The Rise of Spotify, with Liz Pelly
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by American Express. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Leila Ismail. Over the years, music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed. But how did we get here, and what does it mean for artists, listeners, and the music industry as a whole?

In today's episode, music journalist Liz Peli unpacks the origins of Spotify, its meteoric rise and its transformative impact on the way that we create and experience music. Whilst researching for her new book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Peli conducts over 100 interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees and musicians.

She's joined by writer Timandra Harkness for a conversation on the ethics of streaming, the economics of playlists, and the hidden costs of the perfect listening experience. Let's join Timandra now with more. Hello, welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Timandra Harkness. Our guest today is Liz Pelley.

Liz Pelly is a journalist and author living in New York. Her essays and reporting have appeared in The Baffler, where she's a contributing editor, as well as in The Guardian, NPR, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and lots of other outlets.

Today we'll be discussing her new book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist. Drawing on over 100 interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees and musicians, the book is an exploration of Spotify's origins and influence on music, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalised and autoplayed. So welcome to an Intelligence Squared Liz.

Hi, thank you so much for having me. And I'd say I've not only really enjoyed the book, but I found it really interesting because of course, like, well, you can tell me exactly how many millions of other people I do have a subscription to Spotify. So at some points, I found that I was reading the book while listening to music on Spotify as I read and then thinking, oh,

I wonder why this is the thing that I'm hearing now. So the book did slightly change my, the way that I relate, if you like, to the music that I listen to. So I hope we can dig into that a little bit. But I'd just like to start off because you tell the whole story very comprehensively.

And you give some great figures. So streaming accounts for 84% of recorded music revenues. And Spotify has 30% of that market. So yeah, millions of users and millions of paying subscribers. But it only started, I think, in 2008. So maybe you could give us a little potted explanation history of how did it get to be so big so quickly? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's a really good question. So Spotify was created in 2006 by Daniel Ack and Martin Lawrenson, these two men with backgrounds in advertising. And when they came up with the idea for Spotify, it was an idea for a platform that would give access to a large catalog of media that a user could stream

And their original funding model was that it would all be funded by advertisements. At the beginning, it wasn't even really clear to them that it would be a music platform if you listen to early interviews with early Spotify employees. Martin Lawrence and the co-founder said,

they'll talk about how at first maybe they considered that they would do video maybe it'd be music maybe it'd be audio books as lawrenson says in these early media appearances they knew the funding source would be advertising but they weren't sure what the traffic source would be and i think that that's really interesting phrasing that i've sort of latched on to because i think

the discussion of music as the traffic source for an advertising product sort of gives you some insight into

the thinking in the early days of this product. So the model of any song you could think of funded by advertisements didn't last long with the music business. In the early days, Spotify was originally positioning itself as not necessarily an alternative to piracy, but they described it as something that would be better than piracy is the phrasing that they used.

But at that time, because of the impact that file sharing had had on the music industry, the music business was really averse to anything having to do with free music. You know, they were looking for solutions to what they saw as the problem of free music. So together, sort of in negotiations with the major record labels, the

model, the freemium model of having a free tier and a subscription tier sort of emerged. But I do think that even the existence of that free tier at all was part of what made Spotify so successful so quickly. And if you listen to other people who worked in the music business at the time talking about why this platform was successful where others had failed, because Spotify

Spotify wasn't the first streaming service. By the time Spotify came along in, you know, the product launched in Europe in 2008, but they started working on it in 2006. And at that point, you know, Napster existed, for example, from 1999 to 2001. The major labels had been trying for years to figure out how to bounce back from that period. They had tried starting their own streaming services themselves. They weren't very successful yet.

If you talk to people who are in the music industry at the time, they'll talk about how they were really clunky. There was a lot of buffering. The economics of these services was really confusing. There had been other platforms too, like in the US, there was a streaming service called Rhapsody that launched prior to Spotify. There's Pandora. There were other streaming services.

