotify first launched in some parts of Europe, and then again, when they launched in the United States in 2011, it requires streaming services signing deals with the labels that give them

the ability to, you know, include their content in their app, in their product. So because the major labels are so powerful within the music business, it gives them this really outsized negotiating power and the ability to, you know,

have contracts that give them certain privileges and perks that smaller independent record labels or DIY musicians going through, you know, self-serve distribution systems don't have access to. So in the early days, that meant that the major labels got things like advances in

really big advances, equity in the company, certain free advertising on the platform. And also just because these are such big companies and so influential in the music business, there's just a different type of relationship there between the major labels and streaming services when it comes to things like pitching songs for playlist curation and the relationship that exists there between labels

major labels and streaming curators. So that was one of the things when I first started writing about Spotify, the first article I read about Spotify came out in 2017. That was one of the first things that really interested me was that relationship between the major labels and the streaming services, specifically Spotify, because at the time in the mid 2010s, which is, you know, I

when I started writing about this, the streaming model was really being pitched to the independent music world as something that was going to, quote unquote, level the playing field, democratize music, and that, you know, the gatekeeper power of the major record labels and commercial radio stations was going to be diminished.

But a lot of independent labels and independent artists, you know, for years, even in the mid 2010s, hadn't necessarily seen this playing out. And over the years, what we've seen is these services emerging as new types of gatekeepers. Yeah.

Yeah, so the idea that you were going to be able to, you know, that good music, basically, and if you put out good music, and it was something that listeners enjoy, that you would benefit, right? But what you're describing with regard to the...

basically the relationships that I have with major labels, that's going to undermine that immediately. And you also describe that by contrast to these really, you know, lucrative contracts for labels, independent artists have ended up with minuscule payments and what you've called new types of pay to play. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, so, you know, there are all sorts of things that I think influence whether or not a track or an artist is able to gain popularity in the streaming ecosystem. So many things that shape music that streams well, whether it be specific types of deals that are in place, various like commercial considerations, or simply, you know, a system that repeatedly rewards the same types of music.

One thing that I talk about in trying to unpack, when you look at a streaming app and you're being recommended a song, why are you being recommended this song? And what are the different factors that have gone into shaping this recommendation? Or what are the various circumstances that have led to this track being shown to you? And there are so many different factors.

to unpack. But one thing in particular that I think is really interesting is all of these commercial deals that shape streaming recommendations that listeners don't know about. And one of those is this, you know,

not necessarily payola, but what some call a payola-like practice, this program called Discovery Mode, where artists and independent record labels are given the quote-unquote opportunity to accept a lower royalty rate in exchange for algorithmic promotion on things like the Daily Mix, Autoplay, or Radio on Spotify. And, you know, these aren't

in the legal definition of the term, which has a really specific meaning

legal definition within the context of commercial radio, but they are commercial relationships that your average listener doesn't know about that are affecting what you are exposed to on these platforms. Yeah, we're getting reactions from listeners. Aiden writes, "I love Spotify. As a lawyer, I often tell people to take Spotify's advice and AI music recommendations." Jason on Instagram writes, "I strongly believe it is worse

Then it seems. We'll learn more from Liz Pelly after the break. Stay with us, listeners. You are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Change is always happening. It's part of life. Here at Xfinity, we want to do our part to keep one thing the same with a five-year price guarantee on our internet.

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about Spotify this hour. The music streaming giant was originally marketed as an anti-establishment platform, a democratic platform, but has evolved to favor major labels and its own algorithmic playlists, all at a cost to listeners and artists, according to Liz Pelley, a writer and contributing editor to The Baffler. Her new book is Mood Machine, The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.

And you, our listeners, are invited to join the conversation. Do you use Spotify? What questions do you have about how it operates? Do you wonder how playlists are being determined? Are you a musician or artist who has their music on Spotify? What are your thoughts on being part of the streaming service?

