In the hands of some of its most gifted practitioners, songwriting is a kind of emotional alchemy. For the past week, I have been returning to a perfect example: Every Time the Sun Comes Up by the US singer Sharon Van Etten, which was released in 2014. Its lyrics might be fractured and fragmented, but it is an almost perfect portrait of self-doubt and downward spirals: one of those songs that captures feelings so deep that they go way beyond words.
I went back to that song as I read a superb new book that has both educated and profoundly depressed me. Mood Machine, by the New York-based journalist Liz Pelly, is about the music-streaming giant Spotify, and how it attracted its current 615 million subscribers, making a billionaire of its Swedish co-founder and CEO, Daniel Ek. But its most compelling story centres on what Spotify has done to people’s appreciation of songs and the people who make them – much of which is down to the platform’s ubiquitous playlists.
Thanks to Spotify’s algorithms, I recently found Every Time the Sun Comes Up in a personalised (or “algotorial”) playlist titled Farmers Market, versions of which have been saved by nearly 250,000 listeners. On mine, the song sits alongside such classics as the Rolling Stones’ Beast of Burden, Mazzy Star’s equally aching Fade Into You and Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, whose pathos and depth seems to have been neutralised by their new setting, summed up in the accompanying blurb: “fresh produce, reusable totes, iced coffee and all the lovely spring things”.
Such is what Pelly calls “the relegation of music to something passable, just filling the air”. Playlists tend to mean that songs once full of power and emotion get recontextualised, and washed of their meaning. And at the same time, Spotify constantly boosts music that never had any of those qualities to start with: a type of latter-day muzak that reaches its apogee in a genre now known as “Spotifycore”. Pelly traces the birth of this “muted, mid-tempo and melancholy” sound to around 2018: the US singer Billie Eilish seems to have unwittingly kicked things off, and the result has become inescapable, thanks to the kind of Spotify playlists whose titles include the word “chill”. You know it when you hear it: it initially makes you feel as if you are in a big-budget Netflix series, before you find out that there is no discernible plot.
Spotify in effect encourages musicians to produce this aural wallpaper, by showing them the data that proves this is how to make money from the platform. Such music answers some very 21st-century needs: as Pelly reminds us, it offers solace to people who are “anxious and overworked, engaged in cycles of trying to focus hard and chill hard”. It also helps them sleep, which is one of the functions Spotify capably delivers. And whether the platform’s users are awake or slumbering, Spotifycore also has a quality that makes it perfect for endless streaming: one song blurs into another, meaning that the app can be left to tick over, requiring minimum effort on the part of the user. This is the core of Ek’s business model: the idea, after all, is to keep you listening – or half-listening – for hours at a time.
What does all this mean for the music itself? Those of us who are addicted to Spotify – and just to be clear, my habit extends to several hours a day, though I mostly leave its playlists untouched – know how seductive an invention it is: an almost infinite jukebox, accessible via devices that are the same size as a Twix. But using it also comes with increasingly sharp pangs of ethical discomfort, and a sense that its version of streaming has long since started transforming music in no end of unsettling ways.
Though Spotify has no direct involvement in its creation, a lot of the vapid music clustered on its playlists is now made by production-line suppliers of what the company calls “perfect fit content”, or PFC – which could just as easily be made using AI. The fact that no money is paid out if a song is listened to for less than 30 seconds has come close to killing the idea of a slow-burning intro (if they were modern creations, there would be no hope for such songs as David Bowie’s Sound and Vision, or the Temptations’ Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone). The limited public outcry about the tiny rewards Spotify offers most musicians and songwriters may be connected to the fact that the average “chill” playlist is intended only as background music: as Pelly says, “it follows that a population paying so little conscious attention to music would also believe it deserving of so little remuneration”.
Technology always bends and re-shapes artistic creativity: the fact that the archetypal album began life at about 40 minutes and then stretched to 70 or 80 was a story scripted by the invention of the 12in record, and its eventual superseding by compact discs. But what sets Spotify apart is something much more insidious: it goes beyond alterations of music’s forms into what we think music is there to do, and one of big tech’s most sinister powers: the way that it sidelines dissent in such a subtle way that we only realise what has happened when it is far too late.
At the risk of making myself sound ancient, I had always understood the demise of music made with guitars – the best of which came with at least a hint of countercultural rebellion – as something down to that instrument’s old age. Now, I wonder whether it might also have happened because it doesn’t fit the low-volume, inoffensive aesthetics demanded by playlists with titles such as Stress Relief, Soft Office and Beach Vibes.
I definitely think the large-scale decline of songs that deal in social and political commentary is partly to do with Spotify’s relentless muzak-ification: in the UK, the one high-profile artist who does that kind of stuff is the brilliant, Bruce Springsteen-esque Sam Fender, and his artistic loneliness speaks volumes. With Trump in the White House and the world in chaos, the absence of a pop-cultural response is striking: might it be connected to the tyranny of what Pelly calls “sad piano ballads with weird drums”, and Spotify’s reduction of artists to near-anonymity: people hanging on for dear life, with no voice? And beyond anything political, does that not pose a threat to music with any real substance at all?
Van Etten, I am pleased to say, is playing three concerts in the UK this coming week with her band the Attachment Theory, and returning in the summer for another run of shows. I will be there for at least one of them, soaking up her deep, powerful music in the context it was created for. My phone will be switched off, and “chill” will not be on the menu. And like just about everyone there, I will not be giving any thought to farmers’ markets, iced coffee or “reusable totes”.
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John Harris is a Guardian columnist. His memoir Maybe I’m Amazed, about his autistic son James and how music became their shared language, is published on 27 March. For more information, visit maybeimamazed.substack.com