People in the music business will talk about how Spotify's user experience was the slickest. They had that free tier. And then eventually in the United States, what I sort of trace in the book is how when they launched in the US in 2011, how their sort of playlist and creation strategy was also kind of part of their growth strategy. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the playlists and the importance of playlists and kind of where they came from. Because in the book, you suggest that

that the strategy itself developed and changed over a period of time. And it does seem to me, it's quite interesting that it's something that obviously Spotify really developed. And it almost seems to bridge a period between

Actual mixtapes. You're possibly too young to remember this, but I actually am old enough to have had boys make me cassette tapes of music from records that they had. And the idea of the playlist seems to have kind of bridged that to today. You often hear radio programmes actually saying, oh, we're now half an hour of classical mixtape or add to playlist and so on. Could you talk us through...

maybe briefly through what you see as the key points in that development. I mean, presumably Spotify weren't the first people to say, we're going to give you a playlist, were they? No, definitely not. I mean, I sort of positioned the playlist as kind of like the polar opposite of the mixtape, like culturally. In the book, I kind of set up the concept of the Spotify playlist in two different contexts. You know, the playlist...

There's one sort of historical precedent for the playlist, which is just music technologies that allow the reordering of songs. So, you know, thinking about mixtape culture, thinking about other digital music apps that had existed before Spotify that would allow people to have their MP3 collection and create playlists from their MP3 collection.

And then there's also, of course, the word playlist comes out of commercial radio. Thinking about the playlists that a radio DJ would have to look towards to fulfill certain requirements of a programming strategy. So in the book, I write about it as kind of the streaming playlist doesn't really like neatly fit in either of those two lineages, but sort of draws from both of them to create a new commercial playlist.

logic entirely. And there were examples in the kind of like iTunes era of ways in which different user-created mixtapes were commercialized that I also point to as a

precedent for the concept of the streaming playlist. But for Spotify's purposes, you know, yeah, for one, the app launched in 2008 in Europe and then 2011 in the United States, the ability for users to make their own playlists existed from the beginning. But prior to 2012, 2013, the

Playlisting was more of what people from the music business who I interviewed over the years referred to as like a wild west. They talk about how like the playlisting landscape was really dominated by user generated playlists and also that kind of there was this sort of

landscape of like playlist influencers who emerged on Spotify in the early days before Spotify had created a strategy to have more control over the user experience. So while I was researching Spotify in order to write this book, something that I spent a long time doing was looking at the front page of Spotify.com on the Internet Archive and looking at the different ways in which

Spotify's homepage changed over the years. And I noticed that there was this one really particular moment in 2012 where the way in which Spotify seemed to be positioning itself and its product offering really changed really quickly. You know, for the first few years of Spotify's existence, its branding, the way it was sort of putting forth its

offering as a product was more about giving users access to all the music in the world. It would talk about Spotify as a way in which to access a world of music. It was really focused on prioritizing words like instant, simple, free, and kind of explaining what streaming was

And then there was this moment in 2012, around December 2012 going into 2013, where the front page really changed and all of a sudden it was like this early Instagram aesthetic filter imagery of people in their cars, sun flares, walking along the side of the road on vacation, a person swinging in a hammock, and it was more about like

you know, painting this Spotify as this lifestyle product or sort of kind of trying to signal to potential Spotify subscribers different moments in their life in which maybe they would use Spotify to soundtrack a moment or a mood. And this was right before they launched this new brand campaign called Music for Every Moment. And it was also the year before they hired an in-house producer.

team of playlist editors to start curating playlists largely themed towards certain moods and activities. So there clearly was this moment where they really shifted thinking about what they were offering from it being about accessing all the music in the world to the product being about recommending you the perfect song for the perfect moment when you open the app.

And according to some of the research I did, there's actually a research study that Spotify had commissioned on its own user base where they were able to kind of recognize that more users were coming to the platform than they realized for recommendations for more of a Pandora-like leanback experience. And it seems that after that research was conducted, they started to sort of optimize for that type of user. Actually, I looked at Spotify first when I was writing about personalization.

because my last book is all about why is everything personalised now? How is through technology, but I was interested in why. And I looked at Spotify a little bit

I thought at the time, well, for me, this is actually a really good example of personalisation because I do get control. And if I particularly want to listen to something, so I went, oh, yeah, I like Fela Kuti. So, you know, play me Fela Kuti. And then it and then it recommended me other things that were like that. And I could choose. And then also I could get things that obviously other people have made playlists. So for me, I

I was thinking this is a really interesting example of the mixture. Obviously, there's an algorithm there somewhere picking up on what I've listened to before and feeding me things. I gathered that there were humans curating it, as you say, there were humans deciding what goes on a playlist and what gets accepted. And then, of course, there was the choice by me.