And if you stream music, have you noticed your listening habits changing, especially if you grew up in the vinyl cassette or CD era? The email address is forum at kqed.org. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky Threads, a KQED forum, among other social channels. You can call us 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

And a listener on Discord writes, seems to me that online streaming services with interactive engagement by both the supplier and the consumer should be able to justify the distribution of revenues merely by supporting statistics. But then that begs the question, how transparent is Spotify with their wealth distribution decisions and revenue?

the statistics involved. That's part of what we are unpacking with Liz Pelly. You know, Liz, I do want to ask you about just what role some of the things that you described with regard to relationships with major players and the impacts on artists and the pay-to-play industry

types of deals that they try to strike with artists, what it's had with regard to what's directed to listeners. So I'm curious, like, what did Spotify promise to provide to listeners? You said it was almost like a search bar where initially you could put in, you know, the artist or album that you were looking for. But then they move toward things like mood, music and curated. Why? Was that because of things they were discovering initially in this sort of like search bar model?

So I have this chapter in my book. It's the third chapter of the book, and it's called Selling Leanback Listening. And what I tried to do in that chapter of the book was really trace this part of Spotify's history. You know, why did this company shift from, like you mentioned, being a place where you could just go and search for supposedly any song in the world? I always like to point out that people who are really interested

engaged with music will tell you that these platforms don't actually have every song in the world, but most of what you could think of. And how did it come to be that instead what you see when you open these apps is these curated playlists and algorithmic and AI-driven discovery tools? And

there was this really interesting moment that I learned about through my reporting. I interviewed a lot of people who worked in the music business at the time. It was around

2013 the end of 2012 early 2013 when spotify made this shift towards more curation more mood playlists you know i actually went back and used the internet archive to look at the front page of spotify.com and was able to pinpoint like this exact moment when the company really started to shift its branding from phrases like instant simple free um to you know these kind of uh

almost looking more like a Pinterest board and having images that really conveyed these different moods and moments. And it was less about explaining Spotify to the user and more about getting the user to imagine themselves in all of these different moods and moments throughout their day. And yeah, you know, it was this like

distinct period at the end of 2012 into 2013 when the shift happened. And according to one of the sources that I interviewed, there's actually a moment where in its efforts to bring in new subscribers and to grow its user base, Spotify had commissioned a research agency to do research and to have

Spotify users keep listening diaries and to try to unpack, you know, how are people actually using this app? And one of the things that they discovered was that maybe where previously they had thought of what they were providing more as sort of like, you know, a fully stocked iTunes library, but with everything being streamed over the internet. Instead, what they found is that people were thinking of

it more like Pandora or they were thinking about it more like, you know, there were other services at the time that acted as these sort of concierge type services where they would give you the perfect playlist at the perfect moment. Another one at the time was Songs. You know, they were sort of like an app for mood playlists. So this sort of research on their own user base was part of

shaping the direction of the company at the time. In 2013, they bought this startup, this Swedish startup called Tunago that was...

referred to itself as an app for ready-made playlists. And I sort of chart the history, a little bit of the history of this company and the moment when Spotify started incorporating their playlists into its recommendation system. And the following year, they bought this other startup called the Echo Nest that was a kind of big data for music startup. And that powered their continuing to get into the

space of algorithmic recommendation and personalized recommendations. So it seems like, you know, all of this, like other platforms, was driven by the desire to grow the user base and not just grow the user base, but it was really also sort of like elsewhere in the platform economy driven by wanting to boost user engagement, keep people on the platforms longer, you know, think about, you

hooking people in new ways. Yeah, they really start pushing this on us for all of those reasons. And you say Spotify benefits when we stream content that's cheaper for them to provide. So how did they use all this information to make it cheaper for them to provide what they saw listeners sort of gravitating to? So in addition to sort of charting this evolution of the industry and

embrace and celebration of what is now for a while referred to as the lean back listener or the passive listener. I also talk about the impact that that had on, you know, listeners and music. So I

In this period of time when, you know, one of the former employees that I interviewed referred to this very specific period of time in the history of Spotify, 2016 to 2019, roughly as the quote unquote peak playlist era. This was an era in Spotify's history where the editor curated playlists really started to have a lot of weight in the music business. And so I think that's a really important period of time.

