New book investigates Spotify’s origins, influence and consequences for music industry

A new book set to be published in 2025 will explore Spotify’s origins and influence on the music industry.

Written by music journalist Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise Of Spotify And The Costs Of The Perfect Playlist has been pieced together using more than 100 interviews with music industry insiders, former Spotify employees and musicians.

A synopsis for the book reads: “Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today’s highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalised and autoplayed.”

The book is also described as “an unsparing investigation into Spotify’s origins and influence on music, weaving unprecedented reporting with incisive cultural criticism, illuminating how streaming is reshaping music for listeners and artists alike.”

Pelly has years of experience of reporting on music streaming under her belt, and uses that to detail the consequences of the Spotify model by exploring both sides of the company’s marketplace: the subscribers, and the musicians whose work powers it all.

Find out more about the book, and pre-order a copy ahead of its 7th January publish date, here.

Last month, Spotify reported a revenue increase to €4 billion, as well as a rise in subscribers to past the 250 million mark. 

Spotify’s financial success stands in sharp contrast to headlines 12 months ago. Despite owning more than 30% of the global music streaming market by last December, the company had only managed one quarter of profit in the previous 24 months, and announced a 17% cut to its workforce — around 1,500 job losses – in the third round of redundancies that year.

Artist royalties were also changed last October, introducing minimum annual stream counts and minimum track play times in order to trigger payments. This move, confirmed in November of last year, means that tracks with under 1,000 plays will not be eligible for royalties. The move formed part of the company’s commitment to tackling what it describes as “payments lost in the system”, namely the “tens of millions of tracks that have been streamed between 1 and 1,000 times over the past year” and generate on average just $0.03 per month.