One summer, while interning at an internet radio station, I became obsessed with scouring bandcamp, various forums, and other sites to build a catalog of music files. This was before bandcamp started to throttle free downloads, and the pay what you want feature reigned supreme. The year before, I had moved to New York and been introduced to Brooklyn’s DIY scene, and I fell in love not just with the bands I heard there but also with the sheer range of music they produced. I then sought out the even more varied world available across the internet. I crawled bandcamp seeking out lofi bedroom pop, blown-out punk, and slow ambient, much of it likely recorded directly into a laptop microphone. This was the moment when everyone was releasing albums and EPs (and EP-length albums) on cassettes, as the lack of fidelity became the sign of authenticity and community. Some of that music is still my favorite, but the computer where I saved all that music crashed at some point. I still haven’t been able to revive it, and I’ve since forgotten most of what was there.

Liz Pelly, author of Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, came out of this same scene, and frames her investment in the music industry and community through her participation in DIY scenes. I probably saw her at some shows, but I don’t think we ever met. (I saw her sister, Jenn Pelly, interview the band Big Ups at like 10am toward the end of a Silent Barn 24-hour show; her opening, lovingly ribbing question was, if I remember correctly, “so what made you decide to make a band that was all men?”; at some point later: “Why do men like Pile?”; I love both Big Ups and Pile) And this basis serves Pelly well throughout Mood Machine, as Spotify grew out of music piracy communities that were, at least initially, invested in similar punk or anarchist values such as the open distribution of music. However, part of the project of her book is to understand how Spotify came to embody the antithesis of these values, how it has gutted the way that many artists make a living, and how it has created a more homogenous music culture that is ultimately more boring for artists and listeners alike.

Pelly’s argument is captured in her title. Spotify has become increasingly invested in “mood”-driven playlists, where “lean-back,” passive listeners turn to a playlist not to engage with a certain genre or scene, nor for the artists on the playlist, but for the vague mood captured by that playlist. There’s a long history, going back to Thomas Edison’s research into what would become muzak, of attempts to use music to manipulate the moods and feelings of listeners, usually aiming for “calm” or one of its synonyms. In this understanding, Spotify is a “mood machine” in the way one would talk about a fog machine, emitting mood in a steady flow.

However, what you learn over the course of Pelly’s book is that Spotify is a “mood machine” in a much different sense. Rather than finding the music that expresses and affects certain moods, Spotify is instead a machine that produces moods and how we understand them. Many people find many different things calming. I, for example, find the song “Goes Black,” by the aforementioned Big Ups, calming (you likely will not). However, for Spotify, “calm” or, more commonly, “chill” becomes one specific and ever-more-narrow sonic experience. Spotify would never include “Goes Black” on a chill playlist because it does not fit their definition of calm or chill. Calmness is as much produced as it is distributed by Spotify. A mood machine that makes moods is very different than one that distributes them.

Moods become a useful way to understand the history and effects of Spotify because of its transformation from a music streaming company to something more all-encompassing. Spotify has increasingly turned to “Perfect Fit Content” (PFC), music that has been produced and licensed more cheaply than that by major studios and that has been preferred by Spotify for their playlist program. (Pelly revealed the existence of the PFC program in earlier reporting that her book builds upon.) Nobody seeks out albums from PFC artists, so the playlist form is crucial to get people to listen to this music. Even as the music became worse, Spotify’s profits grew, as PFC filled out the playlists to which listeners increasingly turned. The artist no longer mattered. The music didn’t even matter. Just mood.

This is simplifying the incredible detail in Pelly’s book (you should read it). But this brief sketch of the trajectory of Mood Machine illustrates how Spotify has become so powerful. Even as they turned away from traditional labels and artists, PFC and the playlist form have given Spotify immense influence over not just how music gets distributed but what gets made. To achieve success and popularity, all artists—not just PFC artists—must play by Spotify’s rules, so more and more music begins to tailor itself to the playlist form. In order to minimize skips, these songs need to catch you from the beginning and are often less dynamic, instead preferring single, consistent, mood-driven structures.