And these playlists started to be seen as really important to musicians in terms of how they were going to connect with audiences on streaming services. So there were, you know, there were ramifications for this championing of playlists as this sort of key way in not just how they grew their audience, but, you know, streaming services became really invested in the business of

shaping user behavior around their playlists, around their own discovery products, because it put them in greater positions of control and influence if they could shape user behavior around this visual real estate that they owned and had control over. So these playlists during this period of time started to become really influential for listeners, but also for musicians. And

you know, I think there are always sort of risks to that, right? Like if a user has a daily relationship with a streaming service that is based around, for example, uh,

Yeah.

The example I've always given is that, you know, if a user has a relationship with the children or playlist, then if one of the artists on that playlist decides to protest Spotify over its poor royalty payments, you know, for Spotify, that's okay, because they can just replace them with someone else, you know, a different song. And, yeah.

There have been lots of consequences of this, but one of the things that I discuss is over the years, the ways in which this outsized influence of the streamers over their own curation, the behavioral, the types of listening behaviors that they've helped shape puts them in the position to be able to, yes, you know, um,

Fill these playlists with music that is cheaper for them to license. So there's two parts of the book that really investigate this. One is the discovery mode program that we were talking about earlier. But another is this practice that started to emerge also in this sort of.

to 2019 era where the Spotify playlist was becoming really influential and it was that the streaming services Spotify in particular started to

look at their lean back playlists, their passive listening playlists, things maybe for meditating or sleeping or focusing and started to fill these playlists with tracks that they could commission at lower royalty rates made by essentially stock musicians. So that's kind of been like a big conversation of the past decade amongst people really tuned into music

streaming discourse and I tried to research this in new ways for the book. Yeah. Can you talk about the phenomenon of ghost artists? Yeah. So like I mentioned, you know, around 2016, there started being whispers of this in the music press. The music business trade publication, Music Business Worldwide first reported on this back in 2016. At this time,

In the music trade press, sometimes on social media, you would hear people talking about how Spotify was reportedly filling its leanback playlists with fake artists. This was the phrase that people used at the time. And Spotify really quickly denied that they were creating their own tracks or creating their own artists to pay lower royalty rates for the music that was filling out these playlists. But they never fully denied the existence of some broader arrangement.

So over the years, you would occasionally see these viral social media posts or Reddit threads about stuff like this, where a person would say, I was listening to this podcast.

study playlist on Spotify and I looked a little bit more closely at it and I realized, hey, wait, all of these tracks are by artists that seem to have potentially generative AI artwork for their user profile, user photos, and there doesn't seem to be any information about these artists anywhere else online and they don't have bios and there's no links and I can't find anything else about these artists. I think these artists might be fake. So, you know,

The conversation had been bubbling for a while. Then in 2022, there was some new reporting that came out of Sweden. Their daily newspaper, DN, did a big investigation where they were able to

access copyright records and prove that there's actually this really small handful of songwriters that were responsible for hundreds of different artists, monikers, hundreds of different tracks that were being put on these really popular playlists like, you know, Deep Focus or Playlist for Sleep, things like that.

So once I started reporting my book, interviewing musicians, former Spotify employees, people who worked in the music business at the time, I was able to piece together some of the other details and pull the veil back a little bit and learned that there's actually a small team within Spotify that's specifically dedicated to looking after these more lean back mood playlists. It's usually instrumental music on these playlists.

and kind of working to make sure that this music from this select group of licensors ends up on these playlists, these production companies, mostly stock music companies or production companies making music for wellness music or in some cases music for spas or things like that. And they're the ones who commission the music from...

composers, artists. And yeah, it was super interesting. It was especially interesting. I was able to talk to a handful of musicians who actually make this music for these production companies. And some of them would tell me things that, you know, they'll crank out, you know, dozens of these songs all at once released under different monikers. And they would say things like,

You know, I just make these songs and submit them and get paid and I don't really know what happens after that. So there really is this kind of whole web of secrecy around this practice, even for some of the musicians who are involved. Wow.

