As an editor at a large publisher who liked my proposal for a book but was not going to publish it very reasonably explained to me, commercial publishers are in the business of publishing books that people already know they want to read. In books about music, as other editors told me less apologetically, this mostly means biographies of popular musicians. But glamour does generously leave a little shelf-space for fear, and so the book that a bigger publisher than mine thinks people already want to read is Liz Pelly's Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. If you are the people they have in mind, who already wanted to read soberly-researched explanations of some of the ways in which a culture-themed capitalist corporation has pursued capitalism with a disregard for culture, written in a tone of muted resignation, here is your mood. For maximum irony, get the audiobook version and listen to it in the background while you organize your Pinterest boards of Temu products by Pantone color.  

As a corporation, Spotify is very normal. Its Swedish origins render it slightly progressive in employment policies relative to American companies, at least if you want to have more children than you already have when you get hired, and can make sure to have them without getting laid off first. In business and product practices, I never saw much reason to consider it better or worse than what one would expect of a medium-to-large-sized publicly-traded tech company.  

I arrived at Spotify involuntarily via an acquisition, and left involuntarily via a layoff, but in between those two events I was there voluntarily for a decade. I believe that music is what humans do best, and that bringing all(ish) of the world's music together online is one of the great human cultural achievements of my lifetime, and that the joy-amplifying potential of having the collective love and knowledge encoded in music-listening collated and given back to us is monumental. That's what I spent that decade working on, and although Spotify as a corporation finally voted decisively against this by laying me off and devoting considerable remaining resources to laboriously shutting down everything I worked on, I was hardly the only person working there who believed in music, and wanted there to be a music company that put music above "company", and wanted Spotify to behave in at least a few ways like that company.  

It was never very likely to, of course. As Liz begrudgingly notes in her introduction, she set out to write an anti-Spotify book only to realize the problem wasn't really just Spotify so much as power. Spotify entered a music business largely controlled by a few record companies, at a point in history when the other confounding factors in the industry were already technological. Spotify did eventually come up with a few minorly novel forms of moral transgression, but they were never really in a position to explode the existing power structures, even if we could pretend they wanted to.  

There were three specific things I fought against throughout my time at Spotify, and although my layoff was officially just part of a large impersonal reduction in "headcount", it's hard to imagine that there wasn't some connection. Mood Machine describes two of these in depressing detail: the secret preferential treatment of particular lower-royalty background music, and the not-secret "marketing" program to pressure artists to voluntarily accept lower royalty rates for the prospect of undisclosed algorithmic promotiom. Liz quotes multiple internal Spotify Slack messages about both these programs, and if somehow this ends up with all those grim private threads getting published, I'll be pleased to get so much of my earnest polemic-writing back. The quote from "yet another employee in the ethics-club" on pages 193-4, pointing out that Discovery Mode is exactly structured to benefit Spotify at the collective expense of artists, is definitely me. I'm pretty sure I went on to explain how to fix the economics of this by making Spotify's benefit conditional on artist benefit, and how to fix the morality of it by actually giving artists interesting agency instead of just an opportunity for submission. Sadly, Liz doesn't quote that part.  

But I hadn't resigned in protest over PFC or Discovery Mode, partly because I didn't think either one actually caused sufficient practical damage that removing them would solve enough, but mostly because I had the autonomy and ability to spend my time fighting against the third and much bigger thing, which Mood Machine alludes to in far less detail than the others, which is Spotify's relentless and deliberate subordination of music and culture and humanity to machine learning. "ML Is the Product", the executive exhortation went. I wrote an internal talk explaining exactly why this was a culture-destructive way to think, which I would also like back. I am enthusiastically not against the use of data and algorithms in music and thus culture, but computers are tools that accomplish our human intents, and it is thus us that should be judged on their effects. Over the years at Spotify I found that it was increasingly dishearteningly common that people, and especially hierarchical company priorities based on obtuse quantitative metrics, not only did not care about the widely varying effects of erratic ML on music, but didn't even notice that they often didn't have enough information with which to care. I developed a small library of internal tools that only existed to make it unignorably easy to compare the outputs of two different systems on any individual example, and every time I ever compared a complicated state-of-the-art ML system developed by demonstrably talented ML engineers against whatever I whipped up in BiqQuery and spent a couple of hours tweaking while looking at exactly what it did for different bands or genres or songs, the music results from the less-exciting tech were always clearly better.  

And each time I did this, it renewed my uncooperative senses of possibility and optimism, because collective human knowledge is astonishingly broad and deep, and the world is full of amazingly great music, and it takes only a little bit of very simple math to use the former to discover the latter. This is what my decade at Spotify was about, and thus is also what my book is about. If you care about music, you ought to want to read Liz's book. But if you can also stand being reminded why anybody cares about this subject in the first place, whether you already thought you wanted that or not, read mine, too.  

Should you read either of our books? No. Do it if you want, or read something else, or put on some music and go for a walk, or put on some music and dance or hold still. My book is geeky, and tells you things you don't really have to know. Liz's is depressing, and tells you things you could already have guessed.  

I will say, though, that mine involves both fears and joys. Liz's could have, but does not. It's telling that she talked to so many people, but as far as I can tell only people who she already knew agreed with her. Liz and I were on a Pop Conference panel together in 2018, I've offered to talk to her multiple times over the years, and she quotes my tweets and this blog and discusses my work in the book, but she didn't talk to me. Her book is decent journalism, but it's journalism to explicate a grudge, to deepen understanding in only one specific trench. I don't think, when you get to the bottom of it, there's any treasure, or really anything productive to do except climb back out, and then we're just where we started. Liz makes a good case for public libraries collecting local music, which seems like a fine idea to me, but not really an answer to any of the same questions. Mood Machine laments the loss of small things Liz thinks we used to have, maybe, but doesn't seem interested in looking for any of the big things we could have had, and still might. If the problem is mood, I don't think this is the solution.  

Not that I solved anything in my book, either. We both note that maybe Universal Basic Income is really the only thing likely to. But if you think the only moral direction is retreat, and the right model for music is that you never hear any unless it was made next door, then you are choosing passivity over curiosity, and just a different status quo over all the possible better worlds, and reducing a complicated problem to choosing sides. And to me that's what we should be against, together.