Reviewed by Matthew Smith

I’d like to share my thoughts on the book “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist” by Liz Pelly. There are a lot of great books being written right now that discuss different aspects of technology and how it is affecting individuals and society, and a number of them have made it on this year’s Lit Lineup. I was enthralled by the book “Careless People,” a memoir by a former Facebook global policy director Sarah Wynn-Williams. This book is a scathing tell-all of her time as a Facebook executive, and it is not flattering. Facebook sued to prevent the book’s publication and is still pursuing litigation against the author.


I also appreciated the book “SuperBloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart” by Nicholas Carr that details the myriad ways social media is harming and changing society. I haven’t finished the book “Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company” by Patrick McGee yet, but from what I’ve read I’m interested in learning more about the geopolitical ramifications of the globalized system of technological production and how it’s changed this iconic American company.


But about “Mood Machine.” As a music lover, I have followed the changes from cassettes to CDs to digital downloads and now to the streaming era. I hadn’t thought much about the differences between them and what they have meant for musicians and listeners until reading this book. I remember as a young person saving up diligently to buy one cassette at a time and then memorizing every word of every song. In the age of streaming, people with access to the internet and a streaming service or YouTube have tens of millions of songs to choose from at any given moment.


Liz Pelly is a music journalist, teacher at New York University and music connoisseur who has reported on music streaming and Spotify for more than ten years. From her home in Brooklyn she has interacted with hundreds of working musicians and reported on many aspects of the music business in the digital era. In the introduction of “Mood Machine” she highlights that she had originally planned on breaking her book into two parts, the first part on how streaming has influenced and changed music listening habits, and the second part on how the streaming business has affected the artists and musicians who create the music.


But as she explains in the introduction, the reality of a large, singular technology company controlling the interface that allows people to choose, curate and discover music has meant that both stories can’t really be separated. And after detailing Spotify’s roots and company history she quickly starts to explain the many ways the business aspects of streaming music have affected artists and listeners alike.


Pelly reports that Spotify quickly learned that playlists were a major source of listening hours and, after its early years, invested in playlist creation and promotion. Soon, much of the listening on the technology platform wasn’t through searching for specific artists, but through specific playlists and mood mixes. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, these have grown and play an important role on the platform, and it’s not clear or transparent how these are created or promoted.


Artist compensation has been in the news in relation to streaming companies, and Pelly touches on many aspects of this, even though there is no clear formula or percentage for reimbursing artists that is known outside of the individual companies. People who receive music royalty checks aren’t even sure how much they have received for each listen of their song.


Artists do have some say in their music’s promotion though through Spotify for artists and can agree to lower royalty rates for promotion within the Spotify app. There are other avenues for promotion that music labels can use to promote songs and artists, further blurring lines that with the payola scandals of the 1950s have been against the law for music on the public airwaves.


There were many surprising things I learned from the book, but one that I probably should have known but didn’t think about relates to the amount of data Spotify collects every time someone uses its app. The app records each click, device used, search, time, song, misspelling and saves it forever.


As Shoshana Zuboff reported in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” all of this data about your interactions is recorded to a company’s advantage or worse packaged and sold to data brokers to further sell or promote different products or ideas to a user.


These are just some of the many different aspects about streaming music and the company Spotify that Pelly details in her enlightening book. If you have any interest in music or want to know about the streaming business, this is a great read.


“Mood Machine: the Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist” is a selection on the Homer Public Library’s 2026 Lit Lineup. It and the other 99 books on the list, as well as approximately 40,000 other items, are available for check out from the Homer Public Library — Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday between 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. or on Tuesday and Thursday between 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.


Tune in Sunday mornings at 9:45 a.m. for “Reading Between the Lines” on KBBI AM 890, Homer, and 88.1 FM, Seward.