Liz Pelly is pulling back the curtain on how Spotify operates and how it affects what we think we're choosing to listen to and also how it affects musicians and artists. And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation. Jay on Instagram writes, Spotify and other media platforms are pretending to be there for the individual artists. That goes for Tiny Desk Concerts, too, according to Jay. These ideas began as a grassroots empowerment platform, but we are a capitalist society. We need to be the solution by continuing to support our immediate communities and people.

Let me go to caller Michael in West Marin. Hi, Michael, you're on. Hi there, how are you doing? Great, what's on your mind? Well, I'm a musician. I had been studying music for 60 years. I went to Eastman School of Music and I went to Ramona College. And so I put a lot of time into this. And the last album that we produced, it cost us $10,000 and it took about 100 human hours to do. And we're a half hour in this conversation. And finally...

The last comment that was made talked about the musicians and the production, and these are ghost musicians. So the problem with these things, it's all piracy, and music is really the foundation of it. We haven't really talked about that. We're talking about music as a product. The concern I have is I don't know what Spotify pays, but Pandora pays three thousandths of a cent per play. That means if you have a thousand plays, you get three cents.

And most of the other platforms are equivalent to that. There's no way a musician, I mean, Spotify or Pandora talks about it as exposure. Well, I mean, what kind of exposure is that? A lot of people are talking about making or living selling t-shirts and coffee cups. You know, I didn't study music for 60 years to become a t-shirt salesman. Ooh, you're bringing up so many good things, Michael. Thanks so much. So,

A couple things. One is, the listener writes, I prefer the way YouTube music works. Is it any better for artists? There have been others who had brought up Pandora as well as what they used to listen to. I mean, are there alternatives to Spotify that are better to musicians, would you say, Liz, that are, you know, accessible? I think all the points that are being raised are super important. You know, most recently, and this even came out after I finished working on my book, but you'll hear things like,

Daniel Ack, the CEO of Spotify, saying things like,

well, the cost of creating content now is close to zero. And I think that one of the things that has really happened in the streaming era that has been really, really harmful is just, you know, the utter devaluing of music, both on a financial level and also on a social level and cultural level. You know, and I think that as listeners, it's important for us to, and people who care about music, to push back on that, you know,

There is so much labor that goes into creating music. And one of the risks of this model is the way in which streaming services sort of obfuscate and invisibilize all of that labor, whether it be through, you know, the basic suggestion that not only

$10.99 a month is a fair rate to pay for access to all the music in the world. Or even through, you know, you'll hear musicians and artist advocates talk about how on streaming platforms, it's really hard to access the credits on a song. And I think that's another way in which

Yeah.

And one of the issues of the streaming model has been this championing of a one size fits all model for culture. But music is so vast and there's so many different reasons why people make music and listen to music. And when thinking about solutions or ways to actually contribute to the revaluing of music.

I think part of it requires sort of thinking beyond that one size fits all model. So for some people, it might be buying music directly from artists or, you know, buying MP3s, buying physical media, putting money directly into the pockets of artists. But there are certainly other solutions as well. Yeah. And we'll get into those as well after the break. We're talking with Liz Pally. Her new book is Mood Machine, The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. Stay with us.

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You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking this hour with Liz Pelley, a writer, contributing editor to The Baffler. She's written a new book called Mood Machine, The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation today.

With your experiences of Spotify, your questions about how it operates, differences that you have noticed and maybe alternatives that you are trying. The email address is forum at kqed.org. Find us on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, X, other platforms at KQED Forum. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. And let me go to Steve in Oakland. Hi, Steve, you're on. Hi, how you doing? I'm good.

Well, what would you have to say? Yeah.

Yeah, I noticed that when I use Spotify and I want a particular radio station, say like Nine Inch Nails, and it just keeps playing the same stuff over and over. Yes, it gives me a little bit of Nine Inch Nails, but it doesn't give me anything else that's similar to them. It just plays the same thing over and over again. So let's say like I reset it and it goes back to the beginning and start playing the same thing and it's,

And to me, that's not to me. I don't consider that a radio because I'm looking for something different every time. But it's playing the same songs over and over again. So that's why, to me, I prefer even making my own playlist from iTunes or just, I say Pandora does a much better job in their radio station where they actually give you something new or similar to what you're looking for.

