Every Noise is a Mood: Two Visions of Our Unfulfilled Streaming Present

Every end of year, Spotify rolls out their Wrapped campaign. Ostensibly, it’s a way to review your listening habits, see your most-streamed artists and songs, and document your total music consumption over the past 12 months. In practice, it’s more of an ad campaign for the Swedish streaming colossus, as millions of people inevitably share their results on social media.

Each year, Wrapped comes out with an extra feature, which changes with every edition. One year, it was “Audio Auras”. Another, it was “Your Musical Evolution”. A couple of years ago, there was “Me in 2023”, a Tarot-styled theme where Spotify lumped users into one of 16 personality types based on their listening patterns. There were categories like the Vampire, who listens primarily to dark music, or the Shapeshifter, who has an eclectic taste and jumps from favourite to favourite.

I was dubbed the Cyclops, because apparently I listened to nothing but indie rock. “Sometimes while wearing a monocle.”

And you know what? It’s probably true. Right around the time that Wrapped came out, I was in the middle of what I lovingly called my Sad Dad Rock Summer, when a bunch of my favourite middle-aged indie legends were all touring Australia in succession (I got to see Built to Spill, Spoon, The War on Drugs, Wilco and The National in the space of a couple of months). So yes, it’s not a surprise that I was listening to a lot of guitar-based indie rock played by some very white American dudes that year.

And yet, there was something that really bugged me about the Cyclops dig. It bugged me so much that I made a point, out of spite, to try to trick the algorithm the following year. I would consciously seek out the most random assortment of music imaginable so it couldn’t presume to know everything about me.

I never found out if my strategy worked, since I cancelled my account before Spotify Wrapped 2024 came out. The experience had made salient not only how much Spotify knows about us and our habits, but how much it itself creates and nurtures those habits. How it constantly nudges us into algorithmic playlists (Discovery Weekly, Daily Mix) that serve us music that it knows we enjoy.

This way Spotify both reflects and guides our preferences is something Liz Pelly explores in her recently released book Mood Machine, which is subtitled “The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist”, but may as well have gone for “How Spotify Poisons Everything”. Pelly does not pull any punches in her recounting of the streaming giant’s rise. She presents it as a typical twenty-first century tech success story, one which makes its founders and executives rich, helps the gatekeepers (i.e. the major record labels) maintain their supremacy, and leaves a trail of destruction in its wake for customers and artists. 

Spotify emerged in 2006 out of the shadow of another important tech disruptor from Sweden: the Pirate Bay. In fact, it’s not an accident that both companies came out of the same country. As Pelly recounts, Sweden’s advanced broadband infrastructure, anti-authoritarian streak and lax approach to copyright law made it a ripe breeding ground for online piracy, and Spotify would use that to its advantage. 

In later years, the streaming company, founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzen, has tried to depict itself as a saviour of the music business against the threat of peer-to-peer file sharing, and yet in its early days, before they had made any deals with record labels and distributors, their platform was populated with pirated files. 

Ek and Lorentzen’s vision for Spotify, from the outset, was malleable. Ek came out of the online advertising industry, and the company’s primary goal from the beginning was to find the next digital container to slap ads onto. “The revenue source was ads,” Lorentzen once said at a conference, while admitting that the traffic source had been up in the air. “Should it be product search? Should it be movies, or audiobooks? And then we ended up with music.”

In the beginning, the goal for Spotify was not to save the music industry, but simply to present a better user experience to piracy. Then, when it became viable (and profitable), their goal switched to collaborating with major labels and stopping their rapid descent. Later, the aim was to maximise the time spent on the app through the use of algorithmic playlists. These days, it’s using the supremacy of the playlist to squeeze more and more dollars out of the artists and independent labels.

Pelly believes this process has been an unmitigated disaster: it has siphoned resources to the most popular artists; made us all more passive, boring listeners; and has amplified a type of bland nu-Muzak which is safe, disposable and can easily be ignored as it burbles out of Starbucks speakers. She also thinks it has forced working musicians into untenable payment schemes, as well as destroyed the kind of grassroots communities that had fostered these independent musicians for decades.

