The goal is to hook us as users, of course, but also to divert overall streamshare toward discounted offerings—works that have been licensed to Spotify at a lower price point, both through its ghost artists program and its algorithmic payola-like practices.

“The vast majority of music listeners, they’re not really interested in listening to music per se. They just need a soundtrack to a moment in their day. I think Daniel Ek was the first person to really exploit that. I honestly think that the core of the company’s success was recognizing that they’re not selling music. They’re not providing music.

its model listener would just simply hit play or skip. Often, conversations about the streaming era center the way music has been financially devalued, but there is also a broader, harder-to-pin-down cultural devaluation that comes with streaming: the relegation of music to something passable, just filling the air to drown out the office worker’s

little financial remuneration. Plus, passively soundtracking your everyday moments through song is not the only reason people listen, and the escalation of this single listening mode in service of boosting engagement is a disservice to artists, listeners, and music as an art form; it disregards the many different reasons why someone might listen to

It’s a story of listeners being sold music more as a utility than an art form, and musicians starting to see themselves more as content creators than artists. It is a story of precarity, hyper-commercialization, individualism, and all of the above being obfuscated under the notion of “vibes.” And it’s the story of how those problems then played out

meeting, I remember he was like, ‘Apple Music, Amazon, these aren’t our competitors. Our only competitor is silence.’ ”26 The ex-employee stared off and nodded. “I definitely think people are afraid of silence,” he told me. “And Spotify has capitalized on that pretty well.”

Choosing the music that soundtracks our lives can be part of how we process who we are. But Spotify’s ideal mode of lean-back listening feels different, less an act of choosing than testing one’s tolerance, how much one prefers the sound of “Deep Focus” or “Brain Food” to nothing at all. It follows that a population paying so little conscious

To Stimulate and Enrich Your Imagination To Bring You Peace of Mind To Make You Joyous In Moods of Wistfulness Jolly Moods and Good Fellowship For More Energy! Love—and Its Mood Moods of Dignity and Grandeur The Mood for Tender Memory Devotion Is Also a Mood Stirring For the Children4

Over its first two decades of existence, as Spotify moved from in-house playlisting into its next act as a personalization engine, it became increasingly concerned with shaping user behavior on the platform—which is to say, influencing listening habits, because Spotify benefits when we stream content that’s cheaper for them to provide. Internally,