Temper Machine by Liz Pelly evaluate – a savage indictment of Spotify | Music books

In November and December final 12 months, Spotify’s chief government, Daniel Ek, bought 420,000 shares within the music streaming firm, incomes himself $199.7m (£160m). One wild hearsay that circulated on social media instructed Ek’s eagerness to divest himself of inventory within the firm he based was linked to the approaching publication of Liz Pelly’s e book Temper Machine, as if Ek feared the revelations contained inside it could adversely have an effect on the share worth. That was clearly a whimsical notion. Ek began cashing out Spotify shares in July 2023, and has continued doing so into 2025. On the time of his final transaction, a month after Pelly’s e book was printed within the US, Spotify’s share worth was at an all-time excessive.

And but, you possibly can see how individuals who had a preview of Temper Machine’s contents may get that concept into their head. It might be essentially the most miserable and enraging e book about music printed this 12 months, a completely convincing argument that Spotify’s success has had a disastrous impact on pop music. Pelly additionally alleges a list of alarming company behaviour, indicative of an organization that, one former worker suggests, has “fully misplaced its ethical centre”.

The query is whether or not it ever had one to begin with. The favoured origin story round Spotify’s founding entails Ek, a Swedish tech millionaire and “music nerd”, electing to save lots of the business from the scourge of on-line piracy by offering an alternate: an all-you-can-eat buffet of music on demand for a small month-to-month price. Pelly suggests that is principally tripe. Ek’s speciality was in promoting internet advertising: his large concept was that some form of streaming service can be a great way to do it. In its preliminary iteration, Spotify wasn’t even particularly supposed as a music supplier: the idea was to stream motion pictures, till Ek and his co-founders realised that the dimensions of the digital recordsdata concerned was prohibitive. The image that emerges shouldn’t be of a munificent fan however a really completely different and acquainted archetype: the man who’s good with computer systems and neither understands, nor locations any worth on artwork.

Actually, Spotify appears to have gone out of its solution to denude musicians of earnings. Main labels had been paid huge advances to license their catalogues to the service, with no obligation to share any of the cash with the individuals who had truly made the music. Spotify’s system of royalty funds is each byzantine and patently unfair. Artists aren’t paid just by the variety of streams their songs obtain, however by the share of whole streams they account for in every nation: not to your work, however how nicely your work is doing in contrast with that of a handful of megastars. Considered one of Pelly’s interviewees calls it “pressured consolidation”: not everybody who makes music needs to compete with Ed Sheeran, however it is a world through which you’re mechanically obliged to take action. If you happen to’re prepared to forgo an additional share of your earnings, then there’s Spotify Discovery, which adjusts the app’s much-vaunted algorithm to advertise artists who settle for a diminished royalty fee.

In the meantime, within the early 2010s, the corporate shifted its focus from “music fanatics” to what it calls “lean-back shoppers”, successfully the sort of people that would as soon as have turned the radio on within the morning and left it burbling within the background all day. The aim of the playlists it designed to focus on them – “chill vibes”, “mellow morning”, “mood-booster” – was, and is, to supply unobtrusive background noise or, as Pelly suggests, a latter-day equal to muzak: nothing hanging, uncommon, out-of-the-ordinary, or certainly any of the issues one may fairly need music to be. The message that shortly filtered by to artists was that the extra beige your sound, the extra possible it was to discover a place on a Spotify playlist and earn some money. Therefore the rise of a homogeneous style dubbed “Spotifycore”, which you’ve likely heard even when the time period appears unfamiliar. It’s a bit ambient, a bit digital, a bit folky, a bit indie, a nonspecific wish-wash possessed solely of a obscure wistfulness, the sonic equal of a CBD gummy: music “for anyplace, for anybody”, as one producer put it, that finally ends up being “music for no place, for nobody”.

Spotify inspired it, creating an “optimisation instrument” known as Spotify4Artists that urged musicians to look at the information, see what’s doing nicely and tailor their music to be extra like that. Given how laborious it’s for musicians to make a residing within the twenty first century, you possibly can perceive the stress on artists to hitch this specific race to the underside. “To be sustainable,” says one indie file label government dolefully, “it’s a must to put out data which can be going to get repeat listens in espresso outlets.”

However there was extra unhealthy information for people who did. If you happen to had been dealing in music for no place and nobody, it’d as nicely be made by no one. Spotify began shopping for in what it calls PFC, or “excellent match content material” – blandly nondescript “inventory” tracks from firms that concentrate on background music, made by session musicians paid a flat price to crank out dozens of tracks at a time – and packing its playlists with them. PFC, normally hidden behind faux artist names and made-up biographies, proliferated by official Spotify playlists. The corporate has dissociated itself from direct involvement in PFC, stating “we don’t and by no means have created ‘faux’ artists and put them on Spotify playlists”. It stays a secretive world and Pelly will get nearly nowhere investigating it, though she does monitor down among the musicians concerned: grateful for the cheque and frank in regards to the “mind numbing … joyless” expertise of battery-farming music “as milquetoast as attainable”.

It’s a relentlessly depressing story that one suspects will get extra depressing nonetheless. The rise of AI presumably signifies that even the faceless session musicians will quickly be out of a gig. Pelly reviews that Spotify has experimented with an concept known as Soundscape, an infinite AI-generated “personalised” ambient stream (although the product has been placed on “indefinite hiatus”). Its dream appears to be a world of completely passive shoppers who don’t select what they take heed to, however merely press play and let Spotify select for them.

She ends by trying to recommend different futures – through which shoppers swap to small, cooperative streaming companies run by musicians, or exit of their method to purchase direct from artists, replicating the “indie” economic system of small labels and DIY gigs that when supported leftfield musicians – however her worthy concepts really feel like sticking plasters on a gaping wound. Streaming now accounts for 85% of the music market within the UK: Spotify is the market chief, with the sharpest practices, however, as Pelly notes, its opponents aren’t a lot better. One suspects that for many shoppers, Spotify’s comfort – and it is handy – trumps no matter harm its rise has inflicted on music and musicians up to now, which implies it’s solely going to get larger and extra highly effective. What meaning for music and musicians going ahead stays to be seen, however Temper Machine doesn’t depart you stuffed with optimism for the longer term.