And I actually wrote, well, you know, for me, this works really well. But I could see obviously for the musicians, it doesn't work that well. But we'll come back to that. But reading your book, all of that is a lot more complicated than that. But I was really struck by the personalising, as you say, the turn towards saying this isn't about we have the music and you come to us. It's about us.

We will feed you the music that fits your mood at that particular time of day. And something really struck me, actually, was you mentioned, well, in fact, you quote somebody called Tia Donora talking about a technology of the self. And then the Spotify Nigeria ad that says, your music, your world's playlists made just for you. And that seemed to really fit that moment of...

everything has to be personalised. But at the same time, I did think, is that not just a trend that's been happening since The Walkman came out in the 1980s? And suddenly, instead of having to listen to

music from outside of yourself you could have your own personal soundtrack and go around it's like no one else can hear this but this is my personal soundtrack so what was it that Spotify did that really took that to a new direction or a new level? Yeah you know something that I tried to illustrate in the book too is that I write an introduction in the

the story of streaming is as much about what's changed as it is about what stayed the same. And I think that that's an important distinction too, because in the early days, streaming was really pitched as this new disruptive technology, like other platform companies of the late 2000s and 2010s. And I think it is interesting to look at some of these

aspects of the platform that were pitched as sort of, you know, these things that were going to be democratizing or game changing that really were like a continuation of preexisting

histories and practices and dynamics. So even in these moments where what streaming is doing is replicating pre-existing habits or practices, I think it's also sort of instructive. Yeah, you know, I think that the reason why I point to someone like the

academic researcher, Tia DeNora, talking about this long history of music being used as a technology of itself is to sort of show that the ways in which people use music to soundtrack a moment in their lives and how sort of this is kind of part of how we sort of like

construct our sense of self or how we like think about how we exist in the world. You know, this obviously is not something that streaming created for the first time. And I do agree like, yeah, what you said, this maybe has more to do with like the evolution of music technology over the past 30 or 40 years. I think that we,

when I think about the way in which streaming personalization has really made an impact, I mean, one, it's like the sheer amount of data that is collected on users in order to make this whole algorithmic recommendation system possible that I think in the streaming era, there's this real tendency to say like every year on Spotify wrapped, Oh yeah, like, you know, this system collects all this data on me, but it's just music. So like, isn't that interesting? But

um, you know, in order to have a more sort of robust understanding of how data markets exist and what actually happens when platforms collect all this data on us. Um, as you know, one of the lawyers I interview in the book points out, you know, the data is never staying with the platform, especially when you have a company like Spotify, that's so much part of this sort of landscape of, uh, data brokers and marketing companies and advertising and, uh,

data sharing and partnerships with different corporations and things like that. And then I also think that when I think about the sort of consequences of streaming error personalization, like, yes, there's the whole conversation of data collection, surveillance and privacy. But then also just the way in which I think it has really contributed to this overarching dynamic of passivity that has become so sort of

such a defining dimension of streaming era music recommendation. I do think there are some aspects to the way in which algorithmic music discovery started in the streaming era that are sort of interesting, you know, like...

In the early days of Spotify, their music recommendations were largely based on this pretty straight ahead concept of collaborative filtering. Like, you know, this person likes music pretty similar to what you like, so we're going to show you stuff from their catalog that you've never heard of before. On its own, that's, you know, I think simple enough and like kind of interesting way to get music recommendations.

Something that I try to chart is the way in which personalization and algorithmic recommendations on Spotify sort of changed over the years. I think something I commonly feel like I hear from people is, you know, I used to learn about all sorts of stuff on Spotify. These days, they just show me a list of stuff that I listened to already. Yeah, that sounds familiar. Yes. You know, the reliance on the listening history and...

One moment that I really noticed was in the trajectory of personalized recommendation on Spotify. There was this moment where the language really shifted from discover and being about discovery and showing you stuff that you hadn't heard yet to now if you open Spotify, the language you're more likely to immediately see is made for you and kind of more focused on, you know, showing you things that you already have kind of signaled that you like. You kind of...

Oftentimes it's like this pool of music that is based on your listening history that is being sort of repackaged and sold to you through different themed boxes. So, you know, trying to unpack a little bit about how those changes came about and the different points in the history of the playlist system where influential things happened that changed the direction of the strategy is interesting.

