The Maris Review, vol 44
The music issue
What I read this week
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly
We've heard this story before, but it makes my head explode every time: tech bros who don't particularly know very much about a creative industry come in and "disrupt" it with promises of making artists more successful and consumers more empowered; these tech bros end up devaluing the art and enriching themselves and other large corporations and then have the nerve to want to be congratulated for it. Artists who were once able to modestly support themselves from their art can no longer make a living wage. Liz Pelly's excellent, infuriating book is about how Spotify has screwed musicians and benefitted major labels, but look around and its model is all too prevalent in various sectors of digital culture. We're talking about authors and journalists and filmmakers and screenwriters as well, just to name a few.
The commodification of art is certainly not a new struggle for artists – as long as consumers have paid for music and books and TV and film there have been attempts to flatten the art to appeal to the widest number of buyers. But this new era, with algorithms and AI and venture capital money and the tracking and selling of user data, is particularly insidious.
Pelly reminds us off the bat that Spotify is an advertising-tech company that happens to sell music, just like Amazon is an e-commerce platform and cloud computing company that happens to sell books. So it should come as no surprise that Spotify, rather than challenging listeners and exposing them to new sounds, has been flooding the market with low quality, easily accessible music rather than finding new ways for artists of all kinds to reach new audiences. This music is meant to be consumed passively as a background soundtrack to one's daily life, just as Netflix is looking for shows that you can passively follow while looking at your phone the whole time.
Mood Machine contains a modest amount of editorializing, but Pelly's contempt shines through all over the place. To be clear, I very much appreciate this. The hallmark of the Spotify model, she says, is to sell music based on vibes and mood and function (hence the book's title). Organizing music by mood, she says, "is a way to transform it into a new type of media product. It is about selling users not just on moods, but on the promise of the very concept that mood stabilization is in their control." Music as snake oil.
Spotify, Pelly says, favors the lone artist, sans bandmates or producers or management, to whom Spotify can provide a zillion ways (playlist pitching, buying ads) to try to lift themselves up from their proverbial bootstraps. Spotify's algorithm doesn't reward evolution in an artist's sound, of course. It sticks an artist in a box and expects them to stay there. Shit was broken before Spotify and streaming took over the music industry; it's just more broken now. Imagining new futures for music, Pelly says, "requires collectivity, improvisation, and deep listening."
Pelly's book is mostly focused on music, but I left Spotify when they paid Joe Rogan a gazillion dollars to move his execrable podcast over to them (I know that Apple Music and Apple Podcasts aren't much better, but at least I don't have to think WHAT IS WRONG WITH MEN every time I open up my podcast feed). Just like when Netflix pays Jerry Seinfeld and Dave Chappelle millions upon millions for new comedy specials, I can't help but wonder which starving artists/podcasters might benefit from just 1% of that kind of cash infusion.
There's no mention of audiobooks in Mood Machine, which I realize is a whole other can of worms. I'm watching closely as audiobooks have been rising on the platform and breaking Audible's monopoly (a nice little silver lining). But, much like its music contracts, the terms of Spotify's deals with publishers are opaque and it's difficult to delineate their business model. I'm constantly relieved that physical books still have value in the marketplace, more so than records and DVDs. But once streaming audiobooks get further devalued, I hope book prices can keep up. See how it's all connected?
See Friendship by Jeremy Gordon
Jeremy is a music critic and culture writer, as his debut novel's protagonist, Jacob. I think both of them would tell you that media has lost just about any hint of glamor that it ever had. The novel opens with Jacob struggling to stay relevant at a job by desperately trying to come up with a podcast idea that will make him valuable to his employer again.
Jacob is the kind of unreliable narrator who I feel like I encountered a lot in fiction some years ago, but not as much anymore. He's a dude who seems like the target audience for worshipping Manic Pixie Dream Girls, who has a good heart and wants to be liked but keeps fucking up, a journalist who must talk to sources but who still lacks emotional intelligence, as Jeremy deftly shows in Jacob's various professional and personal interactions.
When Jacob decides to focus his entrepreneurial narrative audio efforts on the story of a high school friend who died shortly after graduation, his research involves reconnecting with former high school classmates. This inevitably leads to visiting the place where one goes to try to keep tabs on their high school friends: Facebook. See Friendship is a sharp novel about how social media histories collide with our actual memories, and what happens to personal stories when they're packaged for the entertainment of a wide audience.
A little wish list of musicians who should write memoirs
- Fiona Apple
- Missy Elliott
- Madonna
- Stevie Wonder
- Björk
- Meg White
Who's on your list?
New releases, 3/4
Sucker Punch by Scaachi Koul
See Friendship by Jeremy Gordon
(see above)
The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica
The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
Guatemalan Rhapsody by Jared Lemus
Universality by Natasha Brown
Optional Practical Training by Shubha Sunder
