Spotify’s Listening Machine
My friend, and excellent music journalist Martyn and I were having coffee in Wellington a few weeks ago, talking about — as we often do — the absurdity of the current music business. These conversations always run long and the economics of the space are never far from either of our minds, but for me this topic has been closer in a different way as I work on new projects at the Tabula Rasa Group. We’re continuing to carve out systems that actually give artists more control over their work, more say in how it circulates, instead of feeding into whatever the platforms demand this week.
At one point Martyn reminded me of something that is often easy to forget, even for a part time, cautiously optimistic cynic like myself, “Spotify was never a music company. It was ad-tech from day one”
To the company’s credit, (sort of) they’ve done a very good job culturally of becoming synonymous with “listening to music” but hearing this yielded a moment of just like “ohh, right...” Spotify never really operated like a music company of any sort. The free tier has always just been an enticing reason to get you to walk through the door. Spotify gives the music away because the music was never the actual product. What mattered was your attention. How long you listened, what you skipped and what mood you could be neatly sorted into. All of this data then bundled and resold. Premium subscriptions came as a way to ostensibly free oneself from the ads, but ultimately it was (is) bolted onto a foundational architecture that was designed for ad delivery.
This architecture shapes everything about how the platform feels, and explains why it has always felt bad to me personally. The interface isn’t designed for the most positive aspects of what it is to engage with music like exploration, or discovery — wandering through the aisles of music you’d never think about to make your way over to that one band you know just released an album — it’s designed for a seamless, unending flow. Autoplay defaults, infinite scrolling and tapping, and the way playlists bleed into each other without leaving the possibility for a moment of silence. The categories they sort ‘content’ into often tell you exactly what role music is supposed to play in your life.
Once music has been packaged this way — background as the default — the next step is obvious. If the playlist is just atmosphere, why keep paying for atmosphere at all? Spotify started flooding passive listening playlists with AI-generated tracks and cut-rate commissions from fake artists. It’s cheaper, there is absolutely no friction, and no one was supposed to notice, but even if someone did, enough users had been trained to not even really care most of the time.
This is an especially grim turn of events for me in particular because I really love passive listening music. Our beloved Artificial Intelligence compilation from Warp Records in the ’90s can bring an intricate, strange, and beautiful home-listening experience that treats background as a real mode of engagement. From this lineage you get everything from Autechre to Aphex, and even some of my favorite tangents like Baths’ Geotic project, from which have emerged several delicate, thoughtful albums built for immersion without demanding the spotlight.
“Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular.” - Brian Eno
Passive listening can be textured, poetic, and give everyday life new dimensions, slip unexpected detail into ordinary moments. Spotify erases all of this and takes the idea of background music, flattening it smooth until nothing sticks.
Meanwhile, the company props itself up as some sort of cultural savior with their artist dashboards, “creator economy” rhetoric and endless campaigns about ‘discovery.’ But the mechanics of the platform don’t lie. Every user behavior — both artist-users and listener-users, mind you — becomes a datapoint.
The way money moves in their little ecosystem tells the same story. Fractions of pennies are dripped out to most artists, and profits move upstream into surveillance firms, defense contractors, and other infrastructures of harm. Open the app at night and you’ll see like, “Peaceful Piano” framed as an essential ingredient for the all-important practice of self-care, while the backend capital is underwriting global violence. The two sides of this very strange coin then begin to look something like mood management as a service for the user, and control systems for the shareholder.
And yet it must be said that this isn’t entirely Spotify’s fault. The industry side of the music business has always been allergic to ambition. It’s been decades of executives incapable of imagining anything beyond the path of least resistance, too risk-averse or unimaginative to try building anything legitimately creative, idealistic, or structurally different as the landscape shifts. In this vacuum, Spotify’s model looks inevitable.
And what are we, patrons of the arts, citizens of the world, left with but an ad-tech platform that figured out how to pass itself off as a tool for creator liberation, with infinite choice, freedom, democratization, but what it really offers when we look more closely is atmosphere management and background feed tuned for retention.
This framing can help us to realize that the stakes here go so far beyond the (very important and ever-relevant) discussion about artist getting paid what they’re owed in the streaming era and into a deeper and slightly more complicated discussion about what music even is allowed to be.
“Music for entertainment … seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility.” - Theador W. Adorno
Jozef White is a strategist, consultant, and freelance philosopher working across music, technology, and culture at The Tabula Rasa Group. He is the founder of The Tabula Rasa Record Company, Maison Blanc, and Inscripta, and works with artists, labels, startups, and other organizations on their creative direction and product strategy.
Find him on LinkedIn and Instagram, or get in touch via email to discuss projects, collaborations, or consulting opportunities. Visit tabularasarecords.com to learn more about Tabula Rasa.