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You've mentioned it a couple of times, the lean back.

our idea of listening and and again as I was reading about that and I had music on in the background because that's what I do I find it easy to concentrate if I have music while I work I thought oh that's exactly what I'm doing I am having music in the background without really listening to it and deliberately in fact choosing music that won't distract me too much and so I thought oh I'm doing exactly what you're talking about lean back but then I also thought I don't

do that with Spotify. Often I would just have the radio on if the radio is playing classical music that doesn't distract me. So again, I thought, in what sense is this new with Spotify? Because I

you know there is a long history of people just having the radio on in the background while they do stuff what what is different when spotify does it with their selected personalized feed of music no that's a really good question too um and i also should say that i love to have the classical radio station on in the background in my house and the jazz radio station um i feel very lucky to live in new york city where there are really amazing

um community fm radio shows um uh and in some ways yeah so like chapter three of the book it's called selling lean back listening and it's about the rise in the streaming era of what the music business refers to as the lean back listener so someone who is content to you know hit

play on a playlist themed to a mood or activity rather than actively searching for a certain artist or album. And it's absolutely true that streaming services did not create this idea of the leanback listener and also that the history of commercial radio or radio in general could be understood as a sort of history of leanback listening as well.

But I think that's something that you'll hear a lot from people in the music industry is the ways in which streaming services really championed this way of relating to music, not just lean back listening, but what the industry refers to as functional music. So music for studying, music for reading, music for sleeping, music for meditating. And there's something that I try to unpack in the

book is the different consequences that this has had on music and culture. I think something that is particularly interesting is, you know, in the book, I talk about this phenomenon of

the ghost artist, um, or this practice that became popular around 2016, 2017 on Spotify, where they started to populate some of their popular lean back playlists, functional music playlists, especially playlists, um, filled with instrumental music, um, with, yeah,

yeah, this kind of stock music made by artists that seems to not even really exist. And this became a popular conversation in the music business trade press and on social media, people saying, I was listening to the study playlist and I pulled up the different artists' names that appear on this playlist. And it seems that, you know, these artists have generative AI images on their profiles and there's no bio and I can't find any information on these artists anywhere. Um,

on the internet other than on Spotify. Like it seems like these artists aren't real. And that had kind of been speculated about for years. There had been some investigative journalism on it in the Swedish tech press, but I was able to really lift the veil on the story in my book and

learned that it's actually this internal practice at Spotify. They refer to this content as perfect fit content and their internal description for it is music commissioned for specific moods and playlists with improved margins.

And for the most part, this music is coming from specific production companies that then commission artists to crank out 12, 15 tracks an hour, released under one-off monikers or just monikers they have for specifically these tracks. And they're paid a different type of royalty rate in order to produce this material. So they are real humans making the music?

but they're producing it like by the yard to order rather than this is my creative process that's producing music. Yeah, yeah. And the reporting that I did on it, that's what I found. You know, it's interesting because there clearly is sort of like

this big question that it raises, you know, if people are only half listening to this music and it's really meant for like a background listening experience and already you have anonymous producers making it in bulk, like it seems obvious that there is some sort of path for this

to just also be kind of taken over by generative AI music production? And is that something that is going to happen? I think in a lot of ways, you know, one of the biggest issues I see with this practice is that people are being recommended this music and it is nowhere on the platform made clear that they're being recommended

certain tracks due to certain commercial deals that exist, that this music is being made by stock music companies or like, you know, what I refer to as ghost artists. It's not labeled. And it really raises similar issues that the conversation around generative AI music already is raising too, is that, you know,

I'll have people, since this article came out, sending me links being like, can you tell me if this is a real artist or not? Do you know if this is generative AI? And I feel like those aren't questions that anyone should ever have, especially not about music that's being recommended to them under the umbrella of an editorial recommendation. I feel like it should be labeled if it is music from generative AI, if it's music that you're being recommended due to some sort of pre-existing issue.

commercial partnership, you know, this is stuff that should be clear to the listener. That they're playing it because it's cheaper for them and not because it's something that I would want to listen to necessarily. So talk me through some of the ways in which Spotify is changing the world for people who actually make music. Because obviously, implicit in what you've just said is that

At a point where you think you might be able to make some money by having your own music streamed. In fact, Spotify is instead playing some music that they've commissioned just to fill a gap in a certain playlist. And so it's that that presumably is making it harder for people to make a living. But I mean, you say quite a lot about how it's changed in the landscape. So it's.