And like same thing with their mood. It's the same thing. It plays the same music over and over again. Yeah. Well, Steve, thanks. I mean, I guess in Steve's case, you know, they don't like that. But I guess it sounds almost like Steve is more the exception of the rule if Spotify is looking at its own data to some degree. Yeah.

I think one thing to keep in mind about algorithmic streaming recommendation in the context of the way in which Spotify currently approaches it, which, you know, these are tools that are meant to offer a personalized experience. So they're looking at your listening history and they're recommending you music.

that they think you are likely to want to stream again or that you're likely to, is likely to keep you engaged. So one way to think of it is that streaming services are essentially

invested in keeping you hooked on their platforms, engaged as a listener. Sometimes I and others have positioned streaming personalization algorithms as these sort of like risk management systems. They have you as a subscriber. They don't want to risk losing you as a subscriber. The easiest way to keep you as a subscriber in this way of thinking is to just to serve you stuff that you have already listened to in the past, that you've

that you seem statistically likely to not hit skip on again in the future. So you hear this all the time from people with algorithmic streaming recommendations. It just shows me stuff that I've already listened to. It shows me stuff that I already like. You know, it's so boring. And I think that part of this is because, you know, basically what they're doing is looking at your listening history and then recommending stuff that is, you know, you've already sort of signaled that you that you

are willing to listen to. And I think something to keep in mind, you know, when it comes to personalized streaming recommendation is as a music critic, you know, there are

is such a extreme difference between the role of what critics and curators do and the role of a system that's goal is to provide you the perfect soundtrack at the perfect moment every time and just get you to press play and keep streaming. Some, you know, streaming recommendations are extremely metrics driven, driven, extremely data driven. And the goal is to just keep you streaming. And, you know, that's so different than other contexts within which you'll,

You might be recommended music, like even a local community radio station, the way you might get recommendations from a music writer or a music blogger, or even just like an individual person recommending music to you based on their own tastes and sensibilities. Yeah. I had been wondering how it affects people.

journalists who review and recommend music, this kind of system. Miranda on Blue Sky writes, I would love to hear Liz's thoughts on the post-genre world we are living in, where Spotify pushes aesthetics with nonsensical tag words in lieu of precise musical language. It also waters down the meaning of indie, where casual listeners think it's about a sound, not a label.

I think that those are really good questions. And actually, you know, that whole question, I think, is really related to what I was just talking about, which is that I think this is a moment that sort of asks us to reflect on the type of context that we find meaningful for engaging with and relating to music. You know, so much of the...

push of this idea of genrelessness. It's complicated because on one hand, the role of genre historically has been really limiting and has really put artists and listeners in these unnecessary boxes. And there are so many more interesting things to, interesting ways to think about

the context of music beyond just genre terms that are part of marketing. But on the other hand, you know, thinking about this sort of post-genre, genre-less, vibe-based music recommendation maybe also isn't necessarily the most meaningful way to think about curation either because so much of the work

what drives this kind of like vibe based music recommendation seems to be again, tied up in, you know, pinpointing you as a user and then trying to, you know, based on what you've streamed in the past, serve you music that you seem based on data, you know, willing to engage with in the future. And it's so much more about appealing to, you know,

how you might think of yourself as a listener versus any sort of like musical ideas. So, you know, when we think about framing music, the type of context that would better serve music, you know, I think about things like that maybe would be like more educational, like, you know, it'd be really interesting, I think more interesting to think of music in terms of, you

You know, regional scenes, history, like, you know, there's all these different ways to think about context beyond just genre and vibe. Yeah, I mean, it's really fascinating what you're bringing up. Just, I mean, you've talked about like the flattening also of just our musical tastes and so on through all of this, you know, the different function or maybe we're thinking too much of it as music.

functional as well as being an issue. Well, this listener writes, I remember as a pre-adolescent the excitement of knowing that a new album was coming out. These were the vinyl days and I would listen to that one album in and

Day in and day out as I cultivated my tastes, these days music platforms take that magic away from me. The overwhelming volume and wealth of music seems to follow the laws of supply and demand. There's so much more available at our fingertips, thus the overall value has diminished. Another listener writes, as a listener on YouTube,

Blue Sky, sorry, this listener on Blue Sky.