There are many reasons to hate Spotify. It reduces artist profits at the same time that it raises subscription prices. Unless they make it big, most musicians work second (and sometimes third) jobs, and their labor conditions matter to listeners such as Pelly and myself, who are invested in DIY and independent music scenes. There, artists rarely make it big, yet they turn to other models than streaming platforms and major labels to get by. But Mood Machine makes a compelling case for why Spotify’s effects should matter even to listeners who only care about the Top 40 (if Top 40 remains a thing in a world driven by playlists such as RapCaviar, Today’s Top Hits, and Pollen). If most listeners find music through mood-driven playlists, then it follows that pop music will increasingly follow this model, that the sound of pop will be driven by Spotify’s created moods rather than what’s, well, popular. Popular music has never been insulated from the conditions in which that music is produced, but the influence of Spotify’s mood playlists seems to create a more vapid, hollow, and basically worse musical culture. And what’s more, it is not simply playlists to which artists must tailor themselves now but short-form video such as TikTok. The unskippable playlist song must also keep people from swiping away.

Which brings us to Addison Rae. Her hit single “Diet Pepsi”, as well as her feature on Charli XCX’s “Von Dutch” remix with A.G. Cook, marked her as the likely first pop star to grow out of TikTok popularity. With Pitchfork recently likening her to Britney Spears, this status seems cemented. The podcast Switched On Pop has discussed the influences on Rae’s career, most notably Lana del Rey, whose “Diet Mountain Dew” and “Cola” are cited in Rae’s song title. However, Rae hardly benefits from the comparison to her musical predecessors and collaborators. Her debut album, Addison, almost unfolds like a Spotify mood playlist, as the undeniably chill, washed-out vocals whisper over a reliable set of beats, such that you couldn’t be blamed for missing where one song ends and the next begins. Some of the songs are fun, and “Diet Pepsi” is certainly great. But the album as a whole feels as though it has been crafted as the Spotify-approved version of “chill” from the ground up. (The platform also made sure I would not miss Addison by featuring a track from it on my personalized “Release Radar” playlist.) It reminds us of Lana, of Charli, in places, but it seems like a derivative, hand-me-down, dare I say diet version of these other artists. Beyond its use for slant rhymes to “backseat” and “love me,” the choice of “Diet Pepsi” seems like a tacit omission that we are consuming an inferior product. If you’re going to tell the truth, I guess tell it slant.

Does this matter? Music will continue to be made. Some of it will be better than others, and some popular artists will retain enough autonomy to make interesting music that explores new sounds. One of them is Charli XCX, whose brat defined last summer. As we enter a new summer, there does not seem to be an obvious successor album, and I have to hope it’s not Addison. Even Charli has discussed the difficulty of “letting go of brat,” a thing that she sees as being central to her identity. And reading Mood Machine, in addition to all the questions it raises about the labor and economics of music streaming, made me wonder how much Spotify prevents the possibility of another moment like brat summer. While the platform surely played its part in making brat happen, it seems unlikely to foster future hits like brat. Part of the power of brat came from its ability to weld the sound of PC Music and affiliated artists such as Sophie and A. G. Cook to a marketable pop aesthetic. PC Music and the artists around it had long formed part of a community and developed their sound with reference to each other. brat captured some of this insider ethos even as it brought in pretty much everybody else.

However, Spotify and TikTok feel unable to replicate such a cultural moment. Whereas brat incorporated a whole host of popular and underground references and captured a cultural moment, the mood playlist works by making reference to brat. As Spotify consumes more of culture, we could see a slower version of large language models eating themselves alive as they’re trained on their own output. To put it a bit reductively, Addison works because it’s an inferior brat, or an inferior Born to Die, or an inferior Circus. Next summer, will an album work by being an inferior Addison? Or is there still the possibility that someone will capture something that feels real, rather than churned out by the algorithm? Spotify has hardly won the fight, but if we are going to prevent it from capturing even more than it has, we must demand better labor conditions for artists, a better culture surrounding distribution, and, if nothing else, better music.