Can you start off maybe with, before we get to the money, how has it changed in the creative landscape? Because it's had an impact on genre, hasn't it? That's interesting. Well, you know, I think that ghost artist example is really a good example

starting point for the way in which streaming has created new challenges for people who make instrumental music. Definitely, I think if you spoke to anyone who makes classical, jazz, ambient, lo-fi, hip-hop beats and asked them about the challenges presented to them in the streaming landscape, they would mention these sorts of practices and how it creates new challenges for

not just monetizing their music, but meaningfully connecting with fans because of how tightly controlled the pipelines of music discovery are by not just like playlists, but these algorithmic systems. You know, thinking about the way in which streaming has impacted

the experience of the musician, it's hard not to start with the material realities of it all because that really is like the most, I think, meaningful way in which it has been changed or the way in which artists have been affected. And certainly if you asked any musician

to tell you about the way in which streaming has impacted their lives, the first thing they would start with, I think, is the revenue model and how hard it is to sort of figure out ways to meaningfully monetize your music in a financial system that is really set up to benefit major labels and pop stars. You know, the kind of

The model that we think of when we think of streaming today or the streaming model as we know it is a functional impossibility without the participation of Sony, Universal and Warner Music, the three majors, in order to have an app where the average listener can open the app and search for the vast majority of what they might think of when they think of the history of recorded popular music and actually hear

find a result. For that situation to happen, you have to have Universal, Sony, and Warner willing to license their catalogs since they're the ones who sit on the rights to most of the history of popular recorded music. So that puts those labels in a position of outsized negotiating power and they're able to

have the platforms work for them in ways that, you know, is not possible for smaller independent or DIY artists. Which is ironic in a way, isn't it? Because one of the things that streaming sells itself on is that I can discover not only the major artists I've heard of, but new and upcoming artists and obscure artists from other cultures. And that

that there is supposedly this level playing field. But in fact, having read your book, it seems that it's anything but level. Yeah, no, I think that's a really great point. You know, streaming services and Spotify in particular have really sort of like

shaped a narrative since the beginning and kind of aligned their brands at this idea that these are platforms for music discovery but it's often the artists that people would be hoping to discover independent artists lesser known artists artists that aren't on the top 40 radio or on commercial radio that are the most

negatively impacted by the whole system when it comes to their ability to monetize their work.

So there's that reality that just like the major labels, you know, when Spotify launched, the major labels owned 17% of the company. That percentage has gone down over the years as they've sold off some of their shares and other investors have gotten involved. But they have this influence over the way in which streaming services sort of evolve. Then there's also this reality that

For most independent musicians, Spotify refers to itself as a two-sided marketplace where they say that on one side they're selling a product to listeners, they're selling subscriptions, and on the other side they're selling a product to musicians.

mostly independent and DIY musicians. So they're selling things like advertisements, pop-up ads, banner ads, the ability to participate in things like Discovery Mode, which is a program where artists and labels are asked to accept a 30% royalty reduction in exchange for algorithmic promotion. So, you know, Spotify kind of refers to all of these

promotional opportunities that artists could buy into under this

banner of marketplace, but it's really only sort of like certain artists that are viewed as these potential customers. And then you have like a whole other caliber of artists that's viewed more as like a partner. Or I should say it's really the labels, not the artists themselves, but major labels. So there's different experiences of the streaming era for different artists, for different labels, sort of depending on whether you're talking about

the major record labels or your indie and DIY artists? So it's a slightly depressing read if you put yourself in the shoes of a musician trying to make a living because between the very small revenues and all these things you describe where if you are just a small label or an independent artist, you're trying to compete almost at your own expense with huge labels and very famous artists. But you do...