And another listener, Kathleen, writes, I use Bandcamp because they pay the artists more than any other service because you are actually buying the music. Also, they use fan recommendations that help me find new music. Let me go to Marilyn in Vallejo. Hi, Marilyn. You're on.

Hi. Hey, Nina. Hi. Two quick things. The first is that as an independent musician, can't stand Spotify. It's the disrespect of not compensating or having any kind of model to compensate people, even remotely fairly. It's just disrespectful and I can't stand it. But a couple months ago, a friend turned me on to an online radio station and I want to talk about it really quick.

Game changer. It's NTS Radio. It stands for N as in Nancy, T as in Tom, F as in Sam. It's online. It's an experimental music discovery platform. So you can go on your desktop, or they actually have an app, which is I have it on my phone. And they always have two live channels broadcasting 24-7. They have two live DJs, and they call them resident artists. And they keep an archive of past shows. There's your history. It just...

It's amazing. Their whole thing is people who are music enthusiasts, DJs, people involved in music, and they get to have a show for an hour or two. The most eclectic collection of music. Just listen to it. I can't even do it justice. So for me...

For me, this has been this amazing music discovery tool. There's no algorithm. There's nobody. There's nothing. It's free. If you want to subscribe, you get a couple more benefits. But I just wanted to let folks know. And yes, it stands for nuts to sue. That's it. OK, thanks so much. I appreciate that. And I do want to get into a little more of what you have discovered with regard to, you know,

effective ways of trying to push back on this model. I mean, there's a lot of broader cultural shifts we've been talking about, but I'm wondering if either from listeners or from musicians, figuring out a way to fight back that you think holds promise or potential.

Yeah. And, you know, I love that this person who called in, sorry, I didn't catch your name, that Marilyn brought up NTS, because I do think that in the current digital music landscape, it's been really cool to see the way in which independent radio has kind of, I think, taken on, you know, a really important role, you know, like, like,

Like I mentioned earlier, no one size fits all solutions to any of this, you know, and I do think that it's important to actively keep that rejection of a one size fits all solutionism as part of how we think about revaluing music. Whenever people ask me how I support music or how I listen to music, both sides.

Something else that was mentioned, like buying music directly from artists, building an MP3 library, and listening to independent radio are both really important pieces of the puzzle for me. In my book, though, I also chart

the emergence of a sort of new music labor movement over the past few years of musicians who have been collectively organizing to try to hold streaming services accountable, both through working on legislation around changes to the royalty model. I talk about

different ways in which the FTC might get involved and the importance of sort of like thinking about streaming services and the music business more broadly through an antitrust lens. And I think we can simultaneously do both of these things at the same time, support the efforts of community organizers and musicians that are actively trying to improve conditions when it comes to these really dominant issues.

streaming platforms. And at the same time, you know, if you are someone for whom music is really important and you do consider yourself, you know, someone who cares about directly supporting independent music communities, thinking about ways to plug in and support systems that exist entirely outside of the corporate music industry, whether it's, you know, looking for

ways in which to buy music directly from musicians, listening to community radio, specifically seeking out the voices of music critics and curators whose taste you trust. And really just like, you know, I think part of this is about thinking about music as

and music communities as more of a participant than a consumer. You know, we have to participate in the cultural ecosystems that we want to see thrive. And I think that requires, you know, more active involvement from those of us who want to see things change. The Cisner writes,

This conversation is so gratifying for me. I always felt weird about allowing an app to tell me what to listen to. It seemed cheap and too easy. When I was a teen in the early 2000s, I spent hours on music forums learning about new and old bands from other people. It was a journey of searching that felt like a treasure hunt. I guess this is why I still listen to the same bands I loved in high school and college.