I can’t say I disagree with any of those claims, but taken as a whole, this reads a lot like the critiques of big tech from recent zeitgeisty blockbusters, like Tristan Harris’ The Social Dilemma or Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. A hodge-podge of digital trends that range from mildly concerning to grossly dystopic, but that all converge into a noxious cloud of issues without a single, clear target to aim at. 

With social media, what is the big problem we should focus on? Is it teen anxiety? Is it genocide in Myanmar? Is it Russian political interference? 

In the case of Spotify, is it $0.0035 per stream we’re fighting? Or surveillance capitalism? Modern payola? Is it letting the machines feed us emotional slop in playlist form?

Some of the economic arguments against Spotify are addressed by Glenn McDonald in another Spotify-related book from 2024, You Have Not Heard Your Favourite Song. McDonald is a programmer and was for years the “Data Alchemist” at Spotify, which, in practical terms, meant that he was largely responsible for the creation of many of the recommendation algorithms the company adopted. 

McDonald comes at his Spotify book at a completely different angle to Pelly—he’s an insider giving an insider’s account of how things work inside the machine. He is also an unapologetic fan and booster of streaming music, and while he accepts some of its flaws, he still sees its rise as a positive development in the world. 

He presents streaming as good for a) the music industry, because it saved it from the loss of revenue due to piracy (true, in a sense); b) good for customers, by increasing choice and lowering costs (true, if those are only things being considered, which they shouldn’t be); and even c) good for artists, by… well, I never understood that part of his argument. 

The two authors’ wildly differing approaches are evident in the way they present the arguments in their respective books. Mood Machine is full of case studies, testimonials, and quotes from working musicians, academics, and Spotify ex-employees (most of whom spoke anonymously). Pelly did meticulous research, conducting more than a hundred interviews, and she includes thirty pages of notes and references in the back of the book. 

Meanwhile, as far as I could tell, in the entire course of You Have Not Heard Your Favourite Song, McDonald referenced one external source. Instead of end notes or a bibliography, he has a list of 10 recommended playlists.

His case is laid out, instead, as a sort of a priori tract (with some elements of personal memoir), full of logical syllogisms and arithmetic derivations about why Spotify is no more evil or selfish than the CDs-plus-commercial radio model it supplanted. At times, it’s like he’s trying to mathsplain away the critics’ concerns.

But, to his credit, he does seem like a huge lover and advocate of music itself, of all types, from all around the globe. “The world is more full of music than your heart is”, he says, “but the more of our shared world you hear, the more your own world expands.” This is what drove him to create Every Noise At Once, a website containing an exhaustive genre map of more than 6000 music styles, from Punjabi folk to classical drill, made using data collected by Spotify. It’s a really fun tool to explore, and shows that McDonald’s vision of streaming is one of accessibility and fan exploration. 

Compare that with other figures at Spotify, like former executive Jim Anderson, who called critics of low royalties “entitled” and answered a musician’s question at a Q & A by saying, “the problem [for Spotify to solve] was to get artists’ music out there. The problem was not to pay people money.” Or Daniel Ek, who now invests in military-AI companies and seems like he would happily turn Spotify into a platform for NFTs of celebrity feet if you convinced him it would increase shareholder dividends.

McDonald is not like that. And neither is Pelly. They both care deeply about music and, in a sense, both have utopian visions. Except their utopias look very different. 

Pelly focuses on fomenting musical communities in the physical world, centred around musicians, and the grassroots ecosystems built around them—clubs, festivals, record stores, zines, independent labels. People creating, collaborating, and earning a fair, livable wage for their efforts. 

McDonald, on the other hand, seems more interested in the individual fan, plugged to online space and allowed to feast at the buffet of musical possibilities a connected, globalised world can offer them.

Unfortunately for McDonald, this vision still relies on the infrastructure developed by profit-seeking tech companies that are driven purely by the whims of the market. Which became ever clearer when he was let go from Spotify in 2024, as part of a round of cost-cutting layoffs. This meant that the Every Noise project he had put so much work on had to stop. 

The site is still up—you can still scroll and play around within the genre map, listen to samples of Argentinian underground rap and Serbian turbo folk. 

But Every Noise At Once can no longer be updated. It stands frozen in time—a petrified relic of the unfulfilled promise of a streaming world.