The Mood Machine

One of the last books that I bought in 2024 was a preorder of Liz Pelly’s The Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist on Audible.

Pelly’s book narrates the rise of Spotify and discusses how the company makes more sense when you think of them as an advertising business rather than a music business. When Mood Machine became available in 2025, I noticed I could stream it on Spotify. As funny as it would be to listen to this particular book on Spotify, my guilty conscience with Kubrick wouldn’t let me cancel my pre-order.

Not everyone agrees that listening to an audiobook “counts” as reading, which I find silly. More seriously, digital platforms most certainly believe that both text-based books and audiobooks “count” as content. Spotify’s audiobook program needs to be closely paid attention to on its own terms as well as a harbinger of things to come in the wider business of books.

For one example, Pelly’s reporting shows that Spotify has seeded its playlists with A.I.-generated music and music by pseudonymous artists “presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts.” With ebooks and digital audiobooks continuing to dominate circulation in U.S. public libraries for the second year in a row, we should be vigilant about partially–and fully–A.I. Generated Slop infiltrating library collections.

Padding book packages with ‘slop’ will allow providers to give libraries the old song-and-dance about low costs per title, even as overall digital content costs continue to rise. This is what academic libraries once heard from journal publishers, who created more and more journal titles, as a defense of their overall rising costs.