In “Big Mood Machine,” her 2018 essay for The Baffler, journalist Liz Pelly honed in on the role of digital music as part of “a burgeoning industry surrounding technology that alleges to mine our emotional states.” Zeroing in on Spotify and its familiar categorizations, ranging from “Chill” and “Focus/Study” to “Commute” and “Girls Night Out,” Pelly detailed how the feelings implied by personal soundtracks serve up a swell of marketing opportunities. In her first book, Mood Machine (Atria/One Signal, 2025), she expands on years of earlier reporting to unpack Spotify’s self-described position as “a traffic source for an advertising product” and the broader implications of using listener data to predict future behavior — well beyond musical preferences.
On February 20, Pelly appeared before a full house at Lost Bag in Providence for a conversation hosted by Michael Sugarman from the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst, where he is developing Freq as an open platform for music communities. As attendees claimed seats across rows of metal folding chairs, a flyer circulated around the room with a handwritten IP address on a typed invitation to connect to a local streaming server.
In a BlueSky post days before the event, Pelly invited local musicians to send a song along to Sugarman for inclusion in a “collective creation” to play at the venue. Establishing a simple server using an old Dell desktop computer he bought for $40, Sugarman set up Jellyfin’s open source streaming software and populated a playlist of Providence-area artists. Through a laptop plugged into the venue’s PA system, the mix added a distinctive, idiosyncratic touch as Pelly opened with an excerpt from Mood Machine that attempts to trace the origins of “aesthetic rap,” a vague yet surging subgenre, during a series of sponsored concerts in Brooklyn.
But rather than winnowing her way through the semantics of musical descriptions or the preferences of individual listeners, Pelly’s work pokes at the commercial constructions that often steer them. In the case of Spotify, she recounts how a tip led her to investigate the influence of major labels in shaping the company’s playlists well before the Stockholm-based company went public. Reporting more than 675 million monthly active users in its most recent earnings filings, Spotify’s desktop and mobile platform promises access to a vast trove of music — as well as a growing collection of audiobooks and podcasts — available through a free, ad-supported model and a premium subscription service. Pelly doesn’t critique the ease of discovery and playback so much as mine the business motivations to reveal their impact on listeners and artists alike.
Drawing from her own experiences in independent, all-ages music scenes and alternative arts spaces, including as an active cooperative member with the now-disbanded Silent Barn in New York, Pelly notes with woe a dramatic shift toward “listeners being sold music more as a utility than an art form, and musicians starting to see themselves more as content creators than artists.”
Digging into the devil in the details, she surfaces the practice of integrating synthetic music — think more anonymously manufactured fillers, less Brian Eno artistry — with lower royalty payouts on playlists that draw millions of listeners. She splashes cold water on the trickle-down economic argument behind pro-rata royalty-sharing, wherein the most popular songs reap a far greater payback on their playbacks, with little left for independent musicians. Noting that commercialization and consolidation have long been rampant in the music industry, Pelly highlights the cultural accelerant of massive data sets on browsing and listening behavior. While Mood Machine centers around Spotify, it’s also a reminder of the scale and influence of modern technology. From club cards to credit card purchases to social media platforms to streaming film and television programming, greater personalization generally involves a level of data collection and data sharing with immense business value that’s undervalued by individuals. The consequences are social and political as well, as personal choice becomes less a matter of self-determination and more a byproduct of intentional engineering.
With culture expecting easier access to more things at lower prices, the attendance and attention of Pelly’s audience suggested a potent alternative that need not be entirely analog. Donations collected at the event generated enough funds to install Sugarman’s streaming server at Lost Bag in perpetuity, starting with a localized soundtrack shuffling between the industrial dance of Davey Harms, the expansive electronica of Isabella Koen, the garage aggression of Mother Tongue, the ambient experimentalism of Russian Tsarlag, among others.
Unlike Spotify’s expansive selections that may be widely accessible, Sugarman reinforced how the small size and simple setup of his server provides a different strength. He encouraged anyone, including other venues, to set up their own using Jellyfin or Plex as a media server, without technological sophistication, to forge greater creativity and community.
“It might seem grim to realize that what makes culture less interesting for listeners is also what makes it less sustainable for artists,” Pelly writes in Mood Machine. “But knowing the opposite is also true — that working collectively to improve material conditions for musicians benefits all of us who love listening to music, too — is where there’s power and possibility.” •