And let me remind listeners, you are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Paul writes, I have music at Bandcamp, but have the same issues with getting exposure. I think these days becoming successful is more dependent on one's marketing than musical skills. What do you think about that, Liz?

That is super interesting. You know, I do, I will say, you know, a lot of the things that we talk about when we talk about the current issues with digital music are kind of, you know, new manifestations of issues that have long existed. I think there's like, you know, for those trying to like maybe break out of some sort of algorithmic filter bubble that might be impacting streaming or even, you know, like the other person said with Bandcamp, I think,

One of the things I write about in my book is the importance of independent record labels. So if there's a musician that you like that's on an independent label, looking up their label, seeing what else that label has released, subscribing to newsletters of musicians that you like, subscribing to newsletters of independent record labels that put out music that you like can be one way of sort of breaking out of that.

Also, looking for concert listings in your town and seeing what bands are coming through, who's opening for bands that you like can be another way of discovering music outside of this. And then maybe I could talk forever about ways to discover music outside of algorithmic and digital filter bubbles, but another thing is like,

If there's a record that you really liked, looking up to see if any music writers wrote about it recently and then seeing what else that music writer has written about in recent months and years to try to find music writers and labels and independent music retailers that have a similar taste or sensibility to what you're interested in.

Well, John writes, because of the way they exploit musicians, I would never pay for Spotify, but I do use the free version in a very specific way. I use it to check out bands and discover new music. And when I hear something I like, I go buy it. I'm wondering how much of what we do on Spotify, because, you know, we were hearing...

Take the time to create and listen more to your own playlists, be more active or more directed in the way that you use the platform as well. How much of all of this contributes to AI training data for Spotify, like all our activities?

Yeah, no, it is super interesting. It is something that I mentioned in the book as well, that on one hand, there is this sort of model streaming user who is a lean back listener who uses the discovery tools that streaming services push. But then on the other hand, these...

AI-driven algorithmic music recommendation systems in order to function, do you need training data? And for Spotify, the playlists that users make, the title you add to a playlist, the description, the songs you put on it are a part of the training data that helps them to make algorithmic recommendations in the future. So, you know, something that I write in the book is that, you know, there is a point where making playlists on streaming services might feel like particularly

participating in something like mixtape culture or just making a mixtape, but that in some ways it's actually like a really different type of commercial curation logic at play in an era of so much surveillance. But yeah. But you don't go as far as to say we should just delete our accounts. Right.

I think that the problems in some ways or the issues are bigger. I don't think it's just also specifically about streaming services, although for people who really care about music, I do encourage seeking out ways to

interact with and participate in music outside of the corporate music industry. But I think that a lot of these problems that I'm talking about aren't just problems of streaming. They're not just problems of streaming in the major labels. They're problems of corporate media consolidation and of, you know,

the influence of corporate power on music and culture more broadly. So that's why towards the end of my book, I start talking about things like the role of the public library and what would it look like if we treat

treated music similarly in our society to the way that we treat other art forms and books and what would it look like for there to be a bigger presence at libraries. Like, you know, some libraries have started to have local music collections. And I also talk about the importance of public funding more broadly in music so that we can, you know, start to just think about all of these different ways to revalue music, not just outside of streaming, but beyond the

ways in which we've entrusted the corporate music industry to kind of be responsible for our music culture. Yeah. Well, Liz, thanks so much for talking with us. Thank you so much for having me. And thanks to everyone who called in. Yeah. Thank you, listeners. Check out the book Mood Machine. Thank you, Mark Nieto, for producing today's segment. You've been listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Music

Hey, Forum listeners, it's Alexis. Did you hear that Forum is launching a video podcast? It is true. Each week, we'll drop a video recording of a recent Forum episode on the KQED News YouTube channel. We can't wait to bring you into the studio for our conversations on Bay Area culture, California news, and beyond.

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