Music critic and journalist, Liz Pelly, weaves an unsparing investigation into Spotify’s origins and influence on music, with incisive cultural criticism, illuminating how streaming is reshaping music for listeners and artists alike. If you stream a song on Spotify, how money does the artist make?

Spotify has been profoundly damaging for all but the most commercially successful musicians and even shaped the kind of music that they make.

Like several digital start-ups, Spotify, founded in Sweden in 2006 by tech entrepreneurs Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, purported to be revolutionsing an industry when really it was just reinforcing the status quo. It sold itself to major record labels – Sony, Universal, and Warner Music Group – as the solution to the download piracy that ended the lucrative CD era in the early 2000s. Although Spotify promised to liberate music for listeners by putting every song in the world at their fingertips, their arrangements with major labels were shrouded in secrecy, and it did not take long for musicians to notice their earnings falling. “Spotify does not pay artists per stream, but rather through a complex pro rata revenue share system. And in fact, Spotify does not directly pay artists: it pays ‘ rights-holders’, entities like record lables, distribution companies, and aggregators, which maintains de3als with Spotify on behalf of artists”, writes Pelly.

A 2012, research commissioned by Spotify, into its users listening habits, reveals according to Pelly “active listening was a smaller part of the experience. There were way more listening hours using music as a background experience -people who wanted to lean back and let Spotify choose things … They started to think about how to optimize for that experience, for a less engaged user”.

This prompted Spotify to start promoting playlists to soundtrack work, study, fitness routines, and shopping. The Insidiousness of the playlists is what sets Spotify apart from other streamers because they detach the music from its maker. These playlist are not the same as compilations that introduce listeners to artists whose catalogues they may wish to explore, but instead champion bland background music. “Listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing”, Polly writes.

This essentially laid foundation for Spotify to move towards promoting AI-generated music, which is already on the platform and which Pelly fears could come to play an increasingly significant role in its offering.

According to Pelly Spotify is attracted to AI “for the same reason that other industry power players were clamouring to harness its potential: It opened up a possible new pool of cheap content”.

Spotify and tech giants generally profit from the work of the talented artists. Then there is potential for surveillance that is inbuilt in streaming and which Polly discusses warning : “ It might seem like just music,  but streaming services are susceptible to what’s called ‘surveillance creep’ or ‘function creep’. A surveillance system might start out with one purpose, but over time, its purpose might shift and expand beyond its original use case.”

Pelly discusses the United Musicians and Allied Workers’ campaign which demanded Spotify “pay artists one penny per stream, end payola (the term that emerged in the 1950s to describe record labels’ under-the-table payments to radio stations in exchange for airplay, make closed-door contracts with major labels transparent, credit all labor in recording, adopt a user-centric payment model, and stop-fighting songwriters in court”.

Pelly reveals the plight of musicians who are bound up with wider struggles for “economic justice”, and encourages us to buy music directly from artists or from independent record shops, and go to gigs. Many of us are already doing these things with renewed commitment, she says, striking an optimistic note at the end. “The corporate culture industry entrenches its power or not just through controlling the market place but also by controlling the popular imagination, by convincing us that there are not alternatives. The alternatives are growing all around us, though.”

We all should think about before we click play next time – Collectivism, localism, active listening.

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly, Hodder and Stoughton £22/ Simon & Schuster $28.99, 288 pages.