at the end, start to try and give some pointers towards pushback against that. Maybe you could finish off by just saying to you, what do you think a good world would look like, not only for music and for musicians, but also for technology in general? You know, it is super interesting, like,

since the book came out, like observing like the type of reader who finds it to be depressing and the type of reader who finds it to be hopeful. And I do find that it's like the type of reader that was hoping there'd be a moment where they're told like download this app instead of this app and you'll be an ethical consumer who find it to be depressing. And I do actually think that a lot of people

at least in the feedback that I've received directly from musicians, I've heard more from musicians and people who like participate in independent and underground music that they find it to be more like, um, hopeful or even like uplifting at the end because it, it doesn't end on a note from my perspective, like all doom and gloom. But I think there is power in doing this sort of like mapping of a company like this.

getting some of the receipts on some of the practices that people like deep down have sort of like known were making things harder but have been publicly denied over the years perhaps so I do think that there is sort of like a hopeful ending in some ways I also think that something interesting about the story of the way in which music communities have responded to the era of platform capitalism and web 2 is

in some ways could be like uniquely instructive for thinking about technology more broadly. We're thinking about, you know, public interest technology or what would it look like if people had more of a say in helping shape the trajectory of the tools that they rely on in their everyday lives, since there are some really interesting examples of musicians and music communities trying to be involved in those conversations.

So on one hand, I discuss different musician unions and solidarity projects, self-organized musician solidarity projects that have popped up in recent years. I talk about this group called United Musicians and Allied Workers that came together during the pandemic.

on Zoom. You know, it started out as a group of basically scrappy, fed up musicians, self-organizing meetings on Zoom to talk about the state of the music industry and different issues that they were dealing with as independent musicians. And then it

in some ways inspired by the fact that their tours had all been canceled due to COVID and they had more time to actually organize these meetings. And they, you know, within their first year did this campaign called Justice at Spotify, where they organized protests outside of Spotify offices around the world.

And eventually their organizing around streaming led them to work with Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib on something called the Living Wage for Musicians Act, which has now been introduced in Congress, which to me is a really interesting story. How did this group of DIY musicians end up help writing a bill for the U.S. government? So I try to describe that. And I think it ends up being a story that is also interesting

interesting story about just grassroots organizing too. I talk about different musician-led co-ops and collectives that have tried out different models of music streaming over the years or different ways of working together to create collectives and co-ops that would make music streaming look different. You know, I think what's really interesting about one of the projects that I talk about in the book is this

group called catalytic sound which is a group of like 30 avant-garde jazz adjacent musicians who run this co-op together where they have an online web store for their music and they also have a streaming site where you can subscribe to it and they just instead of paying the 30 artists in their co-op on a per stream basis they just like split the fees 30 ways every month

And it's an example of something that's really interesting to me because it's not a technological solution at all. It's a social and economic solution. There's nothing particularly like high tech about what they're doing. It's just a different way of thinking about relating to each other and working together to make something that works for them. And similarly, I talk a lot in the book towards the end about the role of the public library in perhaps reimagining what music streaming can look like

Again, you know, when we're talking about technology, we're often not talking about the technology itself, but the way in which power and economics and industry practices inform that technology. And I feel like the idea of like the public library streaming service is a really good example of that.

Like the problem is not having a bunch of music on a central server that you access through the Internet so that you don't have to have all the files downloaded on your computer. The problem is the way in which different industry practices and incentives and corporate consolidation and the very consolidated nature of the global recorded pop music industry has created pressures that

and different types of exploitation that play out in the streaming model too. So from my perspective, the library example is so interesting because it's really kind of provides these

examples of what would it look like if you had a streaming service that served a local community in which people involved in a local music scene could have a say in participating in the governance of that platform and just having input over how it operates.

So your ideal situation would involve technology, but it wouldn't look like Spotify. Yeah, you know, I'm not against I'm not like an anti technology person. And I'm also surely not against universal access to music or any ways in which we can make music not just more.

accessible, but more central to our culture and lives and social lives and society, a fundamental part of how we relate to each other. I think that making music more accessible is part of that, but there's also so much more that we could be doing with technology, from my perspective, to make

universal access to music, you know, not only work better for musicians, but also have music be contextualized in ways that serve it better for listeners too. - Marvelous, what a great note to end on. So thank you very much. You have made me rethink my relationship to music, both in reading your book and today.

It just remains for me to having thanked Liz to say that was Liz Pelly, author of Mood Machine, The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, which is available now at a bookshop near you or obviously online. I've been Tavandra Harkness. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Mia Sorrenti and was edited by Mark Roberts.

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